During a decade as a Cathedral Guide, I spent many happy hours in the Diocesan archives at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, so I was curious how much Stuff I Didn’t Know this book could tell me. It told me plenty. For instance, on January 1, 1892, the first services on Cathedral grounds were held in the Ithiel Town House, the building south of the Great Crossing, which was the former Leaks and Watts Orphan Asylum when the Cathedral bought the property in the 1870s. And the Laymen's Club was founded on March 28, 1908 in the Tiffany Chapel in the Cathedral undercroft, which was later disassembled and is now reassembled in the The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Fla. The book is packed with fascinating tidbits like these, and the narrative is enlivened with occasional poems and crisp illustrations. The text is also rigorously documented with a staggering number of primary and published sources--a rich trove for further research for those souls, like myself, captivated by cathedrals.
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