Category: Divine Stone

Angel Escobar makes his way to the Stoneyard

As a boy growing up in East Harlem, Angel Escobar would look across 112th Street at the looming structure rising on Morningside Heights to the West. “When I was small, I used to wonder what that big thing was,” he said. A few years later, he would pick up a mallet and chisel to help build the tower at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “I never thought I would be working at the church,” Angel adds. 

“I was hanging out a lot on the streets by the time I was in my teens. My mother had died and I dropped out of school,” Angel remembers. “I had to do for myself.” 

“Me, I didn’t like being in the street. So when I heard the Renegades had given up their chains and stopped fighting to do something for the community, I found out about it,” Angel continues. 

A New York Times article reported, “a youth gang called the Renegades (sometimes spelled Renigades) is using city loan funds and their own labor to create new homes for their families out of a battered and abandoned East Harlem tenement.” This was the beginning of “sweat equity” or “urban homesteading” and Angel started learning the building trades. The outfit he was working for went out of business and the owner recommended that Angel apply to the Cathedral’s Stoneyard program. Coincidentally, the same NYT article also stated “the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine announced plans to support sweat‐equity rehabilitations over the next two years that would involve 200 abandoned slum buildings that contain 3,000 apartments.”

Angel would now be working at the big church on top of the hill.

As a trainee, the soft spoken and introverted Angel moved limestone blocks around the machinery shop and drove the crane and forklift that transported finished stones from the cutting shed to the stacks by the side of the Cathedral for the first two years. 

Angel would occasionally be treated to homemade lunch brought to the Stoneyard by his wife Maritza and oldest daughter Angela, who remembers walking through the Cathedral to get to the Stoneyard. As a 5-year-old, “I was afraid of the huge stone statues,” she said.

Initially, Angel was intimidated by Master Mason Alan Bird, the primary instructor for the apprentices, and was reluctant to move into stone cutting. “I was scared to be a stonecutter,” he said, “because Alan was so strict, you made a mistake he’d get on your case. I didn’t want to cut stone; I was scared to cut it. I didn’t want to make mistakes.” 

Angel credits Ruben Gibson, a fellow apprentice who started shortly after Angel, for helping him overcome his fears. “Ruben put it in me, he put confidence in me. He made me a stonecutter. He believed in me. I loved Ruben,” Angel said.

Once Angel started working as a banker mason, he got help from others.

Timothy Smith recalls that Angel could cut his stones exactly up to the zinc template measurements – but Angel needed some lessons in fractions. At first, Angel had trouble understanding that the larger the number of the fraction, the smaller the measurement actually was. Timothy gave Angel a tutorial on a whiteboard: ½ inch is larger than ¼ inch and 1/64 inch is smaller than 1/32 inch. Angel caught on quickly.

Eddie Pizarro, another stonecutter from East Harlem, compliments Angel’s cutting skills: “To me, Angel had the best boasting pattern. Very neat. All his finished stones looked the same. He always had a steady hand for boasting the stone.”

Angel also got direction from José Tapia. “He taught me a lot,” he reminisces. 

Angel refers to José as “my brother” because José lived with Angel’s family after José’s parents died in an auto accident in Puerto Rico. Angel’s mother and José’s mother were sisters, so Angel’s mother “took him (José) in, a cousin, but raised by my family,” Angel explains.

José also brought in another member of the extended family to the Stoneyard when Eddie Pizarro, another cousin, came on board. All three share the same paternal grandparents who were from Ponce, PR.

According to Eddie, the cousins “all had different opinions; we were raised to use what you are good at and make a living in the construction field. The Stoneyard united us and Angel kept us focused,” he said. “I remember (Angel) telling us we are here (at the Stoneyard) to make history and we will always be remembered and, to this day, it is true.”  

As Angel’s skills and confidence grew cutting intricate blocks in the cutting shed, another opportunity came up and, once again, Ruben Gibson provided the necessary push.

The Cathedral program needed to start training some apprentice stonecutters in the art of stone carving. Following a blind carving competition, Master Carver Nicholas Fairplay, recognizing Angel’s potential, named him a candidate for the carving program. 

“I was scared to do carving, but then again Ruben came in and put confidence in me and started teaching me. It was kind of easy for me because I used to draw faces on the stones and Ruben picked up on that. Ruben had a way of getting to me,” Angel said. “The way Ruben explained stuff, he made it seem easy. Ruben wanted me in the (carving) shed bad!”

However, Angel was not ready to give up working in the cutting shed so he moved between cutting and carving as the needs dictated. Angel could just as easily cut a springer or tracery stone as he could carve foliage on a crocket or create a unique Gothic face on a cornice stone. Angel must have been very happy to work in the carving shed when his mentor Ruben became lead carver. 

In the summer months when construction on the tower was the focus, Angel occasionally worked topside moving stones from below to the construction floor or helping to set stones. This may have been his least favorite job: “I’m afraid of heights,” he confessed. 

There was significant upheaval in the Stoneyard towards the end of the 1980s when funding for the tower construction dried up. Dean James Parks Morton invited David M. Teitelbaum, a real estate developer with an interest in urban preservation, to expand the Stoneyard. The partnership, Cathedral Stoneworks, worked on outside jobs, such as the Jewish Museum, with part of the profits to be plowed back into the cathedral and allow tower construction to resume.

During the years of Cathedral Stoneworks, Angel took on new responsibilities. The reluctant stonecutter and the hesitant stonecarver stepped up. In a promotional brochure Angel said, “Now I’m lead cutter, teaching the apprentices and still learning.” 

