Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out about the return of pipe organs that went silent for five years after fires broke out at their cathedrals. We’ll also look at a mayoral candidate’s proposal for city-owned grocery stores.
Within a day of each other in April 2019, fires broke out in two cathedrals, one in Paris, the other in Manhattan.
The world gasped as the spire fell and two-thirds of the roof was destroyed at Notre-Dame on April 15. The fire at St. John the Divine a day earlier was not on the same scale, filling the 124-foot-high nave with smoke but doing far less damage than a devastating blaze did there 18 years earlier.
The huge pipe organs in both cathedrals went silent. At St. John the Divine, where the fire started in a crypt in the basement, soot had been sucked into the organ pipes — some more than half the length of some subway cars, others no bigger than a pencil.
The world heard both instruments again for the first time in the same week: The organ at Notre-Dame was played in the reopening service last Saturday, an emotional ceremony showcasing a reconstruction that cost almost $800 million. The organ at St. John the Divine took part in a Sunday service six days earlier.
“It’s quite something, the coincidence,” Daniel Ficarri, associate director of music and an organist at the cathedral, said, adding that no one could have imagined the two fires or the return of the two instruments at almost the same time. “It’s amazing for the organ world and beyond.”
As Ficarri noted, the organ at Notre-Dame is one of the most famous in the world. The one at St. John the Divine, completed in 1911, “is one of the best examples of American organ-building that we have,” he said. The organ will be heard again on Saturday in “The Joy of Christmas: Gloria in Excelsis,” the cathedral’s annual holiday concert, with carols and works like “Christmas Cantata” by Daniel Pinkham.
Kent Tritle, director of cathedral music and organist at St. John the Divine, said the organ was quickly switched off on that Palm Sunday five years ago. But even though there were protective screens designed to keep “detritus” from being sucked into the pipes, the soot was overwhelming.
The project to bring the organ back to life was delayed until an insurance settlement was worked out. Then the instrument was not rebuilt but cleaned, Tritle said. It was rebuilt in the early aughts after a larger fire that apparently started in the gift shop. The flames gutted the north transept, and smoke blackened much of the 601-foot-long sanctuary. Two Italian tapestries depicting the life of Christ, scenes in a 12-part series from the 17th century, were also damaged.
That time, all 8,500 organ pipes were taken out and shipped to Missouri. This time, only about 7,000 needed that kind of treatment. The console — with the keyboards, pedals and knoblike drawstops — did not have to be lifted out through one of the granite-and-limestone archways, as it was before. (The tapestries were cleaned and restored in the early 2000s.)
Organs are often about history as well as music, and the one at St. John the Divine was created by one of the great names in organ-building in the 20th century, Ernest M. Skinner. His organs could “roar like elephants or warble as sweetly as nightingales,” Craig R. Whitney wrote in “All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters,” a history of instruments and the people who build them.
Skinner — who also built organs at Symphony Hall in Boston, at Severance Hall in Cleveland and at the Princeton University Chapel in Princeton, N.J. — invented a stop for the organ at St. John the Divine. Whitney wrote that the stop had “the force and volume” of instruments Skinner had heard on a trip to England.
Thunderous though it already was, the instrument at St. John the Divine was enlarged in the 1950s. The organ has more than 8,000 pipes, but not all of them were playable for the Dec. 1 service, Ficarri said. Many are still being tuned, but the organ sounds like itself again.
“We’ve got the firepower,” Ficarri said. “The organ now again has the ability to reach the back western wall” — the wall at the opposite end of the cathedral. In the choir stalls just beneath the pipes, “you literally feel the wood shaking under your feet.”
Weather
Brace for a chilly day with a sunny sky and high near 35. Tonight, the sky will be mostly clear, with a low around 24.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect through Dec. 25 (Christmas Day). Today is also a Gridlock Alert Day.
The latest Metro news
Commuting
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The fate of congestion pricing: The toll program is scheduled to start on Jan. 5, but it could unravel at the last minute because of legal challenges, including from the State of New Jersey, the Staten Island borough president and the United Federation of Teachers.
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New Jersey’s new “train daddy”: Gov. Philip Murphy picked Kris Kolluri as the new chief executive of New Jersey Transit. Until recently Kolluri led the project to build a $16 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan.
Other news
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Meeting with Trump’s “border czar”: Mayor Eric Adams had his first sit-down meeting with President-elect Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, Thomas Homan, as the city braces for the new administration’s immigration crackdown.
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To scrub or not to scrub: Social media companies were faced with deciding whether to scrub the digital footprint of Luigi Mangione after his arrest in the murder of a health insurance executive on a Manhattan street. Many of Mangione’s accounts were scrubbed or made inaccessible to the public.
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” the Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim discusses life after Bashar al-Assad; Emma Goldberg, a New York Times business reporter, discusses security for executives; and Austyn Gaffney, a climate reporter for The Times, looks at a new approach to climate activism. The program airs at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. [CUNY TV].
Should the city get into the grocery business?
New York City operates ferry boats, buildings and more than 23,000 cars, trucks and buses. Zohran Mamdani wants to add five grocery stores to that list, one in each borough.
Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist who is running for mayor, says that municipally owned stores could bring down costs. My colleague Emma Fitzsimmons writes that the idea has gained momentum elsewhere as a way to address so-called food deserts, neighborhoods where supermarkets are scarce. City-owned grocery stores are in the planning stage in Atlanta and Chicago — and are already open in Kansas and Wisconsin.
Mamdani is hoping to capitalize on anxiety about inflation and the high cost of everyday goods. Roughly 43 percent of New York voters named cost of living as their top concern for state lawmakers — more than crime or immigration, according to a Siena College poll this week — and Mamdani said he was not surprised that voters had drifted to the Republican Party.
“If we want to bring these New Yorkers back to the Democratic Party, then we have to show them that we’re serious about making their life more affordable,” said Mamdani, who also wants to make buses free and to halt increases on rent-stabilized apartments.
Mayor Adams, who is running for a second term while facing a federal corruption trial in April, has focused on affordability as a campaign theme. He recently rolled out proposals and announcements designed to make living in the city more manageable, including a proposed tax cut for low-wage earners.
METROPOLITAN diary
Walk and talk
Dear Diary:
I was walking uptown in the rain from the East Village when a woman just in front of me slipped on a subway grate.
I managed to catch her just before she hit the ground. When she regained her balance, she thanked me, and we began to chat as we continued walking.
She told me about her work, her neighborhood and a few of the restaurants and bars where she hung out with friends.
I got the impression that she was in her late 20s or early 30s and that she was not able to tell that, under my umbrella and floppy hat, I was twice her age.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Connecticut,” I said. “I took the train from New Haven to help a friend get ready to move.”
“Oh,” she said.
I explained that I was headed to Amsterdam Avenue to meet two of my children for dinner.
“That sounds like fun,” she said.
“They’re lots of fun,” I said. “Well, here’s where I turn off. Thanks so much for keeping me company.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Thanks so much for keeping me upright.”
— Timothy Breslin
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post In New York and Paris, Church Organs Return to Life appeared first on New York Times.
