SSOH Tour: The Cathedral of All Saints

62 South Swan Street,Albany NY 12210

23 July, 2022

Description

The Cathedral of All Saints was the first Episcopal cathedral in America to be conceived and built on the English model of church, hospital, convent and school. The brainchild of William Croswell Doane (1832-1914), first Bishop of Albany, the Cathedral was intended to recreate and literally imitate its English prototypes right down to the ancient pavements and stones. The Cathedral was well known even before it was built as a result of publicity surrounding the design competition in 1882 that pitted America's greatest living architect at the time, Henry Hobson Richardson, against a relatively unknown 29 year old British architect newly arrived in Albany. Richardson's impressive Romanesque Revival design garnered much favorable attention from the architectural press of the day, but it was the younger and less experienced architect Robert Wilson Gibson, whose design closely adhered to traditional Gothic architecture, who was ultimately selected to design the cathedral. Gibson, himself a disciple of Richardson, won the commission largely because his design responded closely to the desire of Bishop Doane that the building be "instantly ancient" in design.