Teitelbaum invested heavily in advanced machinery but a real estate crash in 1990 devastated financing for cathedral building and outside building projects, forcing him to close the shop around 1993. 

Afterwards, Angel worked briefly at a downtown antiques gallery installing fireplaces but he did not stay long. It was a “pretty nice job, but it wasn’t like the Stoneyard,” he recalls. He moved on to freelance construction jobs but no more stone cutting. 

Looking back over his 13-year career at the Cathedral, Angel would have loved teaching the next generation of stonecutters if the program had continued, a role he saw for himself. “It’s a skill that you never forget,” he said.

Asked if he thought the Cathedral would ever resume rebuilding, Angel ponders, “perhaps…that’s the way churches work.”

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• New York Times – January 25, 1974
• New York Times – February 23, 2001
• Cathedral Stoneworks brochure

This post is the continuing series of articles about the historic stones in the Cathedral, written by Senior Guide Tom Fedorek.– RM

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine has many details that most visitors either do not notice, or, if they do notice them, do not understand their meaning or significance. Such are the artifacts that are the subject of this article – two remnants of a thirteenth-century cathedral that was nearly destroyed in the First World War, Notre-Dame de Reims.

This article tells you where to find them. But first  – why Reims? Of the many historic buildings that were damaged or destroyed in the war, what was exceptional about Reims Cathedral?

Notre-Dame de Reims

Reims is the soul of France embodied in stone. “Reims is the national cathedral. Others are catholic, she alone is French,” writes Emile Mâle in The Gothic Image, using “catholic” in its lower-case sense of “universal.” 

For centuries, Reims Cathedral was where the kings of France were crowned. At the climax of the coronation ceremony –  the anointment of the new monarch –  the Archbishop of Reims, alone among his peers, was invested with the power to administer the chrism (holy oil). This tradition began in 508 when Archbishop Remi anointed Clovis, king of the Franks, at his baptism. In the image below, Remi holds a ewer with the holy water of baptism in his right hand and, in his left, an aspergillum for sprinkling the congregation.

The second element of the baptismal rite is anointment with holy oil. Legend has it that at Clovis’s baptism, a pure white dove descended from the heavens with a vial of chrism in its beak and placed it in Remi’s hands. Ever after, the same vial of chrism was used for coronations. Between 1027 and 1825, thirty out of thirty-two coronations were held in Reims Cathedral and its tenth-century predecessor.

Even after the monarchy ended in the nineteenth century, Reims continued to hold a special place in the hearts and minds of the French, much as Westminster Abbey does for the British, and the Statue of Liberty for Americans. 

Ralph Adams Cram, the architect of St. John the Divine’s neo-Gothic western half, venerated Reims above all other cathedrals, writing in his book The Substance of Gothic:

It was the crowning monument, in material form, of Christian civilization; so perfect in all its parts that it was perhaps too perfect, as being more perfect than man should be permitted to attain, an infringement on the creative power of God. Beyond this was nothing greater… 

Writing in 1916, Cram used the past tense because two years earlier, Reims had become one of the first of the many architectural casualties of World War I. In September 1914, German forces fired more than 400 shells at the cathedral, which was then serving as a hospital for wounded French soldiers. The bombardment set fire to the roof, gouged buttresses, and mutilated sculpture on the exterior. Shells punctured the vaulting and devastated much of the interior.

Cram grieved the loss of his most beloved cathedral in Heart of Europe, also published in 1916:

All is now gone, the glorious and the insignificant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. The glass and the statues that had survived war, revolution, and stupidity are shattered in fragments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained pavements where a hundred kings have trod and into deserted streets that have echoed to the footsteps of threescore generations.

The Allies lost no time in exploiting the assault on Reims for propaganda purposes, including the United States once it abandoned its neutrality and entered the war in 1917. Dozens of posters promoting recruitment and war bonds featured Reims as “the martyred cathedral.” Three examples appear below.

A recruitment poster aimed at French Canadians has Marianne, the French “goddess of liberty,” asking “Are you waiting for ours to burn?”

An armored fist crushes Reims in a merciless grip while the text below encourages Americans to “Buy war bonds with cash and buy them in installments! And do it now!”

In a nightmarish American recruitment poster, an enraged, sex-crazed, and thoroughly dehumanized Prussian wades onto American shores. Across the ocean, Reims stands in ruins.

While the war raged in Europe, St. John the Divine resumed work on the apsidal chapels that had been left unbuilt when construction halted in 1911. The chapels dedicated to St. Martin and St. Ambrose were constructed during the war years and completed in 1918, the year of the Armistice. 

It is in these chapels that we find the remnants of Reims.

The Chapel of St. Martin

I read the Chapel of St. Martin as Cram’s elegy for Reims. 

His design, pure thirteenth-century Gothic, accomplishes something remarkable. Cram succeeds in creating a space that is not only intimate but also, in its own small way, majestic. He does this by adding a triforium with lancet windows above. A triforium – a walkway between the upper and lower ranks of windows – is something one ordinarily sees in the nave of a cathedral. The chapel’s triforium and clerestory windows transform it into a miniature cathedral.

