By Jared Ebersole in Video 31 Jul 2026

Why America's Largest Cathedral Is Still Unfinished

St. John the Divine began with a Romanesque-Byzantine plan, changed to Gothic after construction started, and remains unfinished more than a century later.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is one of the largest churches in the world.

It is also unfinished.

The incomplete towers and transepts are not the result of one abandoned plan. They record more than a century of changes in architecture, money, geology, war, labor, and what New York needed the building to become.

Where it is

1047 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10025

The cathedral's trustees selected George Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge through an architectural competition in 1891. Their winning scheme mixed Romanesque, Byzantine, and Gothic ideas into a monumental complex on Morningside Heights.

Construction began at the eastern end in 1892–93.

Almost immediately, the ground resisted. Excavation encountered soft rock and underground springs rather than the simple, solid foundation conditions builders hoped to find. Costs rose. Work moved slowly. Enormous granite columns fractured and had to be rethought.

Then George Heins died in 1907.

After a dispute with LaFarge and a change in architectural leadership, the cathedral hired Ralph Adams Cram, one of the country's leading Gothic Revival architects. Cram wanted to transform the project into a more unified French Gothic cathedral.

But he did not receive an empty site.

The eastern portion and crossing already reflected the earlier Romanesque-Byzantine design. Its foundations, arches, chapels, and immense central crossing established dimensions the new Gothic nave had to meet.

That forced a compromise into the structure.

Gothic cathedrals use pointed arches, ribbed vaults, piers, and buttressing to direct enormous stone loads down and outward. Their visual effect depends on height and slenderness. St. John's existing crossing was exceptionally broad, roughly 100 feet square, while a conventional Gothic nave would have been far narrower.

Cram designed an unusually wide nave to bridge those two geometries. Rows of freestanding columns divide the interior into multiple vertical zones, producing a space that combines the height of a Gothic basilica with the breadth demanded by the structure already in place.

The building changed style without starting over.

Above the crossing is another clue. The great Guastavino tile dome looks permanent, but it was installed as a temporary covering. The plan anticipated transepts and a massive tower above the crossing. Those pieces were never completed, so the temporary dome became one of the cathedral's defining interior features.

Architecture was only part of the delay.

St. John was built through philanthropy and donations, not a royal treasury. Stone construction required skilled labor, long schedules, and continual fundraising. World War I interrupted work. Construction resumed and the nave was eventually opened, but the attack on Pearl Harbor came only days after the cathedral's 1941 dedication ceremonies. World War II stopped major construction again.

Work returned in the 1980s with a stone-yard program that trained local residents in traditional masonry. Builders began raising the south tower of the west front. Funding ran out in the early 1990s, and that campaign stopped too.

A major fire in 2001 shifted attention from expansion to restoration. Maintaining the vast structure that already exists remains an enormous and recurring task.

Calling the cathedral unfinished can make it sound unused. The opposite is true.

St. John is an active Episcopal cathedral, a site for worship, music, public events, exhibitions, education, and social programs. Its scale allows it to act as a civic room for the city as well as a church.

There is no practical requirement that every line of the historic drawings eventually be built. Completing towers and transepts today would require vast funding, new engineering, regulatory review, and a decision that expansion matters more than maintaining the existing landmark and supporting its work.

That makes “unfinished” less a deadline than a condition.

The cathedral contains pieces of several New Yorks: the city that wanted a European-scale monument, the engineers who fought springs and weak stone, the architects who changed styles mid-construction, the workers who carved its masonry, and the institution that learned to use a building before it was complete.

St. John the Divine has spent more than 130 years under construction.

Its incompleteness is no longer separate from its history. It is the part that ties every era together.