The Washington Post
NEW YORK — A five-alarm fire damaged the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan on Tuesday, gutting the gift shop and severely damaging two priceless 17th-century tapestries at the largest church in the United States.
The cause had not yet been determined by evening.
Firefighters were called to the cathedral before 7 a.m. after a janitor smelled smoke. By the time they arrived, the gift shop had burst into flames. Within an hour the fire had grown into a fierce blaze that filled the cathedral with smoke and sent a gray plume rising above Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
"The whole thing was just a huge orange ball of flames," said Dorothy Pappadokas, who plays the cathedral organ and first noticed the fire from her bedroom window. "It was going up the height of the cathedral walls."
Early Tuesday afternoon, firemen were still climbing around the outside of the French Gothic structure and spraying out small pockets of fire. The smoke that had filled the nave was mostly cleared, and firemen had pumped out several inches of water flooding the church floor, said cathedral spokesman Gere Farrah.
The 150 stained glass windows, including the 40-foot Great Rose Window, appeared to be undamaged.
Workers had laid out the damaged tapestries on the cathedral floor and were attempting to assess damage. They are part of a set of 12 tapestries woven in the Vatican.
The cathedral, begun in 1892 and still under construction, is a major New York institution that has grown as a community center since the attacks on the World Trade Center. Located within a block of Columbia University and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, the church hosts a half million visitors a year.
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