The windows that Charles Connick created for the chapel narrate the lives of three French saints – Martin, Louis, and Joan of Arc – along with heraldry signifying the cathedral cities associated with them. Four of the seven windows refer to Reims:

Clockwise from upper left: Coronation of Charles VII in Reims, Joan of Arc on right; coronation of Louis IX; Arms of the City of Reims; Arms of the Archdiocese of Reims. Charles Connick, stained glass, 1922

Behind the chapel’s altar stands a blind arcade of four three-lobed arches. Five small trefoils (three-lobed circles) appear within the spandrels (the spaces between the curve of each arch and the border above). Above the altar and inside the middle trefoil, there appears to be a pebble. The pebble is a fragment of Reims dislodged by the bombardment. It sits directly above the midpoint of the altar where the sacrament is celebrated as if it were a relic of a saint – or a martyr . 

Left – Chapel of St. Martin. The red arrow indicates the location of the Reims fragment. Right – Close-up of Reims fragment. Photos: Tom Fedorek.

The 1965 guidebook to St. John the Divine explains how the fragment came to New York: “Cardinal Mercier procured [the fragment] from his colleague of Rheims and brought it as a gift to Bishop Manning.”

The cardinal was Désiré-Joseph Mercier (1851-1926), Archbishop of Mechelen and primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium. While the Germans were shelling Reims in 1914, they were also wreaking havoc in Belgium. At Christmas 1914, Mercier issued a pastoral letter, “Patriotism and Endurance,” that enraged the German occupation regime. Of the letter’s impact, his biographer, Jan de Volder, writes: “With one shot, it made the cardinal the symbol of the resilience of the Belgian people within the country and outside.” For some of the war, the occupying regime kept the Cardinal under house arrest.

Mercier became a cause célèbre for the Allies. According to de Volder: “In the eyes of many Americans, [Mercier] uniquely personified the pride with which the Belgians had not succumbed to the oppressor, and his persona – and the propaganda about him – had helped to win public opinion for the Allied cause and, ultimately, to declare war on Germany.”

William Thomas Manning, then the rector of Trinity Church, was an outspoken admirer of Mercier and published several appreciations of him. 

In December 1916, Manning headlined a rally that packed Carnegie Hall to call upon the U.S. government to protest the forced labor imposed on Belgian citizens by their German occupiers. In his address, Manning acclaimed Mercier as a man:

… who has shown us the sublime power of moral witness, who at the risk of his own life and liberty has lifted up a voice that has been heard in every land, and that has made his oppressors tremble, the great Cardinal Mercier, whose name is an honor to Belgium, an honor to the Roman Catholic Church, an honor to Christianity throughout the world, and an honor to mankind.

Mercier visited the United States in the fall of 1919. He was honored as a hero in every city he visited on his six-week tour and was awarded sixteen honorary degrees. He met Manning at least twice — at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, where Mercier gave an address, and at a small dinner in New York where Manning joined a committee to raise funds for the restoration of another architectural casualty of the war, the fifteenth-century library of the University of Louvain.

Aside from the reference in the 1965 guidebook, my research did not discover a record or report of Mercier giving the fragment to Manning. It goes unmentioned in the editions of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook that were  published from 1920 to 1950. It is a curious omission, given Mr. Hall’s meticulous attention to the Cathedral’s smallest details. 

It is quite plausible that Mercier would have expressed his gratitude for Manning’s support with a tangible token of appreciation. I suggest that Manning probably kept the stone among his personal effects during his lifetime and that it was not installed in the chapel until after his death in 1949. This would explain its absence from the early editions of the guidebook and its sudden appearance in the 1965 edition.

The Chapel of St. Ambrose

The Chapel of St. Ambrose, next door to St. Martin’s, is dedicated to the people of Italy and the fourth-century bishop of Milan. Its Italian Renaissance design, by Thomas Hastings of Carrère & Hastings, diverges from the neighboring Gothic and Romanesque chapels. It has  plaster barrel vault, Corinthian columns, an alabaster altar topped by an ornate gilded reredos, and more marble than one finds in the whole rest of the Cathedral.

The chapel is the only place where natural light enters the Cathedral’s interior without the intermediation of pot-metal glass. The central window combines transparent glass with lightly-tinted panes. The pale tones of Henry Wynd Young’s flanking windows are a dramatic contrast to the vivid primary colors that dominate the Cathedral’s other windows.

The second fragment of Reims can be found in the window to the right of the altar. A pane in the window’s center contains a small fragment of brown glass approximately two inches square, reputedly from one of Reims’s shattered windows. The 1928 edition of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook reports that the fragment is marked with an “R,” though this detail is difficult to see. I have not been able to determine how the artist acquired the fragment.

Left – West window, Chapel of St. Ambrose. The red arrow indicates the location of the Reims fragment. Right – Close-up of Reims fragment. Photos: Tom Fedorek

The shard of glass appears alongside a pomegranate. “The pomegranate is a symbol of eternity and fertility, because of its many seeds,” writes Gertrude Grace Sill in her handbook of Christian symbolism. Pomegranates abound in the window because the name Ambrose derives from the Greek ambrosios,“immortal.” When the fruit is depicted bursting open with its seeds visible, as it is in the window, “it becomes analogous to the Resurrection, the opening of the tomb, an allegory of hope.”

Reims Cathedral experienced a resurrection of its own in the postwar years. In her excellent article, “The Martyred Cathedral,” art historian Elizabeth Emery observes that “the publicity given the martyred cathedral expanded American knowledge of, and interest in, medieval art.” This in turn worked to the benefit of the postwar campaign to restore Reims to its prewar majesty. 

