Cathedral of All Saints, Albany New York

Date added: December 25, 2024

Front west facade completed in 1971 (1971)

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The most ambitious plan for an Episcopal cathedral of its day, the unfinished century-and-a-half-old Cathedral of All Saints was nurtured throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by Albany's great families, the Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Pruyns, and Cornings, and represents the advent of the successful career of architect, Robert Gibson, and the final chapter in the fruitful life of master stone carver, Louis J. Hinton.

Beginning with the influence of the Oxford Movement in Great Britain, a new interest in absorbing Catholic ideals and rituals permeated the Episcopalian Church in the mid-19^th century America. One outgrowth of this theological movement was the conviction that American dioceses were too large, and consequently the Bishop was often a combination of "an administrator and a confirming machine." In theory, every large city should have a bishop; and so as part of a national trend the Diocese of New York was subdivided into five dioceses between 1866 and 1868. Existing parish churches such as St. Paul's in Buffalo and St. Peter's in Albany were adapted for cathedral needs, but the idea of actually building a cathedral was not contemplated at first. Then in 1876 the Long Island Diocese was endowed with a memorial gift to construct a cathedral. It was 190' long when completed in 1883, the year that a site was secured for a cathedral at Albany and Gibson's plans for a 320' foot structure were accepted. Later to be outdone in size by St. John the Divine in New York City (begun 1892), Washington Cathedral (1907), and San Francisco (1910), All Saints in Albany was one of the first Episcopal cathedrals in the U.S. to be conceived on the scale of its European counterparts.

Its construction was heralded by a highly publicized competition between H. H. Richardson and Robert Gibson for the cathedral's commission, and it drew even more attention when the comparatively unknown, and untried 29-year-old Englishman, Gibson, was chosen over Richardson. "About the most important church erected since Trinity (Boston) is the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral in Albany, by R. W. Gibson, a design in a free and somewhat Hispanized English Gothic, which in much of the detail shows a reversion to Romanesque", contemporary critic, Montgomery Schuyler, wrote with enthusiasm. Schuyler clearly admired Richardson's design highly too as he chose to dedicate a whole chapter of his book, American Architecture to the unsuccessful plans for the cathedral. Richardson whose Albany City Hall was just reaching completion, is said to have been very disappointed by the loss of the commission having submitted what Henry-Russell Hitchcock judges "the most elaborate design of his whole career," but he had apparently made little attempt to conform to the restrictions of the program.

After two other more prominent sites, one at the corner of State and Lark Streets and one on Washington Avenue, were ruled out as too expensive, Erastus Corning, whose iron works had produced the tracks for much of America's expanding railroad system, donated the land on the corner of Elk and Swan Streets for the cathedral. Construction began in slow and deliberate stages. The foundations were laid by a well-known firm from Worchester, Massachusetts, Norcross Brothers, in full expectation that they would eventually support the entire flamboyant structure on the drawing board.

Another builder, John Snaith, supervised by John Pellett, continued the first phase of construction which ended with the completion of the temporary structure in 1888. The second phase came between 1902 and 1904 with the completion of the choir due to a gift from an anonymous donor generally assumed, although never proven, to be J.P. Morgan, Sr. who was a personal friend of the energic Bishop Doane. Gibson came back to see that Albany builder, John Dwyer, followed through with the original design. By this time Gibson was a well-established architect who had had a hand in two other New York State Episcopal cathedrals, Rochester and Buffalo (where he redesigned interiors for St. Paul's after the 1888 fire) and whose hospitals, banks and hotels were built in New York City where he practiced. As a touching tribute to his first major U.S. project, Gibson gave to the Albany cathedral its great choir arch at the crossing.

This human element pervades the cathedral in the memorials given not only by wealthy and notable parishioners (the six nave windows bear the inscriptions of six of Albany's oldest families, Pruyn, Hun, Van Rensselaer, Van Vecten, Schuyler and Gansvoort), but by those who were directly involved in its construction. One pillar was given by John Snaith, one of the builders, in memory of his deceased children; and another inscribed "one generation shall praise thy works unto another" commemorates the remarkable services of Louis Hinton who is responsible almost single-handedly for the stone carvings on endless column capitals, archways and memorials} on the baptismal font, the altar and the pulpit. The "master carver" of the Great Western staircase of the State Capitol, Hinton was born in England. His father had worked on the Nelson Statue an Trafalgar Square, and the young Louis became an expert in ecclesiastical carving which led to his being chosen with 13 other craftsman to come to Ithaca, New York to work on a house for Ezra Cornell. Hinton's career took him to New York City where he worked on terraces and fountains of Central Park and also to Chicago after the great fire. With the Capitol commission in Albany, Hinton settled permanently there and taught his trade to Charles, his son, who often worked with him. Fascinated by horticulture, Hinton frequently designed the purely decorative carving himself using local plants he found on hikes, and the cathedral pillars illustrate this enormous variety of foliage. Described by Bishop Doane as "our Blessed Stone Cutter" Hinton was becoming increasingly deaf as he worked on All Saints, a final labor of love of his notable artistic career.

