Let there be light again

July 20, 2008, The New York Times
Scrubbed of Smoke and Grime, a Sanctuary Sparkles Again
By DAVID W. DUNLAP

“Oh, my God,” is not an entirely inappropriate reaction.

An exclamation of some kind is almost inevitable on seeing the nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine for the first time in two years. After a $16.5 million cleaning and restoration, the 248-foot-long nave — the monumental aisle leading from the sanctuary’s main entrance — has a surprising clarity, crispness and lightness, qualities that had been sullied by pollution, smoke and even those swinging censers over the years.

“Some people joke that we may have used too much incense,” said the Very Rev. Dr. James A. Kowalski, dean of the cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

What one remembered as a gloomy expanse of gray now seems more like a forest of lavender, as the grime-free granite and limestone columns are washed in light filtered through newly sparkling stained-glass windows.

The nave will open to the public on Monday. The next day, the first pieces of the cathedral’s great organ are scheduled to arrive by truck from Warrensburg, Mo., where they have been cleaned and restored. The crossing at the center of the cathedral will be closed to permit reinstallation of the organ.

Then, on Nov. 30 — the 67th anniversary of the nave’s dedication — the entire cathedral will be rededicated, bringing a triumphant end to a grim chapter of its history that began Dec. 18, 2001, when a five-alarm fire swept through the north transept. To some, the idea of a well-loved cathedral burning a week before Christmas seemed almost too much to bear, coming so soon after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Belle Harbor, Queens, in which 265 people died.

The organ was silenced at that time because the cathedral feared that any attempt to play it without a thorough cleaning of the fire damage would only worsen its condition.

During the cleaning of the nave, which required an enormous network of scaffolding, a tunnel-like walkway was built along the central aisle to allow the public to walk through the space without risk of injury. It cut off access from the side aisles and features like the Firemen’s Memorial.

“I miss the firefighters coming in for that memorial,” Dean Kowalski said. “After 9/11, hardly a day would go by when you wouldn’t see firefighters from New York and other parts of the country making a pilgrimage to that. You forget how important these things are to people.”

When told that an early visitor to the newly resplendent nave had invoked God’s name in astonishment, Dean Kowalski laughed.

“Well, you know, I like hearing that,” he said. “If we can give you anything close to a religious experience, we must be doing something right.”

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I first went to Saint John the Divine in about 1970 when even less of it was completed than now. I remember the huge tapestries hanging from the incomplete south and north transepts where there should have been rose windows. And I just remember how HUGE the place was.

Skip ahead twenty years to my attending the Saint Francis mass in October 1990, where I was seated behind a woman with a cat on a leash/harness, a nearby parrot and across the aisle two firemen with their house dalmation... and a gazillion other critters. And somewhere in seminary I went to someone's ordination held up in the chancel which easily seats 150 people.

It's an amazing space and yet still unfinished (as was the National Cathedral in 1983 when I first went there). It shall probably always be that way.