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When Gaudi, by then a shabby, white-bearded old man of 74, was run down and killed by a Barcelona streetcar, only one of the twelve spires and a fraction of the rest of the sprawling building was completed. Disciples faithfully carried on the work, added three additional spires. Once, during the Spanish civil war, an anticlerical mob tried to destroy the building, but for all its look of aery fantasy, they could not budge a stone or dislodge a single ornament.
Money to carry on is coming in again. The fund-raising campaign has already started a healthy flow of donations, and a series of commemorative stamps will be issued to raise more. But nobody in
Barcelona expects the Church of the Holy Family to be finished soon. To complete it as Gaudi planned it, his friends estimate, will take $25 million, perhaps 50 years more of careful work.