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Adult Education Forum NEXT Sunday Nov. 16: THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL: PHILADELPHIA’S LOST GOTHIC MASTERPIECE, 10am in Dixon House Library
Join us in the Dixon House library at 10am for this special adult education forum led by Tom Keels. Located at the intersection of Cathedral Road and Ridge Avenue in Andorra, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church stands like a slender sentinel in front of the Cathedral Village retirement community. Few people know that this sliver of a church is all that was ever constructed of what was meant to be the largest, grandest Gothic cathedral in the world, with soaring towers visible for miles. Based on an upcoming online article on Hidden City Philadelphia, “The Sunken Cathedral” traces the history of this forgotten project. Launched in the early 1900s, when Gilded Age Episcopalians were erecting grand cathedrals in New York, Washington, and elsewhere, the Protestant-Episcopal Cathedral Church of Christ was meant to be one of the grand structures lining the new Fairmount Parkway (today the Ben Franklin Parkway). During the Roaring Twenties, it was moved to then rural-Roxborough. Only the Lady Chapel (today’s St. Mary’s Church) had been constructed when the Great Depression forced suspension of the grand project. “The Sunken Cathedral” illustrates the intertwined religious and social aspirations of twentieth-century Episcopalians as they struggled to build the greatest house of worship in the world.
