Notes from the podcast (#134) St. Patrick's Cathedral

A spectacle from a hundred years ago: St. Patrick's in 1912, in a gauze of electric lights. The picture below this post illustrates how this particular light performance made the church standout among the as-of-yet mild landscape of Midtown East. Pictures courtesy the Library of Congress

We hope you like our new podcast on St. Patrick's Cathedral. Very odd timing to be releasing a Catholic themed podcast, given that Archbishop Dolan is set to turn Cardinal tomorrow and, oh right, the contraception controversy.

The church is closely linked to the history of early Irish New Yorkers. However there were obviously huge bodies of Catholics of other nationalities in the mid-19th century, particularly German Catholics. Archbishop John Hughes himself said that "people were composed of representatives from almost all nations." That said, Germans Catholics opened their own churches, in particular the Roman Catholic Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, opening in the East Village in 1852, in the new German enclave of Kleindeutschland.


Here's an interesting read about the 1989 ACT UP protest at St. Patrick's, from a person who was actually arrested at the protest!

VISIT: The official site for St. Patrick's has a historical timeline, a map, and information on tours.

MUSIC: The music in this week's show is from the album 'O Come Let Us Sing', featuring the St. Patrick's Cathedral Choir and St. Patrick's organist Donald Dumler. You can find the album on iTunes.

CORRECTIONS: I made a big blunder in this episode. I've always prided myself in New York movie trivia, yet I flubbed it in this episode. 'The Godfather III' was filmed at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, not at the new one. Sorry for the error.

Speaking of the old cathedral, it's now a basilica, if you haven't heard. Although we speak about the original Mott Street cathedral in this episode, you might like to check out our old show (Episode #9). You can tell we've come a long way in this podcasting thing!

TIMELINE: We do things a bit out of order at the start of the show, so I thought I'd lay out some of the key dates for you for reference. St. Patrick's website also has a historical timeline that you can use to follow along. But of the things we speak about:

1801 -- David Hosack opens his Elgin Botanical Garden in the vicinity of today's Rockefeller Center.
1808 -- The Diocese of New York is created
1810 -- The land where St. Patrick's sits today is sold to an insurance company, the Eagle Fire Company. One of the trustees of the board is Archibald Gracie. By this time, the Jesuits had already constructed a building on this property.
1813 -- Augustin De Lastrange arrives in New York. The following year, he bought the structure and, for a short time, sets up a Trappist monastery here.
1815 -- St. Patrick's Cathedral opens downtown at Mulberry Street.
1828 -- The mid-Manhattan land is sold to Francis Cooper, on behalf of St. Peter's and St Patrick's, with the intention of building a cemetery
1838 -- John Hughes is made a bishop
1850 -- The Diocese of New York becomes an archdiocese
1858 -- The cornerstone to St. Patrick's new cathedral is laid. By this time, the controversial figure Madame Restell has already built her mansion across the street, and quite on purpose it seems.
1864 -- John Hughes dies
1878 -- The 'Great Cathedral Fair' is held, raising enough funds to finally complete the structure
1879 -- The new Cathedral is officially dedicated
1888 -- The cathedral's distinctive spires are finally completed.

St. Patrick's Cathedral: Stately grace in bustling Midtown, thanks to a fiery archbishop and a venerable hairdresser

During its early years, St Patrick's neighbors were luxurious mansions. Today the surrounding streets house retail and tourist attractions. (Picture courtesy Library of Congress)


PODCAST One of America's most famous churches and a graceful icon upon the landscape of midtown Manhattan, St. Patrick's Cathedral was also one of New York's most arduous building projects, taking decades to build. An overflow of worshippers at downtown's old St Patrick's demanded a vast new place of worship, even as most Catholic New Yorkers were having an uneasy time due to religious prejudice by angry 'nativists'.

 Enter 'Dagger' John Hughes, the relentless first Archbishop of New York, who hammered the city for equal treatment for Catholics and managed to construct several New York institutions still in existence. Many scoffed at his idea of building a gigantic cathedral so far north of town.

We explore the early years of this once-quiet piece of mid-Manhattan real estate and some of the notable events that have taken place at St. Patrick's since its opening.

 ALSO: The tale of the revered Haitian hairdresser in the crypt!

You can tune into it below, download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, or get it straight from our satellite site.

Or listen to it here:
The Bowery Boys: St. Patrick's Cathedral

Notes, corrections, clarifications, sources, and additional information will be posted on Tuesday. Because the set-up was so complex this time around -- we bounced around quite a bit between the years 1800 and 1850 -- I'll also have a timeline that can accompany that show.



 Before 'uptown' St. Patrick's, there was downtown St. Patrick's, the original cathedral which was consecrated in 1815. By the 1850s, with the number of Catholics growing due to immigration, a larger, grander structure was required, one that reflect the congregants' growing influence. The image below is from St. Patrick's before the 1866 fire. The facade was rebuilt with less ornamentation.

