Cathedral of St. John the Divine

4 September 2010, 1:45 PM – Morningside Heights, Manhattan

“Thousands can congregate in the space made by a few.”

Kelly and I had meant to visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in July, but ran out of time. So we waited, and waited, until the last weekend the locks were open, to visit the one both of us wanted to see.

The lock opened up the Baptistry, a gift from the 20th-century descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, the famous (or infamous, as the case may be) Director of New Netherland, and with it, New Amsterdam (the two of which would become New York state and New York City, respectively). Completed in the 1930s, the Baptistry was ironically one of the newer parts of the Cathedral, which was built in the 1880s, despite its benefactors’ ballyhooed ancestry.

Still in all, it was an immaculate structure, encompassing at least two city blocks on the West Side, and if anything an interesting bit of the City’s history and architecture to see.

The journey concluded at the Cathedral, but read my closing post, here.