While enormous care went into the construction of the Cathedral at the turn of the century, the Diocese was negligent in the long-term planning for the site around it and failed to buy the adjacent lots on Washington Avenue and Elk Street before the State did. After a bitter, "last-ditch" battle between the Bishop and the Commissioner of Education, the State Education Building was constructed in 1911-1913 running as near to the cathedral as possible thereby diminishing the chances of its being embellished to the full extent of the original Gibson plan.

A virtually completed and magnificent interior by the accomplished architect, Robert Gibson, still stands encased in an unfinished shell of brick and stone. As it is, the Cathedral of All Saints is a monument to the ambitions and ideals of the Episcopal Church in the second half of the nineteenth century and an artistic record of the many talented craftsmen who contributed to the various phases of its construction.

Cathedral of All Saints Website

Building Description

Huge in scale and yet visibly restrained by a small lot where it is crowded by buildings which have subsequently surrounded it, All Saints Cathedral stands on the southeast corner of South Swan and Elk Streets, two minor and therefore, quiet streets in the heart of Albany. The rambling T-shaped State Education Building bounds the Cathedral on the south and east sides and cuts it of from the state government milieu around the State Capitol only one block away.

Still "unfinished" All Saints Cathedral, begun in 1884, is built on foundations measuring the full external dimensions of the original ambitious plan, 320' long, 130' wide across the transepts, 95' wide across the choir and choir aisles, and 75' wide across the nave and aisles. Even the foundations for two massive towers at the west end were laid to support 28,000 tons the weight of towers that have yet to be built.

As an intermediary stage in the construction of this enormous cathedral, architect Robert Gibson planned a "provisional building", a basic shell to enclose the huge space that would be gradually embellished to its final form. As of 1973 little of the exterior detail except at the east end has been attempted while the emphasis has been on the completion of the interior. With the exception of a modern west facade, completed in 1971, the cathedral is much as it was when Gibson described it in the 1905 Guidebook.

The provisional form of the building was devised to provide for immediate use the whole of the final floor space at a cost less than one-fifth of the completed building. This was accomplished by building the main walls, pillars and arches up to the first stage, about forty feet high and then closing in with a brick clerestory or small pointed windows; and a temporary, but presentable, roof of timber. All towers, porches and other external adornments were, of course, omitted for the time, and some of the walls were of bare brick.

The cathedral is laid out in a modified Greek cross plan with short transepts and squared ends. On the exterior the east end is the most complete, entirely finished in reddish-pink Potsdam stone and built to its full height in 1902-1904 with a steel and slate roof supported by flying buttresses. Clustered around a small cloister at the northeast corner of the cathedral is the oblong choir room and two vestry rooms while the Dean and Bishop's vestries are located at the southeast corner. A separate brick Chapter House also built in 1902 stands to the southeast of the cathedral in the shadow of the State Education Building.

On the interior, the nave is separated from two side aisles by a series of monumental pillars formed by clusters of engaged columns and measuring at their widest point seven feet in diameter. The architect's notes emphasize the rationale behind the relatively narrow side aisles. These are only intended as passages, not for additional seating, precluding the possibility of anyone being seated behind a pillar. The six stained glass windows along the nave are the work of a London firm, Burlisson and Grills, as well as those in the transepts. Sunlight comes in directly through the windows in the clerestory which are still filled with conventional glass. The windows in the choir clerestory, choir aisles, the vast east window and the north and south transept windows are all by Clayton and Bell of London. The north transept window is a reproduction of the Bishop's Eye at Lincoln Cathedral. The rose window at the west end is by John LaFarge of New York.

The nave aisles and transepts still have a temporary wood floor covered with linoleum, while that of the choir, sanctuary and two side chapels is paved with mosaic by Burke and Company of New York and London over permanent fireproof flooring of steel beams and brick arches. A delicate iron and brass rood-screen set on a scotch stone base divides the nave from the slightly narrower choir. The wooden choir and clergy stalls alone seat two hundred. Those with high carved backs in the rear were salvaged from a demolished church in Bruges. They bear the date 1655 and are said to have been carved by Belgian monks. Behind the altar, the poly-chrome rerodos by Robert Robbins of New York has a series of niches filled gradually over the years with sculpture.