Gothic Pride: The Story of Building a Great Cathedral in Newark

The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

Accounts of O’Rourke’s winning design were clear about the cathedral’s style. One called it “thirteenth-century Gothic Style” and another, more precisely, “continental Gothic of the thirteenth century.” The composition owed much to the High Gothic masterpieces of Chartres, Notre Dame, Rheims, and Amiens, but it equally called upon the Gothic of Pugin and his followers. It reflected Jeremiah’s forty-year career steeped in a mode that in later years was informed by new scholarship on medieval architecture and photography of original specimens. In overall proportions , Sacred Heart is closest to Chartres and Amiens, though its nave has only five bays, fewer than its principal models. Its abundant Gothic detailing also blended historic antecedents and O’Rourke’s personal manner. Arched window openings were filled with Gothic tracery from the period of its medieval models. The Rayonnant-style rose windows were set in arched rather than in circular openings, and they were placed over a row of lancets . The rose windows’ composition itself suggested a synthesis of the outstanding west windows of Chartres and Rheims. This French-derived arrangement also appeared in his plans for the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle in New York, influenced by Pugin and Ashlin’s Saint Colman’s Cathedral in Ireland. High in the main gable, O’Rourke placed a niche for a patronal statue, a favorite Pugin touch that he admired. At the design’s particularly inventive east-end, five chapels radiated from the chancel, with a deep Lady Chapel on the central axis to which a small cloister was attached that led to the bishop’s sacristy. The early newspaper accounts mentioned a red tile roof, though the 1906 rendering has 12 The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart 107 a raised-seam metal roof.1 A flèche marked the crossing, and the roof ridges over the chancel and the Lady Chapel were crowned with iron cresting ; their eastern ends terminated in small metal statues. These were restrained embellishments in a conservative design about which the architect said, “no expensive ornamentation has been indulged in other than is necessary to carry out the style selected.”2 O’Rourke’s construction plans included a limited use of steel, which in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was supplanting iron. He used it conservatively, in the flooring throughout and for the roof. Otherwise, Sacred Heart was a masonry structure whose vertical, load-bearing elements —walls and columns, for instance—were designed according to the established standards that had guided O’Rourke in the past—ones that he had articulated at a meeting of the American Institute of Architects the year before: “My practice is to construct the walls as if I had not steel or iron in them. Every building designed under my supervision in Washington , for the government, or in my private practice, will be found to stand that test, the walls when built show neither steel nor iron construction; this construction is added for additional rigidity and strength, but in case every post rusted out, the building will stand just the same, with a reduced but still suªcient factor of safety.”3 Towers Turrets at the corners of the transepts and pinnacles rising from nave buttresses, in the Anglo-Irish manner of the nineteenth century, created a vertical thrust that visually prepared for a pair of towers and spires of immense height. Given the dedications “Gesu” and the “Blessed Virgin Mary,” O’Rourke, in a gender-laden description, said that the taller Gesu tower “is distinguished by strength and dignity in treatment, the square plan developing into the octagon at the fifth stage,” and the smaller Mary tower, “is treated in a more elegant and graceful manner—the square plan developing into the octagon at the fourth stage.” The towers and spires, replete with tabernacles for statues and crocketing, were the design’s most unreserved gesture. They are traceable back to Pugin’s Saint Giles Church and to which O’Rourke looked when he designed Saint John’s Church in Orange. When Sacred Heart was started in 1898, the nationwide race to raise ever higher buildings was under way, yet Newark’s tallest structure stood at twelve stories. Sacred Heart’s spires, the tallest being the equivalent of 108 Sacred Heart Cathedral about a thirty-five-story building, would pierce the city’s skyline spectacularly . More than a matter of mere height, the...