ST.

JOHN THE DIVINE CATHEDRAL IS IN RECOVERY

MODE
WHILE ALL EYES ARE ON PARIS’S FIRE-RAVAGED NOTRE-DAME, NEW YORK’S
ST. JOHN THE DIVINE CATHEDRAL IS DEALING WITH THE AFTERMATH OF A
FIRE OF ITS OWN.
By Jane Margolies
Published Sept. 17, 2019
Updated Sept. 18, 2019, 12:53 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/arts/design/st-john-the-divine-cathedral-
fire.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FArchitecture&action=click&contentCollection=ti
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All eyes are on Paris’s fire-ravaged Notre-Dame, which President Emmanuel Macron of
France has pledged to restore in five years. But a great cathedral in New York is also
recovering from a conflagration that occurred on Palm Sunday — one day before the
medieval French Notre-Dame was overcome by flames.

The fire at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, a Gothic-style landmark in the
Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, was far less catastrophic. It was confined
to a windowless room in the crypt, and no one was injured. The cause has been declared
unknown.

Still, oil paintings and an 18th-century icon were destroyed and other artworks damaged. And
the plumes of smoke that rose up through heating vents in the floor into the cathedral’s vast
interior left soot everywhere.

“It doesn’t sound so bad until you learn that smoke on stone acts as an acid,” the Rt. Rev.
Clifton Daniel III, the cathedral’s leader, said in an interview on Monday.

For months, crews from Maxons Restorations have been scrubbing down walls with special
heavy-duty brick-shaped sponges. Construction lifts — driven right onto the slate floor of the
nave — carry them up to the 125-foot-high ceiling. With no room around the high altar to
maneuver such heavy machinery, scaffolding is being installed there to put soiled surfaces
within arm’s reach.

The stained-glass windows are being vacuumed, the cast-bronze entrance doors wiped down.
The cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, remains open. A rented
electronic organ is providing music until the 8,035 pipes of the cathedral’s acclaimed Skinner
instrument — which, incidentally, had recently been cleaned and reinstalled after a more
serious fire in the cathedral in 2001 — can be packed up and sent away again for cleaning.

“It’s what you call an M-E-S-S,” Dean Daniel said.

He hopes the cleaning of the stonework will be completed by Christmas and the cathedral
will no longer look like a work site, with the organ restoration taking place next year (total
cost: about $10 million).

Until then, tour buses still disgorge passengers out front. But for the duration, with so many
areas cordoned off, the usual $10 admission fee has been cut in half.