It speaks to the close-knit worlds of American medievalism that both Christopher Grant La Farge, eldest son of Adams’s dear friend John, and Ralph Adams Cram, who supplied the introduction to Mont Saint Michel and Chartres when it was commercially printed in 1913, contributed separately as architects to the design of Saint John the Divine, the cathedral of the Episcopal diocese in New York (see Fig. 3.29). La Farge fils wove together Romanesque and Norman styles in work that began in 1892 and continued until 1911. At that point Cram took over with a French rayonnant Gothic design. Reconciling the two designs and constructions made for a hard row to hoe.
The timing of the groundbreaking looks very significant in retrospect. In a British context, the year 1892 could be seen as coinciding with a slippage in the cultural centrality of the Middle Ages with the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a poet who drew much inspiration from medieval legends. Not so in the United States—ground was broken for Saint John the Divine on December 27, the feast day of the holy man, in the year that marked the quadricentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s fateful landfall.
The rendering of the projected Saint John the Divine that was published in an issue in the first year of the Architectural Record shows a towering edifice, worthy of any that Adams would have seen on his cathedral tours of France (see Fig. 3.30). In its grandeur it was intended to be the largest Gothic structure on the face of the earth—and to make even New York City, for all its sky-high modernity, into a cathedral town, albeit on an American scale. Despite being uncompleted, the great church remains to this day the largest in the world.
The final blueprints for edifices such as Saint John the Divine emerged from long and often emotive negotiations. The debate was still more heated in this instance, since the church aspired to the status of a national cathedral. We must remember that contention over the design began in New York more than a century before the completion of what has since become officially the National Cathedral in the District of Columbia. The cornerstone of the house of prayer was laid only in 1907. At that point it was not dedicated as such, but rather as the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the city and diocese of Washington.
In Henry Adams’s Esther from 1884, the artist Wharton criticizes the original scheme for an imagined cathedral to be put up in New York. The character, based on John La Farge, says, “I would like… to go back to the age of beauty and put a Madonna in the heart of their church. The place has no heart.” It sheds no small light on the consistency of Adams’s passions and insights across the decades of his life that already at this juncture, just over two decades before his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, he equates an image of the Virgin Mary with the innermost essence of ecclesiastical architecture. But the building at issue in the novel published two decades earlier was modeled upon Trinity Church in Boston, which Henry and Clover Adams often visited during its construction when he taught at Harvard (see Fig. 3.31). Similar
wars of words took place about Saint John the Divine in New York City, but only years after the publication of Esther.
Trinity Church belonged to a radically medievalizing makeover that Boston performed upon itself in the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The largest urban conflagration ever to strike the City on a Hill was the Great Fire of 1872. In its immediate aftermath, the erection of edifices in revival fashion kicked into high gear.
Many new medievalesque buildings that sprang up afterward were demolished less than one half century later. Take, for example, two that faced each other at the corners of Boylston and Tremont Streets. One was the Gothic Masonic Temple (see Fig. 3.32), which after being damaged by a blaze was torn down to make way for a fresh structure that was put up in 1898–1899. The other was called “the Italian-Gothic style” Hotel Boylston (see Fig. 3.33), which stood from 1871 to 1894.
Fig. 3.29 Postcard depicting the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York: Frank E. Cooper, early twentieth century).
For a few decades, the metropolis of Boston made its newfound and pervasive medievalishness a badge of honor, even or especially while publicizing itself as a lamp of liberty, learning, and culture in the New World (see Fig. 3.34). Yet most of Beantown’s modern Middle Ages was not to last long. One of the pride and joys of the Gothic past that have since disappeared from Boston is notably the original Museum of Fine Arts (see Figs. 3.35 and 3.36). This High Victorian Gothic edifice in Ruskinian style opened on July 4, 1876, a strangely medieval means of marking the hundredth birthday of the United States of America. The date fell during Adams’s tenure at Harvard. Before the first decade of the twentieth century had ended, the building had been dismantled to make way for the present-day Copley Plaza Hotel. The Museum of Fine Arts moved to its present location in 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
140 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
Fig. 3.30 “Interior view of design submitted for Cathedral of St. John the Divine.”
Design by A. Potter and R. H. Robertson, New York. Published in The Architectural Record 1.3 (January–March, 1892): 260.
Fig. 3.31 Trinity Church, Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph, ca. 1877–1895.
Photographer unknown. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Library.
Fig. 3.32 Masonic Temple, Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph, 1875.
Photographer unknown. Boston, Boston Public Library, Pictorial Archive.
Fig. 3.33 Hotel Boylston. Photograph, ca. 1870–1879. Photographer unknown.
Boston, Boston Public Library, Pictorial Archive.
142 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
Fig. 3.34 Postcard depicting various Gothic-inspired structures of Boston, Massachusetts (1902).
Fig. 3.35 Postcard depicting the former Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (London: Raphael Tuck & Sons, 1903).
Fig. 3.36 Postcard depicting the former Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (New York: Souvenir Post Card Co., early twentieth century).