A sizable portion of the restoration’s funding came from Americans, with major donations from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  The restored cathedral was consecrated in 1938, one year before war broke out again. The cathedral made it through World War II unscathed. On May 7, 1945, it was the site of Germany’s formal surrender to the Allies. No longer a martyr, Notre-Dame de Reims became once again the embodiment of the indomitable spirit of the French nation and people. 

Next in this series on the Cathedral’s historic stones – another seldom-noticed detail, the Ephesus Tile.

Sincere thanks to Wayne Kempton, diocesan archivist, for his kind assistance. Special thanks to Kathryn Hurwitz, archivist of Trinity Church, for conducting a search for material relating to Bishop Manning and Cardinal Mercier, and to Rob Hudson of the Rose Museum and Archives at Carnegie Hall for material relating to Manning’s rally at Carnegie Hall.

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Sources

Bloch, R. Howard. Paris and Her Cathedrals (New York: Liveright, 2022) ● Cram, Ralph Adams. “Reims Cathedral” in Yale Review, October 1918 ● Cram, Ralph Adams. “The Medieval Synthesis” in The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures (Boston: Marshall & Jones, 1925) ● Cram, Ralph Adams. Heart of Europe (London: Macmillan, 1916) ● Emery, Elizabeth. “The Martyred Cathedral: American Interpretations of Notre-Dame de Reims in the First World War” in Medieval Art & Architecture After the Middle Ages (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) ● Hall, Edward Hagaman. A Guide to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (New York: The Laymen’s Club, multiple editions 1920-1950, 1965) ● Mâle, Emile. The Gothic Image (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ● Manning, William Thomas. “The Enslavement of Belgians: A Protest.” (Privately printed pamphlet, 1916) ● Sill, Gertrude Grace. A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Collier Books, 1975) ● Stoddard, Whitney. Art & Architecture in Medieval France (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) ● Volder, Jan de. Cardinal Mercier in the First World War (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018).

(This is Part 2 of a two part story about the bells by Divine Stone co-author Robert F. Rodriguez)

Several decades (and two bishops) passed with no plans to resume construction at the Cathedral. Bishop Horace Donegan, like his predecessor Bishop Charles Gilbert, said that no further construction would take place during his episcopate. 

The climate changed in 1972 with the investiture of Bishop Paul Moore, who brought in James Parks Morton, who studied architecture at Harvard, as the new Dean at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Both the Bishop and Dean felt the time was right to resume construction following New York City’s tumultuous 1960s. The Dean moved forward with a plan to employ traditional medieval building methods and train neighborhood men and women from Harlem to raise the towers and, hopefully, install a grouping of bells. 

John Taylor and Co. furnished a diagram for a circular layout of a ringing peal of 12 bells and a Bourdon bell in June 1977, two years before the first stone was cut by the new apprentices.

A December 15, 1978 letter, between Payne Studios, a New Jersey-based installer, and John Taylor and Co. expressed concern about how the 13-bell proposal would fit into the planned bell chamber. Payne Studios felt there would be inadequate space for 13 bell ringers and urged John Taylor and Co. to revise the plans. The letter ended on an upbeat note: “We are getting all excited here.”

The new plan came in less than two weeks and proposed a peal of eight bells and a tenor bell weighing 2.1 tons and measuring just over 5 feet in diameter.

The number and size of the bells seemed to change once again a few years later with still another plan for a Bourdon bell surrounded by the ringing peal. 

An April 1980 letter from the general manager of John Taylor and Co. to Dean James Parks Morton describes a 7’7” diameter Bourdon bell surrounded by a ringing peal. The letter adds, “I feel that it is important that this decision be made at an early stage so that the design work for the tower can proceed without alteration.” Prophetic words as will be seen in later correspondence.

As of November 1980, “present-day” prices were furnished to the Cathedral. The “present-day” qualifier may be due to the fluctuating costs of metals for casting the bells. The ringing peal and Bourdon would cost $372,225.92 and the ringing peal only, $225,926.14.

A fundraising brochure prepared by the Cathedral Development office, probably from around 1980, listed $250,000 as the suggested donor contribution for a “Peal of Twelve Bells, plus the Thirteenth, or Bourdon, ‘Great William,’ in honor of William Thomas Manning, Tenth Bishop of New York.”  It did not specify the size of the Bourdon bell.

The flow of letters between the Cathedral and the bell foundry seemed to halt as construction of the southwest tower proceeded in fits and starts during the early 1980s. 

A December 1986 Cathedral Newsletter gave an overly ambitious 1994 projected completion date for both towers, at a point when the southwest tower was barely one-quarter completed.

“The entire St. Paul’s tower is expected now to soar 323 feet above Amsterdam Avenue by 1992, the centenary of the laying of the cornerstone of the Cathedral,” the article states.

Tower construction was at a crossroads in the mid-1980s and a decision had to be made whether any kind of bells would ever resonate in the tower. 

This responsibility fell on the shoulders of John Walsh sometime in 1986.

An August 2021 Divine Stone article provides the background: “Walsh, Master of the Works, came to the stoneyard during a rocky period. Master Builder Jim Bambridge had gone back to England. Master Masons Alan Bird and Stephen Boyle had also left. Money was tight and morale was at an all-time low. John Walsh’s main role to begin with was to stabilize the program, get a handle on finances and chart a way forward.”

Much of the design work was complete but there were several major items outstanding, including the fabrication and installation of the steel bell frame and setting the concrete ring beam that was to tie the masonry of the tower together directly below the base of the bell frame. 

