Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Morningside Heights, New York, United States
The Episcopal cathedral of New York, begun in 1892 and still unfinished, an enormous Gothic and Romanesque building that functions at once as a working cathedral, art venue, and urban pilgrimage site.
Construction began in 1892 in Byzantine-Romanesque style, shifted to French Gothic under Ralph Adams Cram, and has never finished: the cathedral is by several definitions the largest church in North America and among the largest anywhere, with the caveat that an unfinished building makes such rankings slippery. It has absorbed the city's shocks, including the December 2001 fire that swept the unfinished north transept, rededicated after restoration in 2008.
Its life today is unusually broad: daily worship for the Episcopal Diocese of New York, a Great Choir with a large Aeolian-Skinner organ, regular concerts (the New York Philharmonic has performed in its nave), art exhibitions, poetry readings, the Peace Fountain sculpture garden, and one of the few labyrinths in a major American cathedral, following the Chartres pattern tradition. The incompleteness is part of the identity rather than a defect: a building still being built, used daily.
Visiting
The cathedral's visit page carries sightseeing hours and tickets (prayer and meditation are always free); sightseeing runs Monday to Saturday 9:30am to 5pm, Sunday 12 to 5pm.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_of_St_John_The_Divine.jpg), CC BY 4.0, Kidfly182.
Associated traditions & practices
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