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The original work on the cathedral stopped in December 1941 because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But Architect Ralph Adams Cram left plans for the towers, which Bambridge now consults in a dungeon-like room under the bishop's office. "It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle," he explains, pottering around in a pair of tartan carpet slippers. Bambridge makes large drawings of the more complicated bits—perpendicular tracery, buttresses, gables, turrets and pinnacles. From the blueprints, he designs each stone individually on a numbered job card marked with height, width, length. There is also a scale drawing to show the apprentice stonecutter what the finished stone should look like. "To be a good mason you must have an eye for surfaces," says Bambridge. "You must visualize the finished job before you start, so when you drop down into the stone with your chisel, you know where you are headed. Keep your elbow tucked tightly to your side. Don't tap the stone like a chicken. Be authoritative. Strike the chisel forcefully with regular beat. I was careful to pick people who are not discouraged by cold hands and feet."
The yard where the stonework is done has a machine shop and "banking shop." First, four apprentices cut ten-ton blocks of Indiana limestone into manageable pieces with a frame saw two stories high. The resulting slabs are sliced into smaller pieces, called stones, with circular saws that have diamond cutting edges. Then all the stones go to the banking shop, where apprentices, working at waist-high tables, shape them into basic cathedral building blocks (ashlars), cornerstones (quoins) and structural supports (pier stones).
The Bambridge work gang is no ordinary group of hardhats. Explains Poni Baptiste, 28, a black sculptor from nearby Harlem: "For those of us in the valley, the cathedral was the castle on the hill. I saw my friends killed by overdoses and by the cops. I wanted to be involved in social art. I love coming here. I can't leave any stone unresolved." Like medieval apprentices, Poni's fellow workers range in age from 20 to 35. Most came from the ghetto and have some interest in art. A few gave up good jobs to join the project. To work so hard for $7.50 an hour with wife and children to support, or parents, is itself an inspired commitment. Like the man who chose them, they all have a touch of grace and gentleness, a lust for stone, an eye for eternity.
"What fascinates me," says Ruben Gibson, 32, a black from The Bronx, "is when we lay the stone for the cathedral the same way it comes from the ground, the grain horizontal. St. John the Divine is really a gray mountain." Gibson is foreman of the machine shop. He supervises the lifting of the big limestone slabs from the trucks. Then with chalk he diagrams each block with the outlines of the dozen or more stones that must be cut from it. "The great trick is not to waste any. They are very expensive and they cost as much to ship as to buy. We have to squeeze out every inch." Gibson spent two years in The Bronx as a monk in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Inside the cathedral, he will tell you, he soars beyond the "furthest reaches of space."