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

Boom and Bust Again

Newark, like other American cities, roared during 1920s, fueled by a zeitgeist of prosperity that grew stronger as the decade unfolded. Commercial plants multiplied and boomed. Retail operations, from the big department stores to store-front shops, grew unabated. It was an era when Newarkers came to have a choice of more than sixty live theaters and forty movie houses. In all, it evinced the materialism and secularism that had disquieted Monsignor Doane early in the century, which had increased unchecked. Prosperity, Inflation, Clever Substitutions The financial buoyancy of these years also restarted the cathedral project. This, in turn, brought fresh lessons about the complexity of economic forces: like everyone else, project leaders had to contend with war-induced inflation. Wincing on the part of both the clergy and laity at spiraling costs for cathedral construction prompted builder Edward Waldron to put them in perspective. He provided “then and now” statistics for the newspapers that any reader could grasp: When Sacred Heart was begun more than twenty years before, masons were paid 40 cents an hour but now demanded $1.25; a team of a horse and a man that cost $4 a day now was $12. At the start of construction, hoisting engineers had daily rates of $3.50, granite cutters $3, and granite setters $4. All commanded $10 now—for a workday that was two hours shorter (a shift attributable to changing societal norms and government laws born of the workers’ rights movement).1 The builder stressed that the problem was not only double and trebled labor 16 Boom and Bust Again 159 costs. Portland cement that had been bought for eighty-eight cents a barrel now cost more than three times that. All these facts and figures buttressed the case for an upward revision in fund-raising goals. Soon the cathedral facade’s three portals were planned. In developing their sculptural program, the diocese sought advice from an American agent of the Mayer studios in Munich, which Monsignor Doane had visited in the 1870s and which was long famous for its ecclesiastical arts. Themes related to the Sacred Heart were provided for the iconographic scheme for the main portals. The tower portals’ subject matter was treated as the towers themselves were named, one pertaining to Jesus and the other to Mary.2 Regrettably, the fusion of architecture and sculpture inherent in Newark’s High Gothic models was lost in these compositions. The underscaled and shallow reliefs pointed to a waning artistic vision that was foreshadowed by the decision to look outside for advice from abroad. The planners also began to consider the windows. The carving of stone tracery, with its curves and lobes and intersecting forms, was never expected to be cheap for such an array of window openings. But when the preferred contractor proposed to supply window and doorway tracery for a little over $1 million, everyone stood back. Lower estimates were produced, but these too reflected labor costs that had spiked sharply and did not mitigate the need for still greater funds to fill the tracery with stained glass. During discussions that left everyone dispirited, Ditmars brought an enticing alternative to the table. He suggested terra cotta be considered as a substitute for stone. Terra cotta, which means baked earth, is a clay-based material produced in molded forms and that is fired and glazed. In can closely approximate the color and texture of stone, and in the previous two decades, terra cotta’s popularity had spread. The building professions admired its structural strength, appearance, apparent stability, and relative a¤ordability. Because it is produced in molds, terra cotta was well suited to creating, in quantity, the geometric units that are assembled to form Gothic tracery. Told that the necessary terra cotta could be produced for one-fifth the cost of stone, the diocese welcomed the substitution and turned again to craftsmen at Rochette & Parzini for the clay models from which molds would be fashioned.3 The terra cotta was produced in a Woodbridge plant only fifteen miles south of Newark—a novel variation on Pugin’s theme of building with local materials. The increasingly complex project meant that Ditmars needed help in supervising o¤site progress. In a move that raised no eyebrows, he hired 160 Sacred Heart Cathedral Fred Metcalf, his former fellow arbitrator of the O’Rourke-Waldron dispute, to help inspect the terra cotta prototypes and work...