The largest cathedral in the world by floor area, begun in 1892 and still unfinished. One tower is missing, the transepts are stumps, and it is extraordinary.
Still not finished
Ground was broken in 1892. Construction has stopped and restarted repeatedly — for money, for war, for a change of architect that switched the whole design from Byzantine-Romanesque to French Gothic halfway through, and for a decision in the 1960s that the money was better spent on the neighbourhood than on stone. A serious fire in 2001 in the north transept closed part of the building for years.
The result is a cathedral 601 feet long with a nave 124 feet high, the largest cathedral floor area anywhere, and visible seams: one west tower, no crossing tower, transepts that stop short, and a great deal of scaffolding that has become permanent. There is no realistic completion date.
The unfinished quality is not a defect to apologise for. It is the most interesting thing about the building — you can see how a Gothic cathedral is actually made, which no completed one lets you do.
Inside
The nave is enormous and mostly empty, which is why it works so well for what the cathedral actually does with it. This is a famously liberal, ecumenical place: it has hosted Philippe Petit walking a wire, a memorial for Duke Ellington, the annual Blessing of the Animals at which people bring dogs, cats, snakes, an elephant and, on at least one occasion, a camel up the aisle, and the Paul Winter Consort’s Winter Solstice Celebration.
Look for the Poets’ Corner, the seven Chapels of the Tongues radiating behind the altar, each dedicated to an immigrant group, and the Peace Fountain in the close outside, which is a genuinely strange sculpture of the Archangel Michael decapitating Satan among giraffes and crabs.
The Great Rose Window has over 10,000 pieces of glass.
The peacocks
Three of them — Phil, Jim and Harry — live on the cathedral grounds and wander freely. They are white and blue, they are loud, and they are the reason a certain number of local children come at all.
Practical
There is an admission charge for sightseeing visitors, with free entry for worship. Guided Highlights Tours run most days.
The Vertical Tour climbs the internal spiral staircases inside the buttresses to the roof, with a torch, and ends outside above the city. Limited dates, small groups, book ahead, and not suitable if stairs or heights are a problem.
The cathedral is in Morningside Heights beside Columbia University; Riverside Church, with the world’s largest carillon and a tower you can go up, is a ten-minute walk west.
More Churches & Cathedrals
St Patrick's Cathedral
A French Gothic cathedral dropped into the middle of Midtown, built when this was farmland and everyone said the location was absurd. Free to walk into.
Trinity Church
The tallest building in New York until 1890, now dwarfed at the end of Wall Street, with Alexander Hamilton in the churchyard and a parish charter from 1697.