In April 1988, Walsh moved ahead with the pouring of a four-foot deep concrete ring beam to strengthen the southwest tower, support the potential weight of bells and serve as a base for the bell frame.

The cement may not have been dry on the ring beam when a John Taylor and Co. interoffice memo from April 6, 1988 revealed: “JOHN WALSH RANG.

1) THEY DO NOT have money to buy the ring of bells.

2) They do not have money to buy the carillon.

3) He has the configuration drawings of the carillon – could they put the frame in now for the largest 14 bells only?

4) Wants engineer’s drawings and quickly – wants to set in and close walls around the structure.”

The memo adds that John Walsh “did not appear at all optimistic about getting the money — as he has before – he sounded almost desperate when he was on about the framework.”

Yet, the bell frame was erected.

Master Mason and tower construction supervisor Stephen Boyle was on the tower in September 1988 when the bell frame was assembled. He speculates, “I think it was a ‘now or never’ call, hoping the money for the bells would materialize later. It would also have much been harder to build the rest of the frame once the stone tower walls had risen further.” 

Construction continued on the tower for a few more seasons and the limestone rose to cover most of the steel frame, but work ended before the frame was completely walled in and a roof added above.  Around 2007, after years of inactivity, the rusting scaffolding and the upright beams of the bell frame were removed. 

Additional information provided by John Taylor and Co. confirms that the bell frame erected on the southwest tower was the company’s design for a carillon. They did not manufacture this frame—they believe their design drawings were sent to a U.S. firm that manufactured the frame locally to Taylor’s specifications.

John Taylor and Co. also stated that the plan for the two towers was for the change ringing peal to go in the southwest tower, then under construction, and the carillon to go in the northwest tower.  

This turned out to be the reverse of what actually happened, as John Walsh may have felt his best option was to erect the bell frame for the carillon in the southwest tower. 

While no bells were ever ordered, Cathedral docent Tom Fedorek recalls, “During my first years as a cathedral guide in the 80s, visitors would ask if there would ever be real bells. One of my fellow guides told me that the bells had already been manufactured and were sitting in a warehouse in the Netherlands pending completion of the tower.” Wishful thinking or an urban legend.

Anyone walking near the Cathedral these days will hear bells ringing, but the sound comes from a speaker mounted on the southwest tower. Douglass Hunt, the Cathedral organ curator, explained, “The Cathedral’s bells are a Schulmerich Carillon. It is a digital instrument — the bell sounds were sampled from cast bells and are digitally generated by the carillon’s electronics. Not a recording per se, but rather a digital tone generator system.

“We have always kept the instrument to playing clock functions (hourly rings), as well as calls to worship for Sunday and other major services. On a rare occasion, I’ve been asked to program a toll (for a solemn occasion) or a peal (for a joyous one),” he continued.

“It was once said to me that the installation of an electronic carillon had been done years ago as a way of getting the sound of bells into the neighborhood atmosphere, in preparation for the completion of the west facade and towers.”

Aside from bells proposed for the tower, Stephen Boyle points to blueprints that indicate a few unusual items. Plans included an elevator running on the exterior of the tower’s east side with a narrow entry to the tower base. A small tapered passageway inside the tower leads to a blank wall that would have been opened to accommodate an elevator. This lift would save the bell ringers and /or carilloneurs the steep climb up a spiral staircase to the floor of the tower and allow visitors to the belfry. 

There are also four corbels in the tower carved in the likeness of several major supporters and benefactors, looking down from near the top of the chamber’s ceiling. A corbel is a bracket that projects from within a wall to support a weight, although these four corbels might have been purely decorative. 

One such corbel honors The Rev. Dr. Robert Ray Parks, Rector of Trinity Church. Rev. Parks was a member of the Cathedral Board of Trustees and the Chairman of the Fabric Committee when tower construction was under way. Rev. Parks stood atop the tower in 1982 for the dedication ceremony and saw Philippe Petit cross Amsterdam Avenue on a high wire.

Today, the bell chamber sits as quiet as a catacomb; the only sounds piercing the stillness are the rumbling of buses and ambulances on Amsterdam Avenue below. 

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Sources:

• Special thanks to John Taylor and Co. Archives and Tim Barnes at Trinity Chuch
• Riverside Church
• Andrew Dolkhart – Morningside Heights
• American Bell Festival
• Cathedral of St. John the Divine archives
• Cathedral Newsletter
• Schulmerich Carillons
• Cathedral Docent Thomas Fedorek
• Central Council of Church Bell Ringers
• New York Magazine, May 26, 1980

List of carillons in the United States – Wikipedia

Yale Guild of Carillonneurs

(This is Part 1 of a two part story about the bells by Divine Stone co-author Robert F. Rodriguez)

This is a story of “what if”… “what should have happened”… “what didn’t happen.” 

The bell chamber in the unfinished southwest tower of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine is dark and eerily quiet. Limestone blocks and red bricks form the walls, punctuated with soft light filtering through several louvre grates. Above, a series of heavy steel I-beams span all sides of the tower, and above that, a corrugated roof keeps out the elements.

The visible steel beams are from the base of a bell frame, which would have…could have… supported a number of harmonious ringing bells, breaking the silence in the tomb-like lower level of the tower.

Plans for at least a dozen bells and perhaps more than 50 date back almost a century.

