[URBAN NOTE] On condos at St. John the Divine, New York City

[rfmcdonald]

New York magazine's Justin Davidson blogged about how the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, an Anglican cathedral in Manhattan I'd visited in 2012, is selling off land to developers for condos. Davidson suggests, not without reason, that the city government should intervene to prevent the Cathedral's majesty from being overwhelmed by ill-judged condo architecture.

In New York, even the most majestic churches can’t dominate the skyline for long. Trinity Church, whose spire was once a sailors’ beacon, now crouches amid the skyscrapers of Wall Street, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral is practically a dwarf in midtown. At street level, however, both those churches — and just about all the world’s great cathedrals — have the elbow room to assert their sanctity: a graveyard, a plaza, a perimeter of streets. St. John the Divine has a lovely garden on one side, but on the other, it will soon have neighbors peeping through the stained glass.

Here we have a classic real-estate situation being handled with the usual narrow-bore clumsiness. Neighbors and preservationists growl, the church stonewalls, and because the developer’s not asking for any zoning concessions, the city declines to get involved. Meanwhile, crews rip out trees and level the site, making way for more mediocre architecture. There’s a better way: negotiate. What matters most to the cathedral’s majesty is its presence on the street, not the height of its still-nonexistent central tower.

Instead of two short towers, one tall tower set back from the church is Davidson's recommendation. Can the church wait so long for funds, given what Davidson acknowledges would be a lengthy design and review process?

I have photos here of the church and of its National AIDS Memorial.