Part of the beguiling preposterousness of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York’s paean to medieval times (those of the bubonic plague, capricious beheadings and a church that stifled science), comes from the unexpected transport one feels not only meandering through the mini-cosmos of its “two football field”-sized nave, but even before entering when, gazing from Broadway across 112th, you spy what appears to be an entire Notre Dame or Chartres seemingly airlifted out of ancient France and plopped down in, pretty much, Harlem. Sure, some of it apparently broke off when they dropped it (why only a bell tower on the right? Aren’t these things supposed to be fanatically symmetrical?), but that just adds more medievalness to the surreality.

Far from an ideal beauty, in ways New York’s version of the Gothic model of divine splendor is an enormous, struggling hunchback. Though “struggl-ing” may be the wrong participle. 120-something years after construction began (in 1892) and 900 years after it was designed (basically), St. John the Unfinished, as it’s nicknamed, hasn’t seen work in nearly two decades due to a lack of funding. Sucks to not have a king and the bestowal of royal largesse, sometimes.

But these things take time, history tells us. Chartres was not built in a day (54 years) nor Notre Dame in a fortnight (109 years). And in that spirit – the coming and passing of generations that lived and labored and worshipped and made pizza in its shadows – New York’s cathedral carries the hulking hope and burden of a massive dream much as those European masterpieces of sheer religious force did back in the day. So it’s not just the Cathedral’s millennium-old architectural style that smacks you with a flashback to about twelve lifetimes ago (you were a monk with a bad haircut); the very interminablity of its construction mimics medieval existence slowly willing a cathedral into being with hand tools and oxen carts and blunt faith from men whose full lifespan was 45 years, unless they died of syphilis or pestilence before then.

And in the face of such a prodigious, obsolete undertaking in these our modern times, one has to ask: why would 19th, 20th and 21st centuryers even want to recreate architecture from a period of history whose blighted physical, social and political health didn’t get it nicknamed “The Dark Ages” for nothing? Sleek modernism was in full bloom while the archaic bulk of the Cathedral was being forged: Mondrian had reinvented the square and van der Rohe and Wright were busy making horizontal the new vertical. But back on the Morningside Heights farm, stonemasons trained in ancient techniques were using biceps and iron hammers to carve winged gargoyles and figures from the Bible, and ribbed vaulting and pointed arch after arch were rising as high as medieval man had found a way to make them (hint: flying buttresses), as if to say that anything flat, like the earth, was where sorrow squatted, so our attention should rise up and away.  

If you take a tour of St. John the Divine, your guide will announce that you’re passing through the largest cathedral in the world and then say something like, “as with other medieval cathedrals, the nave was built big enough to host a feast for an entire village!” So you squint and imagine the church filled with some Hollywood-informed idea of pitiably-dressed, ravenous men and women gnawing at roasted meat and drowning the misery of their era in spiced wine quaffed from thick carafes…

Oddly, it’s the Cathedral’s long, ongoing incompleteness that might just be it’s greatest blessing. Its crippled towers, the blunt, incomplete transepts, the spire-less roof that has no arms to grasp at heaven – enable us to relate to it as we would to any soul with a rough history.

Funny, that image: as with many Hollywood clichés, it’s probably got a toe stuck in a reality somewhere – but not on this continent, never mind this city. St. John the Divine is a medieval church in a land with no medieval history. It’s aesthetic purpose, then, is doubly-misplaced: not only have its builders labored (and I mean, labored;  they’ve eschewed technology and used original Gothic-era building methods) to ensure the Cathedral represents the motifs and beliefs not only of a far away time, but of a distant land as well. Home to the Bronx Bombers, it ain’t.

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It was initially decided the Cathedral would be built in the Romanesque style – shorter, thicker and darker than Gothic. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But after 19 years in that direction, when the main architect for the original firm of Heins & LaFarge was dismissed, the project managers or whatever they were called back then brought on Ralph Adams Cram, who immediately said, “no no no, all wrong. We’re going Gothic.” One doesn’t sense an implied question mark at the end of that.