Correspondence between Cathedral officials and bell foundry John Taylor and Co. tells the story of the numerous proposals and various configurations of bells for the towers. These historic letters and other documents from the company’s archives were recently shared with me.  

Let’s go back a century to put the timeline and narrative in order.

In 1925, the project to complete the Cathedral was coming together. Under Bishop William T. Manning, major work on the Cathedral had resumed that year. A young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, less than a decade from the White House, spearheaded a $15,000,000 capital campaign to revive construction, which later included enough additional money to build the west façade, and possibly the towers. 

Architect Ralph Adams Cram, who oversaw the transformation of the Romanesque style of architects Heins and LaFarge to a more traditional English/French Gothic design, had plans in place. The foundation for the nave was finally prepared. The central crossing and chapels to the east looked like a stubby domed box sitting atop a carpet of concrete – waiting for construction of the nave to start. 

News of resuming the project at the Cathedral reached across the Atlantic Ocean and in 1926, the Cathedral architect received a letter from John Taylor and Co. in Loughborough, UK. The company dates back to 1839 and today is the last remaining bell foundry in England.

Having installed 10 bells at Yale University’s Harkness Tower a few years prior, John Taylor and Co. was doing well with new orders from the United States. In that light, the company sent a May 12, 1926 letter to Cathedral architect Ralph Adams Cram. The sales pitch proposes: “ I suppose the West towers will some day be completed, and if I may make a suggestion at this very early stage, then I recommend that the grandest ringing peal in the world should be placed in one tower, and a carillon in the other, the pièce de résistance being of course the ringing peal. The ringing peal must then possess a grandeur unparalleled by any other in existence.”

“What is advisable for St. John the Divine?” the effusive letter posed. “I suggest and recommend a ringing peal of twelve, with the tenor weighing not less than 100-cwts.”  

Bell weights are often expressed in hundredweights (cwt.), quarters (qtr.), and pounds (lbs.). 

The National Bell Festival website explains that the tenor bell is the heaviest bell within a change ringing peal or carillon or chime. Consequently, it sounds the lowest tone or note of the instrument. 

IF…the bells for the Cathedral had been cast, Tim Barnes, the Ringing Master at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, notes that the tenor bell would have been “the largest in the world for a change ringing peal, coming in at 11,200 lbs. or 5 tons. “It was the Roaring 20s,” Barnes continues, “and apparently nothing was too ambitious!”

Taylor and Co. had experience with transporting these behemoth bells. To move the 16.7 ton “Great Paul” Bourdon bell from the foundry in Loughborough to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the company first considered using a team of elephants but decided upon a more practical custom-built steam powered trolley.

The price quoted for the Cathedral’s ringing peal was $53,520 – with free delivery!

Tim Barnes contacted Taylor & Co. for an updated price and, a century later, the cost estimate would be about £495,000 or $650,000 for a new ring of 12 change ringing bells. The change ringing bells, or a peal of bells, swing full-circle, as opposed to being in a fixed position, and are used for change ringing – sounding the bells by pulling on ropes 

In the 2025 estimate from John Taylor and Co., the size of the tenor would be reduced from the original 100 cwt. to about 40 cwt. — 4,480 pounds or 2 tons.

For comparison, the current tenor bell at the Washington National Cathedral weighs 32 cwt. (3,584 lbs. or 1.6 tons) and the Trinity Church tenor weighs 24 cwt. (2,688 pounds or 1.2 tons.)

The National Bell Festival explains, “change ringing bells are mounted on wheels (secured by a cradle) in a room directly above the ringers. The change ringing bells begin their swing from a mouth-upward position and rotate full circle before reaching the balance point and then, by the pulling of a rope by the ringer, swing back in the opposite direction. The sequence of which bell to ring comes under the direction of the ringing master and there are thousands of variations possible.”

Tim Barnes adds, “Change ringing involves a set number of bells (usually 6, 8, 10 or 12 bells), numbered from the highest note to the lowest note” and each bell rings once, as part of a predetermined ordering of the bells (the peal of bells), before any of the bells ring again. Patterns known as ‘methods’ are rung and these methods generate different permutations (i.e. orderings) of the bells. 

A recent visit to the Trinity Church tower helped me to understand the bell ringing process. After a 99-step climb to the base of the belfry, a group of “ringers” gathered for an evening practice.

Trinity has a “ring” of 12 and the bells came from John Taylor and Co.

Click the link Ringing at Trinity Church, Wall Street, NYC on Vimeo to hear a ringing peal of bells – change ringing bells.

IF…the bells for the Cathedral were cast, the ringing peal would have been only the second in New York City. Today, Trinity Church has the city’s only change ringing or ringing peal installation.

John Taylor and Co.’s four-page 1926 letter to Ralph Adams Cram goes on to detail the proposal for a carillon of 56 bells for the other tower: “In view of the extreme importance of the building I recommend as ideal a Carillon of fifty-six bells. The cost of the carillon would be $250,040.” (Also with free delivery). Remember, this is in 1926 dollars. Tim Barnes contacted  the bell foundry and the cost of the carillon today would be around $2,000,000.

The letter did not specify which tower would house the peal of bells or the carillon.

The 56 bells proposed would have been larger than Yale University’s 54-bell carillon, also cast by John Taylor and Co. 

