Washington's Gothic cathedral took 83 years, from Roosevelt to Bush
Theodore Roosevelt watched its foundation stone go down in 1907; George H. W. Bush attended its completion in 1990, on the same September date. The National Cathedral sits on the highest ground in Washington, and hidden inside its first stone is a small rock cut from the fields around Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.
Pierre L'Enfant's 1792 plan for the capital set aside ground for a non-denominational great church for national purposes, but Alexander Hamilton struck it out, and the National Portrait Gallery now stands on that spot. A century later Episcopalians took up the idea. Congress chartered their cathedral foundation on 6 January 1893, and Bishop Henry Yates Satterlee picked Mount Saint Alban in 1896: a wooded hill roughly 400 feet above the Potomac, northwest of the centre, where he rightly expected the city to grow. He wanted a church that stood above politics and commerce. Phoebe Hearst's gift for a girls' school helped pay for the land.
Style was fiercely argued, with some on the chapter preferring Renaissance forms, before Satterlee's Decorated Gothic won on 21 May 1906. He hired British architect George Frederick Bodley, with Henry Vaughan supervising and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. planning the grounds. Bodley died in 1907, Vaughan in 1917, and war halted work. Afterwards the Boston firm Frohman, Robb and Little took over. Philip Hubert Frohman, who had designed a working house at 14, enlarged the west front and added the carillon stage of the tower; when Ralph Adams Cram, brought in to supervise, demanded too many changes, Frohman persuaded the chapter to dismiss him.
Satterlee loved symbolism. The foundation stone laid on Michaelmas, 29 September 1907, joined a Bethlehem stone of about two kilograms, carved with a line from the Gospel of John, to a much bigger American granite block. He refused to bury the customary time-capsule deposits, arguing they implied doubt that the building would last. Earlier, a Celtic Peace Cross raised in 1898, with President McKinley speaking, marked peace with Spain after the Spanish-American War.
The result, modelled closely on late fourteenth-century English Gothic, is the second-largest church in the United States and the seat of the Episcopal Church's presiding bishop. More than 270,000 people visit each year, architects ranked it third on a 2007 list of America's favourite buildings, and repairs from the 2011 earthquake were still under way in 2024.
Source: Washington National Cathedral