In addition to being an important neo-Gothic architect, Ralph Adams Cram was many things – as are we all, as are we all… But among the sundry fish who swim the depths of our own personalities, “fascist sympathizer” hopefully isn’t among them. It’s true though: the chief builder of what we see when we see the  Cathedral of St. John the Divine once referred to the general populace as a “savage and ignorant mob,” and considered Mussolini a good egg with nice ideas about how to govern…the people. But fascism was  a fad in its day, and let’s not forget that aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, modern poetry hero Ezra Pound, and conservative insophisticate hero Ayn Rand all drank of its swill. In 1926, a Ralph Adams Cram could still strut the  cover of Time Magazine.

Similar to Rand, Cram was one of those believers in the supremacy of “Great Men.” In an essay, he argued that average people (you, me) comprise, I kid you not, “the ignominious sub-stratum” of mankind, who bear no kinship with the “great and fine” men of history. So maybe it’s in that same vein that he referred to his retro-Gothic style as “retracing our steps to the great Christian Middle Ages,” italics mine. That of the bubonic plague, public beheadings, censure of science, etc. In a prose style that resembled a cross between the King James Bible and a teenage girl who dresses as a faerie for Renaissance fairs, Cram — who left quite a paper trail — wrote that the purpose of his design was “to return for the fire of life to other centuries, since a night intervened between our fathers’ time and ours wherein the light was not.” In short, for a guy like Cram, the last half millennium of history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.

A fool’s errand, of course. And it’s from that trap which Cram sprung that the Cathedral of St. John the Divine must rise. In order to succeed in its mission (hint: it’s a church), whatever it provides in spiritual and aesthetic value has to emerge cleanly from under its chief builder’s disdain of pretty much anyone who would ever enter the Cathedral, as well as from a stylistic imitation of a brutal and troubled period of history that plays in our minds like Game of Thrones without the nudity.

And as one of the City’s most important and compelling churches, it has to also fulfill its own obvious design: to elevate citizens from that flat expanse of sorrow that has existed in this…damn…physical world throughout time, and to feed their own awkward spiritual aspirations, whatever they may be.

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Oddly, it’s the Cathedral’s long, ongoing incompleteness that might just be it’s greatest blessing. Its crippled towers, the blunt, incomplete transepts, the spire-less roof that has no arms to grasp at heaven – enable us to relate to it as we would to any soul with a rough history: probably made some bad decisions along the way, suffered rotten luck, fell under questionable influences. There are plenty of churches with the stiff, polished perfection of a Fifth Avenue cathedral. Nice and all, but they have no ready portal to empathy and humanity’s struggle written in their very shape; in no way at all do they resemble the clustered multitudes yearning for something wonderful they haven’t yet gotten, and may never…but can’t stop trying. St. John the Divine is still in the midst of its hulking dream, however foolish and misguided it might be. Aren’t we all, aren’t we all…

But maybe the Cathedral’s most memorable gift to those who experience its lumbering grace is that initial shock of miraculously finding a broken piece of sacred history in the midst of New York. Because, regardless of whatever windbreaker-clad visitors riding the tops of tour buses think, this city, as we all know, can bore the hell out of you sometimes, with a predictability that rivals watching corn grow in Iowa. The streets, subways, buildings and masses huddled against another rainy day can so easily blend into a numb, grey blur. But in an arm wrestling match against what George Packer called “the dismal ordinariness of life,” St. John the Divine would slam it quickly to the table and swill some beer. There’s nothing ordinary about it – from its bizarre conceit to the Zen-like quietude of its evensong service; from the profound vibrations of Great Organ recitals to the fabulous evil of its gargoyles; from the authentic medieval-stained glass that canonizes men of sports as well as of the Bible, to the seven chapels of American immigrant tongues; from the dusky heights of its tiled dome down to the obscenely awful sculpture in its otherwise serene garden and grounds.

So, what about the fact that its chief architect was a misanthropic-fascist-type? It’s important to realize that Cram was mostly an organizer; he invented nothing. At the behest of a committee he took 900 year old styles and ideas and moved them around on a page until they fit. Not that I could do it – but it’s the mission of the church that’s the real design behind its power; its blunt purpose of shaking , or shocking, people from of the narcotic sameness of daily physical life. And if there is some otherworldly thrill inside your ribs you when you encounter that colossal, preposterous dream; if it does momentarily lift you up from the flat plain of 21st Century city grind, it’s because you’ve allowed yourself to be transported; because you’ve recognized that possibility; and because you can find something of the true value of mankind in a struggling, giant old hunchback that will hopefully never, ever fulfill its architect’s vision.