St. Patrick's Cathedral is a Catholic cathedral in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. It is the seat of the Archbishop of New York as well as a parish church. The cathedral occupies a city block bounded by Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, 50th Street, and 51st Street, directly across from Rockefeller Center. Designed by James Renwick Jr., it is the largest Gothic Revival Catholic cathedral in North America.
The cathedral was constructed starting in 1858 to accommodate the growing Archdiocese of New York and to replace St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. Work was halted in the early 1860s during the American Civil War; the cathedral was completed in 1878 and dedicated on May 25, 1879. The archbishop's house and rectory were added in the early 1880s, both designed by James Renwick Jr., and the spires were added in 1888. A Lady chapel designed by Charles T. Mathews was constructed from 1901 to 1906. The cathedral was consecrated on October 5, 1910, after all its debt had been paid off. Extensive restorations of the cathedral were conducted several times, including in the 1940s, 1970s, and 2010s.
St. Patrick's Cathedral is clad in marble and has several dozen stained glass windows. It measures long, with a maximum width of at the transepts. The bronze doors that form the cathedral's main entrance on Fifth Avenue are flanked by towers with spires rising . The northern tower contains nineteen bells, and the interior has two pipe organs. Inside is a nave flanked by several chapels; two transepts; a chancel and apse; and a crypt. East of the apse are the rectory, Lady chapel, and archbishop's residence facing Madison Avenue. The cathedral is a New York City designated landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
History The Diocese of New York was founded by Pope Pius VII in 1808. St. Patrick's was founded shortly afterward to serve New York City's small, but growing, Catholic population, which could no longer fit in St. Peter's Church. A site was selected on Mulberry Street in what is now Lower Manhattan, and St. Patrick's Old Cathedral was dedicated in 1815. At the time, there were 15,000 Catholics in the diocese.
Early site history In March 1810, the Rev. Father Anthony Kohlmann bought the land on which the present cathedral stands. The site was bounded by what is now Fifth Avenue on the west, 51st Street on the north, Madison Avenue to the east, and 50th Street on the south.Pitts, Carolyn. National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination. August 1976. National Park Service. The Jesuit community built a college on the site, which at the time was north of New York City proper. It contained a "fine old house" which was fitted with a chapel of St. Ignatius. In 1813, the Jesuits sold the lot to the Diocese of New York. The school closed in 1814 and the diocese gave the property to Dom Augustin LeStrange, the abbot of a community of Trappists who were fleeing persecution by French authorities. In addition to a small monastic community, they looked after orphans. With the downfall of Napoleon, the Trappists returned to France in 1815, but the neighboring orphanage was maintained by the diocese into the late nineteenth century.
In 1828, trustees of St. Patrick's, St. Peter's, and St. Mary's met to discuss the feasibility of establishing a burial ground at Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. The trustees bought the property in 1829 but did not use it as a cemetery. Bishop John Dubois reopened the chapel in 1840 for Catholics employed at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum and in the general neighborhood. A modest frame church was built for the parish of St. John the Evangelist and dedicated in 1841 by the Rev. John Hughes, administrator of the diocese. Tickets were sold to the dedication to ease the parish's debt, but the mortgage was foreclosed upon, and in 1844 the church was sold at auction. The church's pastor, the Rev. Felix Larkin, was said to have died from stress as a result. The Rev. Michael A. Curran was appointed to raise funds for the devastated parish and used an old college hall as a temporary church. Curran continued raising funds to buy back the church during the Great Famine in Ireland, eventually succeeding and taking the deed in his own name.
Planning By the early 1840s, the number of Catholics in the Diocese of New York had increased to 200,000. As a result, several additional dioceses were created in New York state. Most of New York state's Catholics at the time were Irish. The Diocese of New York was made an archdiocese by Pope Pius IX on July 19, 1850. Bishop John Joseph Hughes was raised to the level of archbishop soon afterward. As early as 1850, Hughes determined that the growing Archdiocese of New York needed a large cathedral to replace the older cathedral in Lower Manhattan. At the time, the Fifth Avenue site was still relatively rural. The site faced the gardens of Columbia University to the west, but the surrounding area was otherwise characterized by rocks and unopened streets. Even so, Hughes believed the site would grow into a populous business area.
