Going Vertical at St. John the Divine

I went back to St. John the Divine, this time to take the Vertical Tour. Our guide was a parishioner originally from the German-speaking part of Switzerland whose name, regrettably, I can't remember. She was knowledgeable, patient, and seemingly quite at home leading a dozen strangers up the narrow spiral staircases and into the upper reaches of one of New York’s most extraordinary landmarks.

I knew the climb would be difficult. The Vertical Tour rises more than 124 feet through the Cathedral, and there are something like 180 steps between the ground and the upper levels. I had heart surgery only a little over a week ago, so before we started I mentioned this to everyone.

I also told them that I really wanted to do this.

Nobody made a fuss about it. The pace remained moderate, and as we climbed, people kept an eye on me, occasionally asking how I was feeling. Nobody seemed impatient. Nobody made me feel as though I were holding them back. Quite the opposite: I felt in very good company.

And gradually the Cathedral changed.

From the ground floor, St. John the Divine is about height. From above, it becomes something else entirely: structure.

The challenging space

Columns become supports. Arches reveal volume. Buttresses stop being picturesque Gothic appendages and begin to explain themselves. Spaces that seem almost two-dimensional when viewed from the nave suddenly acquire extraordinary depth. Looking down into the Cathedral, I found myself bewildered by the perspective of this neo-Gothic transplant—a literal adaptation of the European past into the heart of Manhattan.

The Cathedral began with the Romanesque-Byzantine design of George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge. The cornerstone was laid in 1892. After Heins died in 1907, the architectural direction changed dramatically, and Ralph Adams Cram eventually transformed much of the project into the Gothic Revival building we recognize today. The result is less a single architectural statement than an accumulation of ideas about what a cathedral could—or perhaps should—look like in modern America.

And somewhere within this conversation emerges Rafael Guastavino, the Valencian architect I have been following around New York:

Or, more precisely in this case, his son, Rafael Guastavino Jr.

In 1909 the Guastavino Company constructed the great tiled dome over the Cathedral’s Crossing. It was supposed to be temporary. Built in roughly fifteen weeks, the dome spans about 93 feet and was intended merely to cover the Crossing until something more permanent could replace it.

More than a century later, the temporary roof is still there.

That paradox is one of the things that attracts me to Guastavino. Buildings are supposed to be permanent, and temporary structures are disposable. Yet sometimes the supposedly temporary solution proves so ingenious that history simply decides to keep it.

Today I wanted to see all of this from another—and much needed—perspective.

I got the shots I came for, mostly thanks to the grace and patience of my fellow expeditionaries and our wonderful Swiss guide. I carried the Laowa 10mm lens I mentioned in a previous article about Joaquín Sorolla, an almost absurdly wide piece of glass that becomes particularly interesting in a place like this. At St. John the Divine, where architecture is constantly trying to escape the limits of the frame, those ten millimeters begin to make sense.

The images accompanying this post were all made with that glass. Eventually they will have to find their place alongside the moving footage, the interviews, and the archival I am gathering for the film.

For now, however, they are simply evidence of what I saw today.

And perhaps an invitation to look at this building differently: not only from the ground toward the heavens, as its architects intended, but occasionally from the heavens back toward the ground.

The Tour Guide