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

Progress and Setbacks

Simultaneous with the grand-scale landscaping work in Branch Brook Park, contractors began readying the cathedral site in early 1898. In late spring, a firm led by Peter Boyle, from a family of well-regarded builders in nearby Kearny, constructed the foundations, subsurface bearing walls, and the underground footings for the cathedral’s structural columns . An earlier press notice, almost certainly produced by O’Rourke, told Newarkers what was intended: “The substratum of the site will be of gray sandstone, and foundation walls and piers will be level in solid rock.”1 Early the next year, Boyle’s laborers added to the foundation walls of brownstone, bringing them to the height of the water table. The record of this early phase suggests that work moved ahead with quiet eªciency. The Sunday Call soon claimed confidently, “The foundation has been carefully and substantially laid.”2 Laying of the Cornerstone The time had come for the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone. It was scheduled for Sunday, June 11, 1899, and was to be preceded by a citywide parade. Early on that afternoon, and by the train-car-full, marchers and spectators arrived from Essex, Bergen, Union, Passaic, Morris, and Sussex counties, representatives from virtually every parish in the diocese. As special trains from Hudson County arrived at the Centre Street Station, they were greeted by the bells of Saint John’s Church, chiming national airs and the sturdy tune of the unoªcial American Catholic anthem, “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.” Vying with each other in turnout and deportment 13 Progress and Setbacks 116 and led by the colorful banners of their allegiances came contingents of the Knights of Columbus, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the German Parochial Association, the Catholic Benevolent League, Saint Patrick’s Alliance , the Sons of Italy, and exuberant youth groups. Some were dressed in uniforms, many donned sashes and badges, all were in their Sunday best More than a dozen bands marched—Beck’s, McLaughlin’s, Holding’s, Saint Alfonso’s, Drake’s Elizabeth, Clementis, Washington, Larrett’s Military , Alessio’s Twenty-second Regiment, the American Fife and Drum Corps, the Imperial Fife and Drum Corps, and the Italian National. They played favorite marches and national airs, which in turn-of-the-century Newark meant American, Irish, German, and Italian melodies. Fifty, even twenty-five years earlier, such a demonstration would have disgruntled many Newarkers, but those bothered by the prospect of congested streets, packed trolleys. and noisy band music—all for the gratification of Catholics—held their tongues. The line of march, more than fifteen thousand men—and they were all men (as in virtually every aspect of this history of building a cathedral in Newark, women were spectators)—was watched and cheered along a gently rising route of the city’s wide streets and ended at the construction site, where the shoulder-high granite walls foretold the enormous scale of the future cathedral.3 There, a vast crowd swarmed over the entire site. Estimated by some to be one hundred thousand people, by others twenty-five thousand, the police estimate of fifty thousand was probably the most accurate . Even this populist turnout had a privileged class, and it was seated on 350 chairs upon a covered platform erected over the future apse: priests and monsignors; bishops; mothers superior from the orders serving diocesan schools and institutions, wearing their veils and wimples and scapulars; and the local civic and Catholic elite. Across Ridge Street, spectators found their way into a new high school building, known as Barringer High, and watched from atop the roof and windows facing the site. Nickols’s full band, the city’s best, struck up arrangements of a march from Tannhauser, movements from Mozart’s “Twelfth Mass,” Mendelssohn’s “Priest’s March” from Athalia, and Haydn’s “The Heavens Are Telling,” interspersed with Bach and Rossini. When the bell of the little Church of the Sacred Heart rang three times, signaling the start of the ceremony, a procession emerged from it: crossbearer , robed acolytes carrying a vessels Wlled with holy water and incense, surpliced priests, prelates wearing pectoral crosses, and, finally, with miter Progress and Setbacks 117 and crosier, diminutive Bishop Wigger. An advance guard of police on horseback forged a path for the cortege through the dense crowd. As the throng joined in “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” the bishop blessed the cornerstone, inscribed...