How does a carillon work? The National Bell Festival explains: “A carillon is a musical instrument of bells, consisting of at least 23 harmonically-tuned bells. The cup-shaped bells are hung fixed in a frame – “dead” rather than “swinging”. Seated in an enclosed space within the tower, a carillonneur then operates a console – a clavier – with batons (for the hands) and pedals (for the feet).The bell clappers are connected by means of wires and a tracker system to the “baton clavier” that enables the player to control both the rhythm and dynamics of playing. The deeper notes are sounded by means of foot pedals similar to those on an organ. 

Hear the carillon at Riverside Church – The ringing of the Riverside Church carillon

IF…the proposed bells had been cast, the Cathedral’s carillon would have rivaled that of neighboring Riverside Church. Built in 1930, the Riverside Church carillon was a gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in memory of his mother. The world’s largest carillon by weight, the Riverside array contains 74 bronze bells primarily cast by the Gillett & Johnston bell foundry in the UK.  The Bourdon bell at Riverside, weighing over 40,000 pounds — 20 tons — is the second largest tuned bell in the world.

Hear the Bourdon Bell at Riverside Church (16) Video | Facebook

Riverside Church was completed in just over three years, at the same time as the Cathedral was constructing the nave. A Cathedral fundraising brochure states: “Even the Great Depression did little to dampen the spirit of civic pride engendered by the building of the Cathedral. Then as now, the building of the edifice was to give heart to a depressed city and provide work for those seeking jobs.”

The Second World War brought the Cathedral’s building phase to an abrupt halt, with no work started on the west towers. The dedication of the nave took place seven days before the U.S. entry into the war. 

Photographs from that period show a boxy metal frame rising on the west façade tower bases and spanning the pointed roof of the completed nave – probably used for lifting stones and other materials to the upper reaches of the building. 

Aside from the initial 1926 letter from John Taylor and Co. to Ralph Adams Cram, no other correspondence was uncovered from the bell foundry’s archive concerning this construction phase. It could be that Bishop Manning needed to focus his attention on building the nave, transepts, the narthex, west façade and tower bases before he could turn his attention to specifications for bells.

After the Second World War, there was a brief attempt at fundraising to resume construction but money was more urgently needed on numerous rebuilding programs throughout the Episcopal diocese. In addition, Bishop Manning retired at the end of 1946 and his successor, Bishop Charles Gilbert, felt that continuing to spend large sums on the construction of a grand edifice while poverty increased in the surrounding neighborhoods was inconsistent with Christian charity and faith, according to Andrew Dolkart in his book Morningside Heights.

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Endurance, constancy, continuity – these are the virtues that stone structures possess, cathedrals most abundantly. 

As if to implant these qualities in the walls then rising, St. John the Divine collected stones resonant of its Anglican heritage during the years it was under construction. Some came from historic British cathedrals – Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Bristol, Norwich, Southwark, St. Alban’s, Worcester, Ely – others from the sites of historic monasteries – Westminster Abbey, Bury St. Edmunds, the island of Iona – and one from William Shakespeare’s parish church in Stratford-on-Avon.

The intent was to integrate the historic stones with the freshly-cut limestone and granite of the fabric as a palpable sign of the new American cathedral’s kinship with its British predecessors and its devotion to the Anglican expression of the Christian faith. Ultimately, only a few of the historic stones were set in the walls. 
The Chapel of St. Ansgar, designed by Henry Vaughn and consecrated in 1918, houses stones that medieval masons cut eight centuries earlier for two of England’s majestic cathedrals: the Cathedral Church of Christ and Blessed Virgin Mary in Worcester and the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in Ely, hereafter referred to as simply “Worcester” and “Ely.” 

The Worcester and Ely stones comprise the niche in the left wall of the chapel’s apse, added in 1921. The color of  the unpainted surfaces comports with that of Anthony Trollope’s fictional Barchester Cathedral – “that rich, yellow grey which one finds nowhere but in the south and west of England.” The topmost stone, from a blind arcade in Worcester, bears an ogee arch enclosing the top half of a trefoil. The stones below, also from Worcester, are textured with curvilinear forms and scoring.

A squarish stone from Ely, seen below, projects from the base of the niche. Its original function may have been as a wall-mounted pedestal. It is inscribed ELY 1320. The inscription may have been added long after the stone was originally cut; the numerals are in a font that, to my eye, is more modern than medieval.

The small corbel beneath the shelf displays the “stiff leaf” foliage characteristic of the dialect of Gothic architecture known as Early English, prevalent during the late 12th to mid-13^th centuries when most of Ely was constructed.

The paint on the stones is curious – scarlet and lemon yellow on the ogee arch from Worcester, lime green, white, and gold on the Ely pedestal. There is only one other instance of painted stone in the Cathedral’s interior –  the sixteen shields bearing symbols of the apostles and evangelists in the Baptistery adjacent to the chapel. When and why were stones painted? I suggest a possible answer at the end of this article.

The niche and the chapel itself (now the Cathedral’s columbarium) are a memorial to William Reed Huntington, rector of Grace Church, longtime Cathedral trustee, chairman of its Committee on the Fabric, and a driving force behind the first phase of the Cathedral’s construction. The inscription that flanks the stones reads: 

These Stones from the Cathedral of Christ and St. Mary the Virgin Worcester England are Memorials to William Reed Huntington Sometime Rector of All Saints in Worcester Massachusetts.

The inscription seems incomplete, for it does not mention Huntington’s long service to the Cathedral. Neither does the inscription acknowledge the Ely stone, nor do the relevant minutes of the Cathedral’s Committee on the Fabric record any reference to it. The Ely stone may have been added later as an afterthought, but when and why is a mystery.

