CultureNOW - Cathedral of the Holy Cross: Peter Vanderwarker

Cathedral of the Holy Cross

There are no podcasts available.

Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"For many Bostonians, the funeral of a cardinal is one of the memorable public events of a lifetime. The older of these two photos depicts the funeral of Cardinal William Henry O’Connell, archbishop of
Boston, held in April 1944 at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Washington Street in the South End. The new photo, made from nearly the same viewpoint in 1989, shows a less somber event: the ordination of a priest.

In the intervening years, the old Washington El has been tom down, replaced by the underground Orange Line on a somewhat different alignment. No longer does the cathedral seem to be trapped behind a huge iron fence. The clumsy wood rail and ramp in the foreground of the new photo is a graceless solution to the need for access for the disabled.

Across Washington, the buildings, rather characterless to begin with, haven’t changed much. One has been cut down from five to two stories, and another appears to have been demolished for a single-story replacement – although this, too, may be a case of only a top having been removed. Chopping tops was a frequent response by Boston landlords, in the depressed 1940s and ‘50s, to the problem of taxable but unrentable upper floors.

Holy Cross Cathedral is a rather sad story architecturally. Designed in the Gothic style by Patrick Keeley and finished in 1875, it was enormously ambitious, as big as Westminster Abbey in London; But it was sited in a South End that failed to boom as expected. Soon the cathedral, intended as a major, central Boston monument, was stranded in a rarely visited backwater of the city. Its spires were never finished, its interior never fully decorated. And its even coat of dark Roxbury puddingstone looks, on so big a building, very grim.

But cathedrals live long. If the even bigger St. John’s in New York is now finally on the way to completion, perhaps Holy Cross too will undergo a brightening and finishing someday."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Here's the Church: Looking Anew at Holy Cross," Boston Globe, 1989

map not available at this time.

Location

Washington Street & Monsignor Reynold Way
Boston, MA 02118
United States

Nearby Items

Historic Medallions, Washington Street Corridor, Boston		526 feet
Boston Historic Murals		526 feet
Washington Street at Waltham Street		948 feet
Betances Mural		0.3 miles
Tremont Street at Clarendon Street		0.3 miles
Cyclorama		0.4 miles
Atelier 505		0.5 miles