Arriving at Ideas for Exhibit Pages

For the initial launch date of our Morningside project site, December 2014, we are all expected to have completed three exhibits, and to have provided access to at least twenty items, of which many should be in direct support of our exhibits. An exhibit, in a project such as ours, is a Web page that puts forward a coherent narrative or exposition, which is enhanced by the inclusion of items (documents, images, or other media).

We talked a bit about exhibits at our group meeting yesterday. So I thought it might be useful, both to our group and to our larger audience (“those wonderful people out there in the dark,” as Norma Desmond would say), if I shared my current ideas for three exhibits regarding my building–the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine–and the process by which I arrived at them.

First, I read the segment on the cathedral in Andrew Dolkart’’s book Morningside Heights. Through this, I identified six persons of interest: the first three bishops involved in the proposal for and building of the cathedral (spanning the period 1872 to 1946) and three architects (the team of two who won the design competition and the one who was hired to replace them).

Next, I looked up all six in American National Biography Online. Three had entries there; and each entry ended with a valuable bibliography listing key relevant archives and published works. For persons who did not have entries in ANB, I searched for relevant archives in ArchiveGrid and Columbia’’s Archival Portal. This grounded me in a sense of which persons and events would be open to being explored in depth using unpublished documents. Finally, I took a tour of the church itself, led by a historically informed guide; and I asked questions along the way.

Here are my current basic ideas for three exhibits:

Exhibit One: The Need for a Cathedral How was the need for an Episcopal cathedral in New York City presented in early discussions and fund-raising efforts? I will start the story in 1872 when the proposal for establishing a cathedral for the diocese of New York was approved at an Episcopal Convention. I will end in 1946 with the retirement of Bishop William Manning–the last bishop to oversee ambitious expansions of the cathedral’s functional space.

Relevant local archives:

- The Rt. Rev. Horatio Potter, 1821-1915, Papers, Trinity Church
- Bishop Henry Codman Potter, 1835-1908, Papers, St. Mark's Library, General Theological Seminary
- Bishop William T. Manning, 1866-1949, archives of the Episcopal Diocese of New York

Exhibit Two: Competing Visions

In order to select the architects for the new cathedral, the trustees held a design competition from 1888-1892 (Dolkart, 41-50). Although the architectural team of George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge won this competition, it might accurately be said that competing visions for how the cathedral should be designed were at play as long as the cathedral was being built. After the death of Heins, the trustees replaced La Farge with architect Ralph Adams Cram (in 1911). This choice was an interesting one, considering that Cram, in his book Church Building (1901), had argued for the superiority of the English Gothic style for cathedrals, whereas the work completed so far by Heins and La Farge was primarily Romanesque.

Cram had even written dismissively of the then recent design competition: “When the competition for the New York cathedral was held, we saw at once how blind were the gropings, both of the Church and of the architects. Practically, none of the designs submitted showed the least appreciation of the cathedral idea…. It was the chance of a century, and none came forward to seize upon it to the glory of the Church and to his own immortality.” (195-196). The final illustration in Cram’s chapter titled “The Cathedral” is of Heins and La Farge’s design. It bears the caption “NEW YORK CATHEDRAL (ACCEPTED DESIGN)” (214). Cram nowhere mentions the names of the architects nor does he comment explicitly on their design. (They would, however, seem to be implicated in Cram’s sweeping “none came forward….”) It can hardly be surprising, therefore, that Cram had very limited regard for continuity in design principles as he expanded the cathedral that Heins and La Farge had begun.

Relevant local archives:

Avery Drawings & Archives holds collections related to Heins & La Farge, and St. John the Divine.

Exhibit Three: Spaces for Worship

In 1899 “the first services [were] held in a chapel of the crypt.” Services moved upstairs in 1911 when the Chapel of St. Columba was consecrated, and were first held in the nave in 1939. The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York (Bloomfield, CT: Finlay Printing, 2008), 55-56, 58. Throughout most of the period that I will cover, people’s experience of the cathedral was centered on spaces other than the nave (which is the space that most of us today probably think of when we think of this cathedral). I hope that this exhibit will have a defamiliarizing effect–prompting people to reconsider the cathedral as an entity built over time, whose center of gravity repeatedly shifted.

Relevant local archives:

To be determined. Overall, my hope is to create exhibits that provide strong angles of light on three aspects of the cathedral’s history. Exhibits two and three will have strong visual interest. Exhibit one is more conceptual, but I will aim to enhance with images of relevant documents such as fund-raising appeals.

John L. Tofanelli

Author: John L. Tofanelli

John is Columbia’s Librarian for British and American History and Literature. His research interests include literature and religion in 18th- and 19th- century Great Britain, textual criticism, and book history. He has enjoyed the chance to explore the early architectural history of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.