Description
St. Patrick's Cathedral is New York's great Catholic church, a Gothic Revival cathedral of white marble on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, directly across from Rockefeller Center. It is the seat of the Archbishop of New York, and the largest Gothic Revival Catholic cathedral in North America.
Look first at the front, where the bronze doors on Fifth Avenue are flanked by two towers with spires rising about 330 feet. The north tower holds nineteen bells. Inside, a long nave opens between rows of chapels, under several dozen stained glass windows, with two pipe organs and a crypt below.
Behind the apse, toward Madison Avenue, the quiet Lady Chapel was added between 1901 and 1906. In the crypt under the high altar, the archbishops of New York and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are buried. The cathedral measures 332 feet in length.
When Archbishop John Hughes chose this block of Fifth Avenue in the 1850s, it was all rocks, unopened streets and an orphanage. He was sure a city would grow around it. On August 15, 1858, 100,000 people watched him lay the cornerstone.
Then the money ran out. By 1860 the white marble walls stood twelve feet high, and the Civil War stopped everything. Hughes died in 1864, before work started again.
It was finished largely with the offerings of poor Irish immigrants: a newspaper wrote that it was built "not of the superfluity of wealth, but for the most part out of the offerings of poverty." It was dedicated in 1879, and the two spires were added in 1888.
Its architect, James Renwick Jr., spent three years in Europe looking for ideas and took his cue above all from the unfinished Cologne Cathedral. The cathedral was consecrated only in 1910, after all its debt had been paid off.
Its position, in the middle of Midtown, makes it a stop for everyone: when it celebrated its first hundred years in 1979, about 6,000 people came to Sunday Mass, ninety percent of them visitors.
Look first at the front, where the bronze doors on Fifth Avenue are flanked by two towers with spires rising about 330 feet. The north tower holds nineteen bells. Inside, a long nave opens between rows of chapels, under several dozen stained glass windows, with two pipe organs and a crypt below.
Behind the apse, toward Madison Avenue, the quiet Lady Chapel was added between 1901 and 1906. In the crypt under the high altar, the archbishops of New York and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are buried. The cathedral measures 332 feet in length.
When Archbishop John Hughes chose this block of Fifth Avenue in the 1850s, it was all rocks, unopened streets and an orphanage. He was sure a city would grow around it. On August 15, 1858, 100,000 people watched him lay the cornerstone.
Then the money ran out. By 1860 the white marble walls stood twelve feet high, and the Civil War stopped everything. Hughes died in 1864, before work started again.
It was finished largely with the offerings of poor Irish immigrants: a newspaper wrote that it was built "not of the superfluity of wealth, but for the most part out of the offerings of poverty." It was dedicated in 1879, and the two spires were added in 1888.
Its architect, James Renwick Jr., spent three years in Europe looking for ideas and took his cue above all from the unfinished Cologne Cathedral. The cathedral was consecrated only in 1910, after all its debt had been paid off.
Its position, in the middle of Midtown, makes it a stop for everyone: when it celebrated its first hundred years in 1979, about 6,000 people came to Sunday Mass, ninety percent of them visitors.