(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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