National Register Listing

Cathedral of All Saints

S. Swan St., Albany, NY

The most ambitious plan for an Episcopal cathedral of its day, the unfinished century-old Cathedral of All Saints was nurtured throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Albany's great families--the Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Pruyns, and Cornings--and represents the advent of the successful career of an architect, Robert Gibson, and the final chapter in the fruitful life of master stone carver, Louis J. Hinton.

Beginning with the influence of the Oxford Movement in Great Britain, a new interest in absorbing Catholic ideals and rituals permeated the Episcopalian Church in mid-19th century America. One outgrowth of this theological movement was the conviction that American dioceses were too large, and consequently that the Bishop was often a combination of "an administrator and a confirming machine." In theory, every large city should have a bishop; and so as part of a national trend, the Diocese of New York was subdivided into five dioceses between 1866 and 1868. Existing parish churches such as St. Paul's in Buffalo and St. Peter's in Albany were adapted for cathedral needs, but the idea of actually building a cathedral was not contemplated at first. Then in 1876, the Long Island Diocese was endowed with a memorial gift to construct a cathedral. It was 190' long when completed in 1883, the year that a site was secured for a cathedral at Albany, and Gibson's plans for a 320' foot structure were accepted. Later to be outdone in size by St. John the Divine in New York City (begun 1892), Washington Cathedral (1907), and San Francisco (1910), All Saints in Albany was one of the first Episcopal cathedrals in the U.s. to be conceived on the scale of its European counterparts.

Its construction was heralded by a highly publicized competition between H. H. Richardson and Robert Gibson for the cathedral's commission, and it drew even more attention when the comparatively unknown, and untried 29-year-old Englishman, Gibson, was chosen over Richardson. "About the most important church erected since Trinity (Boston) is the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral in Albany, by R. W. Gibson, a design in a free and somewhat Hispanized English Gothic, which in much of the detail, shows a reversion to Romanesque", contemporary critic, Montgomery Schuyler, wrote with enthusiasm. Schuyler clearly admired Richardson's design highly too as he chose to dedicate a whole chapter of his book, American Architecture to the unsuccessful plans for the cathedral. Richardson whose Albany City Hall was just reaching completion is said to have been very disappointed by the loss of the commission having submitted what Henry-Russell Hitchcock judges "the most elaborate design of his whole career,"3 but he had apparently made little attempt to conform to the restrictions of the program.

After two other more prominent sites, one at the corner of State and Lark Streets and one on Wahington Avenue were ruled out as too expensive, Erastus Corning, whose iron works had produced the tracks for much of America's expanding railroad system, donated the land on the corner of Elk and Swan Streets for the cathedral. Construction began in slow and deliberate stages. The foundations were laid by a well-known firm from Worchester, Massachusetts, Noncross Brothers, in full expectation that they would eventually support the entire flamboyant structure on the drawing board. Another builder, John Snaith, supervised by John Pellett, continued the first phase of construction which ended with the completion of the temporary structure in 1888. The second phase came between 1902 and 1904 with the completion of the choir due to a gift from an anonymous donor generally assumed, although never proven, to be J. P. Morgan, Sr. who was a personal friend of the energic Bishop Doane. Gibson came back to see that Albany builder, John Dwyer, followed through with the original design. By this time Gibson was a well-established architect who had had a hand in two other New York State Episcopal cathedrals--Rochester and Buffalo (where he redesigned interiors for St. Paul's after the 1888 fire) and whose hospitals, banks, and hotels were built in New York City where he practiced. As a touching tribute to his first major U.S. project, Gibson gave to the Albany cathedral its great choir arch at the crossing.

This human element pervades the cathedral in the memorials given not only by wealthy and notable parishioners (the six nave windows bear the inscriptions of six of Albany's oldest families-- Pruyn, Hun, Van Rensselaer, Van Vecten, Schuyler and Gansvoort), but by those who were directly involved in its construction. One pillar was given by John Snaith, one of the builders, in memory of his deceased children; and another inscribed "one generation shall praise thy works unto another" commemorates the remarkable services of Louis Hinton who is responsible almost single-handedly for the stone carvings on endless column capitals, archways and memorials on the baptismal font, the altar and the pulpit. The "master carver" of the Great Western staircase of the State Capitol, Hintan was born in England. His father had worked on the Nelson Statue in Trafalgar Square, and the young Louis became an expert in ecclesiastical carving which led to his being chosen with 13 other craftsmen to come to Ithaca, New York to work on a house for Ezra Cornell.

Hintan's career took him to New York City where he worked on terraces and fountains of Central Park and also to Chicago after the great fire. With the Capitol commission in Albany, Hinton settled permanently there and taught his trade to Charles, his son, who often worked with him. Fascinated by horticulture, Hinton frequently designed the purely decorative Carving himself using local plants he found on hikes, and the cathedral pillars illustrate this enormous variety of foliage. Described by Bishop Doane as "our Blessed Stone Cutter" Hinton was becoming increasingly deaf as he worked on All Saints, the final labor of love of his notable artistic career.

While enormous care went into the construction of the Cathedral at the turn of the century, the Diocese was negligent in the long-term planning for the site around it and failed to buy the adjacent lots on Washington Avenue and Elk Street before the State did. After a bitter, "last-ditch" battle between the Bishop and the Commissioner of Education, the State Education Building was constructed in 1911-1913 running as near to the cathedral as possible thereby diminishing the chances of its being embellished to the full extent of the original Gibson plan.

A virtually completed and magnificent interior by the accomplished architect, Robert Gibson, still stands encased in an unfinished shell of brick and stone. As it is, the Cathedral of All Saints is a monument to the ambitions and ideals of the Episcopal Church in the second half of the nineteenth century and an artistic record of the many talented craftsmen who contributed to the various phases of its construction.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1974.