Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 26, 1990 TAG: 9007260317
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: W. DALE NELSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. mounted the cathedral's Canterbury Pulpit on Palm Sunday 1968, just three days before his death, the central tower was complete but the twin towers on the west portal had not yet begun to rise.
When mourners were summoned for a memorial service for assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation had fallen $10.7 million in debt and work at the cathedral was at a standstill.
"Only the most optimistic person would have bet on Washington Cathedral ever being finished," said Canon Richard Feller, clerk of the works since 1953. "A review of the hard facts gave it almost zero chance."
And yet at noon Sept. 29, a gleaming blue crane will lift a 1,008-pound chunk of Indiana limestone, carved in the shape of a folded leaf, onto the south tower's southwestern pinnacle and one of the world's last great Gothic cathedrals will be completed.
President Bush is expected to be on hand, just as President Theodore Roosevelt was there for the foundation stone ceremony on the same date in 1907. "Godspeed in the work begun this noon," Roosevelt told a crowd estimated at 10,000 as a stone quarried in Bethlehem was sunk in the rocky soil of Washington's Mount St. Alban.
A national worshiping place was first conceived by Pierre L'Enfant, the Parisian-born American architect commissioned by George Washington to plan the national capital. His blueprints for the city included a church "intended for national purposes, such as public prayer, thanksgiving, funeral orations, etc., and assigned to the particular use of no particular sect or denomination, but open to all."
Partly because of concern over the constitutional separation of church and state, it was not until Dec. 9, 1891, that the first meeting to plan the cathedral was held at the home of banker Charles Glover.
Construction would not begin until 16 years later.
Building the cathedral has cost $65 million to date, not taking inflation into account. The figure includes the cost of more than 200 stained-glass windows and a wealth of statues, mosaics and other artworks.
According to the Federal Highway Administration, it can cost up to $63 million in 1990 money to build a one-mile stretch of urban interstate highway. The cost of a B-2 stealth bomber has been set at from $530 million to $815 million, depending on how many are purchased.
Even in today's dollars, the cost of the cathedral is small compared with such sums.
Yet some have questioned whether the foundation, which operates the cathedral under a charter granted by Congress in 1893, should have pumped money into such a project in a capital facing mounting homelessness and poverty.
The provost of the cathedral, the Very Rev. Howard Perry, says the decision in 1983 to finish the building on a pay-as-you-go basis while retiring its debt was coupled with a commitment to expand outreach to the city.
At the time, 20 percent of the cathedral's budget went into worship and outreach. It is now 40 percent.
"We don't see ourselves being so caught up in this building and all its glory that we don't also have a very strong involvement in the metropolitan area," says the Rev. Kwasi Thornell, who came from a mission church in a poor St. Louis neighborhood to be canon missioner of the cathedral.
The cathedral does not double as a parish church, as do most Episcopal cathedrals in the United States, so there is no built-in congregation. Yet several services are held every day. There are usually five services on Sunday.
Perry says only about 15 to 20 percent of the people attending the services come to the cathedral regularly.
One of the regulars is Ruth Goodchild, daughter of an Episcopal clergyman and wife of a retired Foreign Service officer. She and her husband come in every Sunday from suburban McLean, Va. But her involvement with the cathedral doesn't end there.
Monday afternoons, from 12:30 to 3, Goodchild, a former schoolteacher, goes to a school in a poverty-stricken area of Washington and tutors two Hispanic fifth-graders.
As chairman of the cathedral's literacy program, Goodchild also arranges and attends three-hour training sessions for volunteers the first Saturday of each month.
There are more than 90 volunteers in the program, some visiting schools once or twice a week and some working in the evening with adults at a former public school now run by the city government as a tutoring center.
The cathedral is built in the style of the English cathedrals of the 14th century, with some variations, including mostly French-style windows. It is put together in the same stone-on-stone method used by medieval masons.
Although there are steel reinforcing rods in the concrete floors and in the cores of the pillars, there is no structural steel in the bearing walls. Flying buttresses, countering the outward thrust of the Gothic arches, hold them up.
"This thing is built to stay here a couple of thousand years," says Joseph Alonso, the mason foreman.
At 83,012 square feet, the Washington cathedral is the sixth largest in the world, exceeded by St. Peter's in Rome at 227,069, Seville at 128,570, the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York at 121,000, Liverpool at 101,000 and Milan at 92,600. The building is 518 feet long. Its central tower rises 301 feet and the west tower reaches 234 feet.
The work proceeded from east to west, starting in 1907 with the Bethlehem chapel, where Wilson was laid to rest, then continuing to the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea, with a mural of Christ's entombment, and the Resurrection Chapel, with the cathedral's only mosaics. A visitors' center and museum shop complete the crypt, or lower level.
The main altar, directly above Bethlehem Chapel, was built next. Then came the choir, with its richly carved wood, and the south and north transepts, which intersect the nave at right angles to form the shape of a cross.
Construction stopped in 1977 due to the shortage of money. Work resumed in 1980 after a new bishop and dean, the Right Rev. John Thomas Walker, started a fund-raising drive and ordered stringent economies - cutting back on heat, reducing staff and turning the lights off except during services. The final phase of construction began April 5, 1983, with the setting of the first stone for the west towers.
Walker died after heart surgery Sept. 30, 1989, the day that a ceremony was held marking the beginning of the final year of construction. Like five other bishops who served as the building rose, he is interred in the cathedral. His successor, the Right Rev. Ronald Haines, will be installed a few weeks after the cathedral's ceremonious completion.
A few months before his death, Walker challenged the cathedral to become "a servant church."
"The alternative is to become an anachronism, a museum piece, a stop on a tour of the capital city," he wrote. "I don't believe that we will be reduced to be a museum piece."
The building will need more work even after the final stone is set.
"We've got a 70-year-old building at one end and a brand-new building at the other end, and the 70-year-old portion of the building and the intermediate areas have got to have some preservation," Feller says.
One problem is that during the stop-and-start construction, the building was often protected only by temporary roofs.
Walking a visitor through the nave, Alonso said: "You notice these black stains here. That's from water infiltrating. It seeps into the limestone and then darkens."
"A building like this is always moving, expanding, settling," he added.
Unlike New York's St. John the Divine, which is on the edge of Harlem, the Washington cathedral is on a leafy hilltop in a fashionable residential area far from the troubled inner city.
From the south tower, you can see across the Potomac River to the Pentagon, off into Maryland to the Mormon Temple and beyond to Sugar Loaf Mountain, up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and the Library of Congress. The White House, four miles away, is hidden behind trees.
"You can be any place in that building and you can find delight," says James Cramer, executive vice president of the American Institute of Architects.
by CNB