The land where St. Patrick's sits today was wooded and sparsely populated 210 years ago. But for a short time, in 1814, a Trappist monastery sat here, the haven of French refugee Dom Augustin de Lestrange.

The undisputed religious leader of New York's Catholic community was Archbishop John Hughes, whose fierce tenacity -- and curious signature -- earned him the nickname 'Dagger John'. He spearheaded the construction of a new cathedral, in an area of town that, in the 1850s, was nowhere near the center of the city. 'Hughes' Folly' would take two decades to build; by the time it was completed, Fifth Avenue had entirely transformed. The Archbishop's risk had paid off. (courtesy NYPL)

Sunday morning mayhem at St. Patrick's Cathedral at the start of the 20th century. Fifth Avenue became a veritable procession of New York's wealthiest residents. (NYPL)

An image from the late 19th century. The famous 20,000-lbs. bronze doors, featuring three-dimensional sculptures of saints, would not be installed until a few decades later. (Courtesy NY State Archives)

Inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, during the funeral of former mayor Jimmy Walker, November 1946. (courtesy Life)

Worshippers in 1944, as photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life Magazine.

Another shot of St. Patrick's in 1909, in one of the last years the cathedral would be surrounded with residential homes. By 1924 it would get its neighbor Saks Fifth Avenue. Fifteen years after that, Rockefeller Center would rise across the street.

From prison to post office: The odd fate of a Dutch church

Say a prayer for the Middle Dutch Church (pictured here from sometime before the war) as things are about to get very ugly.

 One need only walk through the Limelight Marketplace -- perhaps stopping to grab a slice of Grimaldi's pizza or a champagne damask lace duvet at Brocade Home -- to understand the strange flexibility of church architecture. I've pondered before on this former Richard Upjohn-designed Episcopal church at West 20th Street and Sixth Avenue, transformed into a rehab center in the 1970s, then a notorious nightclub in the '80s.

But the Limelight is only the most extreme example of church alteration in New York. Brooklyn Heights has so many churches that some have been turned into swanky loft apartments. This is not a new trend. New York grew so rapidly in the 19th century that small stone and clapboard churches, once situated on the outskirts of town, found themselves surrounded. As population shifted, congregations left, and other civic services moved in.

The Middle Dutch Church was built between 1726 and 1731, a vestige of Manhattan's Dutch Reformed community that traced itself back to New Amsterdam's very first house of worship. Its location at Nassau Street and Cedar Street made it central to the lives of colonial New Yorkers, but a series of historical twists ensured a few less hallowed activities would take place here.

Below: The church and the adjoining 'sugar house' in 1830, years after being turned into a horrifying prison complex.

During the Revolutionary War, the occupying British turned the damaged and deteriorating Middle Dutch and its neighboring sugar house into a prison for unruly rebels. An old Times article estimates that up to 8,000 prisoners were held here in those years.  "When the victims confined to the Middle Dutch church crawled to the windows begging for food, a sentinel, pistol in hand, would turn back the gifts of the charitable." [source]

"The whole floor of the Church was one caked mass of dead, dying, excrement and vermin," reported the Times, "supernatural" conditions that probably echoed throughout the entire city, choked off during the occupation years between 1776 to 1783.

I'm grimly speculating that prisoners were transferred the prison ships of Wallabout Bay at some point, for the building was emptied, "the planking torn up, tan laid down, and a riding-school established for the recruits of the English riding-horse."

When the British galloped out of New York entirely in 1783, the beat-up old building sat virtually unused -- although Benjamin Franklin may have used the belfry for electricity experiments, according to one source -- before being turned back into a church, re-opening on July 4, 1790. It stayed as a church for 44 years, even as New York's population migrated north.

Under a cloud of debt, the church finally closed in 1844, with its final service symbolically held in both English and Dutch languages.

If Franklin (America's first postmaster general) indeed practiced with electricity here, then the next transformation seems natural. With the federal standardization of postal rates in 1845, New York found itself in need of a central post office. So the U.S. government leased the old church -- buying it outright in 1861 -- and radically transformed the building into New York's central post office.

Special delivery: The interior of the Dutch church turned post office in 1871 (NYPL)

The poor building, renovated and stretched thin, could barely process the flow of mail coming through the city by the late 1860s, so a new central post office was built -- the odd, greatly loathed City Hall Post Office building.

The old Dutch church, now 150 years old, was considered a city treasure, but real estate in downtown Manhattan was now being carved out for skyscrapers. The church of a thousand faces, to the curiosity of "thousands of relic-hunters and citizens," was finally torn down and replaced with the Mutual Life Insurance Building in 1882. The ornate Mutual Life had a good run but was demolished -- with a part of Cedar Street erased -- to make room for One Chase Manhattan Plaza.