The Worcester and Ely stones were the gift of George William Douglas, a Cathedral canon from 1904 to 1913 and an honorary canon from 1920 until his death in 1926. The 1924 edition of Edward Hagaman Hall’s guidebook provides the following account of how Canon Douglas procured the Worcester stones:

Some years ago, when Canon Douglas was visiting Worcester Cathedral, England, Canon Wilson pointed to a spot in the wall where an ancient carved stone had been replaced by a modern stone, and said: “A good while ago a man of the name of Huntington, who introduced himself as Rector of a church in Worcester, Mass., begged me to give him a bit of carved stone as a symbol of the ties between England and America.” This led Canon Douglas to ask for a similar gift to be placed in St. Ansgarius’ Chapel, which is a memorial of Dr. Huntington, in a House of God where Englishmen and Americans often meet and where members of the Daughter Church have constant occasion to recall their indebtedness to the Mother Church of England.

An entry dated November 21, 1911, in Worcester’s Chapter Minutes confirms that Canon Wilson and the Dean were approved to select the stones to be sent to “the Cathedral of New York.” 

That Huntington had earlier sought out an historic stone for his parish in Massachusetts suggests that he may have initiated the collection of such stones for St. John the Divine.

I was unable to obtain similar documentation for the Ely stone. The available records indicate that Canon Douglas obtained three stones from Ely, only one which was incorporated into the fabric of St. John the Divine. 

Worcester’s Lady Chapel, the source of the niche’s stones, was built between 1224 and 1250. With its sharply-pointed arches and “stiff leaf” foliage on the capitals of its columns, it is a superb example of Early English Gothic. The bases, colonettes, and capitals of the columns are of dark Purbeck marble – a dramatic contrast to the pale limestone. 

The Lady Chapel houses the effigy of Margaret de Say (c.1182-c.1242), Baroness of Burford, who provided much of the funding for its construction. 

The charming relief seen above is on a spandrel in the Lady Chapel. We see a benefactress, perhaps Margaret de Say herself. She is shown in profile, dressed in the height of thirteenth century fashion. Facing her, in three-quarter view, a stonemason perches on the side of the arch, cradling his calipers with his left hand. His chisel sits alongside him. The lady is placing something into the mason’s right hand – a bag of coins, most likely. The mason’s relaxed posture suggests that he is at ease in the lady’s presence despite the difference in their stations. He seems quite confident that the quality of his work is worth the full value of the payment he is receiving. 

Of special interest to Divine Stone’s stonemason readers: Worcester is one of a small number of English cathedrals with its own team of on-site stonemasons. Worcester also offers training in stonemasonry, as St. John the Divine did at one time. You can learn more about Worcester’s program here:

https://www.worcestercathedral.org.uk/heritage/stonemasonry

Returning to the question of the painted stones, I detect the hidden hand of architect Ralph Adams Cram. As I trawled through the material in the Cathedral’s archives relating to the period of the niche’s creation, I came across a letter from Cram to Dean Howard Robbins, dated February 7, 1923. Of the chapels, Cram wrote:

I think the whole tendency in these chevet chapels is towards coldness and austerity. Personally, I should like to see much more gold and color in all of them … Somehow these chapels ought to be made very personal and intimate, so that they would draw people there for private devotions just by the force of their intimate quality.

Cram singled out the Chapel of St. Boniface as “very dead and lifeless,” recommending color and gold for the reredos. For the Chapel of St. Martin, his own design, he recommended painting the three tympana of the arcade in gold and “a very dark greenish blue with the fleur-de-lis gilded and burnished.”

No action was taken on Cram’s proposals for those two chapels. But could the painted stones in the niche be a response to Cram’s observations, and likewise the polychrome shields in the Baptistery? It is inconceivable that paint could have been applied to anything in the Cathedral without the approval of the autocratic Cram.

A final note – You may be wondering what became of the historic stones that were not integrated with the fabric.  For many years, they were displayed rather randomly around the Cathedral – on a ledge here, in a corner there. On December 18, 2001, a fire devastated the gift shop that then occupied the unfinished north transept. Firefighters successfully contained the blaze, but ash and soot coated virtually every surface of the Cathedral’s interior. To facilitate cleaning and restoration, the historic stones were taken to the crypt, along with most of the artwork and other movable objects. 

There the stones remain to this day. Should the Cathedral ever revive the construction of the western towers, I would hope there might be some consideration of the original intent of integrating them with the fabric.

My sincere thanks to Dr. David Morrison, Worcester Cathedral Librarian, for his invaluable assistance with the research for this article. Dr. Morrison is the current successor to James Maurice Wilson (1836-1931), Worcester Cathedral’s first librarian and the same Canon Wilson who enabled Canon Douglas to obtain the Worcester stones. 

Thanks as well to Wayne Kempton, diocesan archivist, for providing a complete list of historic stones and granting me access to the papers of the Committee on the Fabric. Also, to Jim Patterson, the Cathedral’s facilities director, for confirming the current location of the historic stones.

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SOURCES

Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Committee on the Fabric, Minutes 1918-1925 ● Hall, Edward Hagaman. Guide to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (4^th edition, 1924). ● Milburn, R.L.P. The Pictorial History of Worcester Cathedral (London: Pitkin Pictorials, c. 1960). ● Suter, John W. Life and Letters of William Reed Huntington: Champion of Unity (New York: Century Co., 1925) ● Worcester Cathedral website https://www.worcestercathedral.org.uk/