Church leaders and public officials, including New York’s two senators, hailed the occasion with sermons and speeches during a three-hour service filled with pageantry, dance and the visceral, booming chords of the church’s restored great organ, heard publicly for the first time since the fire.
But among the several thousand people who packed the cathedral on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Sunday, few could be more thankful than regular congregation members who endured the seven-year cleanup with a mix of patience and exasperation. Year after year, their worship services had been shoehorned behind partitions in different sections and corners of the church to accommodate the work in progress.
“In the beginning, the prayer books smelled of smoke and you’d sometimes sit there and a piece of soot would just float down from the ceiling,” said Sandra Schubert, a longtime member of the congregation of about 400 people.
Some with asthma stayed away.
But
most attended services in whichever part
of the cathedral the folding chairs had
been set up. “If you belong to a church,
that is your church,” said Marsha Ra, a
retired librarian who was an usher at
Sunday’s service. “It’s a community.”
Sunday’s service marked the first time since the fire that most had seen the entire 200-yard-long interior of the cathedral unobstructed by scaffolding or partition walls.
More than that, it was the first time many had ever seen details of the original workmanship of the church. Erected piecemeal between the turn of the century and 1941, the building interior, even before the fire, had acquired a sooty coating of urban plaque.
In that sense, the restoration was like a revelation.
“There is so much light!” said Sylvia Bellusci, a retired social worker who, until the fire, used to give guided tours of the cathedral. “The angels in the columns up there, you couldn’t see that before,” she said, pointing toward the bas-relief on the column capitals about 200 feet up. “The proportions of everything, it just seems so much more clear.”
Robert Holzmaier, chief of the New York Fire Department’s 11th Battalion, which helped to put out the six-alarm fire that erupted in the wiring of the cathedral’s gift shop on Dec. 18, 2001, two months after the 9/11 attacks, led a contingent of firefighters invited to participate in Sunday’s ceremony.
Most of the damage was caused by smoke, he said, and while efforts were made to limit harm to the cathedral’s stained-glass windows and great carved doors, the inch-deep water throughout the 123,000 square feet of floor space, and the soot covering tapestries and every inch of the stone interior, made the aftermath “a real bad mess.”
“You do not ever want a fire in your house,” Chief Holzmaier said.
The Very Rev. Dr. James A. Kowalski, dean of the cathedral, made the lengthy and painstaking restoration of that house the theme of his sermon, urging his listeners to bring faith and stamina to the many challenges facing the city, the nation and the world.
“Engagement,” he said — in the struggle for peace and social justice — “is the only expression of faith that honors God.”
St. John the Divine has long been positioned within the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church, which has been divided in recent years, along with the worldwide Anglican Communion, over the ordination of gay clergy and the celebration of same-sex unions.
The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman to be the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, gave a brief address, though neither she nor Reverend Kowalski referred in their remarks to the disputes roiling their denomination.
Sunday, it seemed, was for the celebration of a singular achievement of restoration.
At the beginning and the end of the service, a procession of clergy and acolytes made the circuit of the church interior, the minister in front swinging an incense pot, filling air that had once been choked by fiery smoke with a sweeter scent.
Along the way, they passed tapestries, statues, stained-glass windows, iron gates, stone walls — every spot of which had been cleaned by someone who found it covered in soot.
Tourists and others who did not have seats, or who had wandered in while passing by on Amsterdam Avenue, between 111th and 112th Streets, craned to take video and pictures of the procession as it passed the front doors, 601 feet straight back from the crucifix in the sanctuary.
Security guards kept them against the wall, cautioning them against using flashes.
Steven Moore, a pharmacy technician and jazz musician who was among the latecomers, waited until the service concluded and the cathedral was emptying before he found a seat about midway down on the center aisle.
He sat there, in his rain-drenched parka, and fixed his gaze on the stained-glass window high up in the apse. He said he was not a member of the church.
“I just come here because it’s my favorite building in New York,” he said. “The scale of this place. The way the sound travels. The light. It makes you aware of what’s important.”