The Majesty of St. Patrick’s
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The tradition of the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade dates to the middle of the 19th century. New Yorkers, after Easter services at one of the Fifth Avenue churches, paraded in their finery as a way of showing that the solemn 40 days of Lent had ended. Or as the New York Times put it in 1887:
For 40 days had Fair Fashion knelt by the snowy cloths of her altars. For 40 days had she eaten the unleavened bread of sincerity and of truth; her champagne and her truffles locked away in the rigid keeping of the penitential butler.
The Easter Parade began before St. Patrick’s Cathedral opened in 1879. But St. Patrick’s is by far Fifth Avenue’s largest church, with grand steps and a terrace ideal for viewing the avenue’s throngs. And as Easter is the holiest day on the Christian calendar, a visit to St. Patrick’s may be in order.
The cathedral is both an overrated and an underrated attraction. Overrated, because swarming crowds, harsh interior electric lighting, and sometimes thuggish guards dispel much of the meditative magic we expect from a great house of worship. Underrated, because in all of New York architecture there is scarcely a finer building — yet how often is one told that?
This majesty was more evident when the cathedral’s soaring towers defined Fifth Avenue’s skyline. Even so, amid the surrounding tall buildings, the towers remain a glorious sight. Their dramatic taper has no equal that I have seen, anywhere in the world. Architect James Renwick Jr. made many compromises in his design, squeezing his cathedral into the rigid confines of a rectangular block of the Midtown grid. Consequently, St. Patrick’s barely has transepts extending north and south. Yet architecture is an art of compromise. Renwick showed genius in his adaptations to site, in his soaring towers, in the decorative richness both outside and in. He was skilled and scholarly enough to pull off the neat trick of a French exterior and an English interior.
The lacy ribs of the ceiling vaulting inside recall Westminster Abbey and York Minster. The Gothic space is breathtaking. Note two things in particular. The aisle windows, mainly by Nicolas Lorin of Chartres, are enamelpainted in the Renaissance fashion, strictly speaking not right for a Gothic church. But so what? They are among the finest windows of their type in New York, with rich, realistic imagery. The clerestory windows up above are true Gothic windows, with integrally colored glass laid up in mosaic. The Boston Gothicist Charles Connick produced these in the 1940s.
The Stations of the Cross along the aisle walls were also a later addition. The artist was an architect, Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers (1827–1921), a Dutchman who was one of the most important figures in the 19th-century Gothic revival in Europe. A disciple of the French Gothic Revival architect Viollet-le-Duc, Cuypers, like his mentor, got heavily involved in the restoration of medieval monuments, not least Cologne Cathedral, whose completion in the 19th century influenced numerous new Gothic churches on both sides of the Atlantic, including Vienna’s Votivkirche, Paris’s Sainte-Clotilde, and our own very beautiful St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