In 1853, Hughes announced that he had hired the firm Renwick & Rodrigue to design a cathedral on Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. One partner in the firm, William Rodrigue, was Hughes's brother-in-law. The other partner, James Renwick Jr., was largely responsible for designing the new St. Patrick's Cathedral. Renwick spent three years in Europe to look for design influences for New York City's new Catholic cathedral. He took particular inspiration from the unfinished Cologne Cathedral. Renwick & Rodrigue originally planned a larger cathedral than the structure that was ultimately built. Hughes requested in 1857 that the firm reduce the dimensions of the new cathedral. To make way for the clergy's and archbishop's residences, the ambulatory was removed from the plans. The area behind the apse would have contained a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, but this was removed entirely. The numerous heavy buttresses in the design were also removed.
Plans for the cathedral were finalized in 1858. To raise money for the effort, Hughes asked wealthy Catholics in the Archdiocese of New York to subscribe to a building fund for the new cathedral. One hundred and three subscribers donated $1,000 apiece, and two subscribers were non-Catholics. The first construction contracts for the new Fifth Avenue cathedral were issued in June 1858. The new St. Patrick's Cathedral was to take up the entire block bounded by Fifth and Madison Avenues between 50th and 51st Streets. The front facade on Fifth Avenue would have three large entrances, and the northwest and southwest corners of the cathedral would be topped by an octagonal spire. The interior was to be designed in a cruciform layout. The cathedral was to be built in the Gothic Revival style. In addition, an archbishop's house and a chapel would face Madison Avenue. At the time, there were numerous hospitals, asylums, and other public institutions along the nearby section of Fifth Avenue.
Construction
Initial work and hiatus On August 15, 1858, the cornerstone was laid just south of the diocese's orphanage. Archbishop Hughes laid the cornerstone in front of 100,000 spectators near the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street, though the precise location remains unclear. That October, the architects presented cost estimates for making the cathedral out of white marble, brown freestone, olive freestone, or granite. The white marble was the most expensive of the four options, with a projected cost of $850,000, and James Hall and William Joyce offered to supply the marble. Even so, Renwick recommended that St. Patrick's be constructed of white marble, citing its durability and beauty. The archdiocese formed a Bureau of Contracts, which first met in December 1858.
The bureau awarded the marble contract to Hall and Joyce in March 1859; at the time, the work was supposed to be finished before January 1, 1867. The cost estimate of $867,500 for the entire cathedral () was unusually low for a project of that size. Construction progressed for two years after the cornerstone was laid. The work consisted of laying stone blocks for the foundation, each weighing between one and four tons. The foundation was excavated to a maximum depth of , where it was laid on solid rock. The excavations were relatively small because the underlying layer of bedrock was shallow, rising nearly to the surface near the transept on Fifth Avenue. White-marble walls were then constructed above the foundation. By January 1860, the cathedral had been erected to about above ground level. Work was slightly delayed by a stonecutters' strike that March.
The walls had reached the water table when all $73,000 in funds had been exhausted. As a result, in August 1860, Hughes decided to suspend all work on the new cathedral. When work was suspended, the walls had been built to an average height of above ground. The onset of the American Civil War in 1861 prevented the resumption of work for several years. Hughes died in January 1864 before the work could resume. John McCloskey was appointed to succeed Hughes as archbishop. McCloskey created a plan to finance the construction of the new St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Completion By mid-1866, work had again resumed and the walls had been built to above ground. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that the interior "looks like a large field" and said the cathedral would be "worthy to be regarded as one of the wonders of the Republic". Some $100,000 was spent on the Catholic cathedral in 1867, and the constituent churches of the Archdiocese of New York promised to spend $100,000 a year until the cathedral was complete. Most funding for the cathedral came from the parishioners of these churches, who were mainly poor Irish immigrants. An editorial in the New York World described the cathedral as being constructed "not of the superfluity of wealth, but for the most part out of the offerings of poverty".
The cathedral's masonry was laid during summer as the stonework could not be laid in the cold. By late 1870, the marble walls had been built to a height of and the transept was finished. The entrance on Fifth Avenue, measuring tall, had also been finished. Over a hundred workers were busy quarrying marble from Pleasantville, north of New York City. The marble was transported down to New York City via the Harlem Railroad, where a branch track led to the new cathedral's site. The construction of the new cathedral drew relatively little interest for New York City's non-Catholic population, though several commentators praised the cathedral's design. An anonymous author for the Real Estate Record and Guide wrote that the new St. Patrick's Cathedral was the "most gorgeous ecclesiastical edifice on this continent", though the critics perceived the buttresses on the north and south sides of the facade as "altogether unnecessary". A reporter for the New York World, probably Montgomery Schuyler, wrote in 1871 that the cathedral would be "one of the leading ecclesiastical structures in the world".