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.
Built in a field
When Archbishop John Hughes announced in 1853 that he would build a cathedral at Fifth Avenue and 50th Street, the site was well north of the built city, among market gardens and squatters’ shacks. It was called Hughes’s Folly. He was building for a population that was arriving in enormous numbers — Irish famine immigrants — and for a church that most of Protestant New York regarded with open hostility, and he wanted the biggest possible statement in the most visible possible place.
Construction stopped for the Civil War and resumed after. It opened in 1879 without its spires, which were added in 1888. By then Fifth Avenue had come to it, and the Vanderbilts had built mansions across the road.
Inside
It seats about 2,400 under a vaulted ceiling 110 feet up. The style is Decorated Gothic, the material is white marble from New York and Massachusetts, and none of the structure is a fake — it is a genuine masonry Gothic building, one of very few in the United States.
Things to look for:
The rose window over the Fifth Avenue entrance, 26 feet across, by Charles Connick.
The Lady Chapel behind the high altar, added in 1906, with windows by the English maker Paul Woodroffe that took twenty-two years to complete.
The bronze doors, six tons each, with statues of American and New York saints including Elizabeth Ann Seton and Kateri Tekakwitha.
The Pietà in the ambulatory, three times the size of Michelangelo’s.
The crypt under the altar, where the archbishops of New York are buried, along with Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-born formerly enslaved man and candidate for sainthood — the only lay person interred there.
The organs total around 9,000 pipes across the gallery and chancel instruments.
The restoration
A three-year, $180 million programme finished in 2015 cleaned the entire interior and exterior, repaired the stonework, replaced the heating with a geothermal system of ten wells sunk 2,200 feet under the building, and re-leaded the windows. The difference between photographs taken before and after is startling — the marble had gone grey.
Practical
Free, open every day from early morning until late evening. Mass is said several times daily and the cathedral remains a working parish, so parts may be closed during services and visitors are asked to be quiet rather than merely quiet-ish.
There is no ticket, no queue and no bag check most of the time. It is one of the easiest fifteen minutes in Midtown and it sits directly opposite Rockefeller Center.
Christmas Midnight Mass requires a ticket, distributed to parishioners.
More Churches & Cathedrals
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.
Cathedral of St John the Divine
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.