Volume 36, Number 18 · November 23, 1989
American Gothic
By Alfred Kazin
The largest memorial to Henry Adams is located, of all places, on the upper West Side of New York, Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, just before the Hispanic barrio is replaced by Columbia University. The Cathedal of St. John the Divine, really two churches in one and eclipsed in size only by St. Peter's in Rome, was on its present lines designed by Ralph Adams Cram, a fervent admirer of Adams's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. The project for an American Episcopal cathedral had been suggested as early as 1828; the original design, Romanesque-Byzantine, went into the apse, choir, and crossing. Construction was remarkably slow, and in 1911, when the officiating bishop and the architects were dead, Cram, of the firm of Cram and Ferguson in Boston, was allowed to complete the church on Gothic principles.
Feature, 3312 words
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