North Porch Begun

Spreading a blob of mortar with a silver trowel, tapping lightly a great block of white limestone, Mrs. Herbert Hoover announced last week: "On behalf of the National Women's Committee of the Washington Cathedral, I declare that the first stone of the North Porch is duly and truly laid. May God bless and prosper the work of our hands upon us." The North Porch thus consecrated is the gift of U. S. womanhood to the nation's Westminster Abbey: the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, abuilding these many years on Mt. St. Alban, 400 ft. above the city of Washington. Less pretentious and less costly than Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it will nevertheless with 71,000 square feet of floor space exceed in area the famed cathedrals of Notre-Dame de Paris, Rheims, Cologne, Canterbury and Westminster Abbey. Units of its Gothic, cruciform plan already completed are the apse and choir (top of the cross), the entire foundations, the crypt of the nave, three crypt chapels, a Children's Chapel. Now being constructed are the two arms of the cross: the North and South transepts. To complete these in time for the bicentenary celebration next year of the birth of George Washington is the object of the Washington Cathedral's National Committee.* The Women's Committee, formed last November with Mrs. William Adams Brown as its active chairman, busies itself with getting subscriptions--from male and female alike-- to the National Cathedral Association, which now has 10,000 annual contributors. Last week the association reported 3,145 new members in the last twelvemonth and $82,183 in donations./- Planned in 1891, chartered in 1893, the Cathedral was begun in 1907. Its ultimate cost will be some $14,000,000.

* Chairman: Gen. John Joseph Pershing. Executive chairman: onetime U. S. Senator George Wharton Pepper. Treasurer: U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew William Mellon. Other committeemen: Bishop of Washington James Edward Freeman, Assistant Secretary of War Frederick Trubee Uavison, Under Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Livingston Mills, Assistant Secretary of State William Richards Castle Jr., Canon Anson Phelps Stokes, etc., etc. /- The cathedral received $250,000 from the will of the late Banker George Fisher Baker, filed last week (see p. 33).

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