Cathedral of the Holy Cross: The Largest Catholic Church in New England

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Irish had remade Boston. Famine ships had deposited tens of thousands of Catholic immigrants into a city that had been Protestant since its founding, and the churches that served them could not keep pace. The old cathedral near Franklin Street was hopelessly overcrowded. The Archdiocese of Boston decided to build something commensurate with what the community had become.

Construction on the Cathedral of the Holy Cross began in eighteen sixty-six on Washington Street in the South End, on what had been the site of a municipal almshouse. The architect was Patrick Keely, an Irish-born designer who would ultimately build more Catholic churches in America than any other architect in history, over six hundred in total. For Boston's cathedral, he chose the Gothic Revival style, which was then the dominant vocabulary for serious religious architecture in the English-speaking world.

The building was dedicated in eighteen seventy-five. At three hundred sixty-four feet in length and ninety feet wide, it was for decades the largest Roman Catholic church in New England, a title later passed to Hartford's Cathedral of Saint Joseph, and it remains one of the largest Catholic churches in the country. The exterior is faced with Roxbury puddingstone, a local conglomerate with a rough, spotted texture that weathers to shades of brown and gray. Inside, the nave rises one hundred twenty feet, and the Hook and Hastings pipe organ installed at the dedication in eighteen seventy-five, with one hundred one ranks across three manuals, still plays.

The cathedral was built in a neighborhood that was then home to working-class Irish and German immigrants. Over the following decades the South End changed around it. Yankee families left, African American residents moved in, later waves of immigrants arrived. The cathedral stayed, a fixed point in a shifting city, its puddingstone walls growing darker with each generation of Boston winters.