Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, CT
In 1827, Ithiel Town designed Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Hartford, Connecticut. The church has gone through generations of revisions. Existing pews were replaced, but the original pew ends were reused, their last rows raised and pew back panels installed. Over the years, new painting and colorizing was effected, and lights, flooring, doors, and other elements were installed.
Rethinking the legacy
Then, in 2021, fully funded, on time, and on budget ($2M), Christ Church Cathedral stepped into the 21st century. As project architect Duo Dickinson describes, "We had to rethink the American tradition of the Episcopal church, where the richest congregation got the most outstanding structures. But today, what is the church's relevance as a space and a structure? This is a rethinking of legacy."
New stairs
Original stairs
The flexibility of the renovated space will help Christ Church serve a diverse constituency, from the arts to civic discourse, to community engagement activities for those who are housing- and food-insecure.
Residents of both coasts today are interested in buildings that will serve a function within their communities, Dickinson notes, spaces that are open to the needs and concerns of all. In Christ Church, Dickinson sought to both honor tradition and to create a spiritual space for community worship
In this vein of thinking, the following 10 components are part of the renovation and rebirth of Christ Church Cathedral:
1-Removing fixed pews
2-Ensuring handicap accessibility (new exterior central ramp and interior ramp)
3-Creating fully accessible bathrooms on the nave level
4-Inserting new steps and a celebratory ramp that meet code and carry the chancel space fully into the nave
5-Giving the altar its own level
6-Integration of new theatrical lighting
7-Simplifying the baptismal font site
8-Reusing pew ends and back panels to integrate storage and new bathrooms
9-Hiding air conditioning elements
10-Making extensive use of natural white oak, Connecticut’s state tree
Remade for the 21st century
Reuse of original pew ends
The renovations have created a space for the cathedral to embody its vocation as a resource for all people in the Cathedral Congregations, representatives across the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, in the city of Hartford, and the state of Connecticut report.
The flexibility of the renovated space will help Christ Church serve a diverse constituency, from the arts to civic discourse, to community engagement activities for those who are housing- and food-insecure. As cathedral representatives note about the transformation of the onetime highly traditional mainline church space, "This project has given the cathedral a remarkable opportunity to model active and adaptive ministry in the public square around issues of social justice, advocacy, and cultural advancement for underserved communities." The church's cathedral collaboration with Hartford Stage, Capital Community College, IQuilt Partnership, and other groups across the Greater Hartford Area will also help bring the community together as it seeks the welfare of its beloved city, across the state of Connecticut and beyond.
Christ Church Cathedral today
Looking back, moving forward
As Ian Douglas, outgoing Bishop Diocesan of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, notes, in the first millennium, cathedrals in England and all of Europe were originally missionary outposts. They were religious communities from which monks and missionaries set out into the wilderness, into the hinterlands, to be about God’s mission in the world. Over time, these monasteries became seats for bishops (the cathedra), places from which the bishop and others would go out to plant churches. Cathedrals, in this light, were fundamentally about the apostolic call to go, to be sent out in the great centrifugal Jesus movement in the world.
The limiting issue with the 20th century model of the cathedral in The Episcopal Church, according to Douglas, is that it reversed the direction of God’s action. Instead of cathedrals being places from which the faithful would go in that great centrifugal mission of God into the world, they became centers of power, privilege, and prestige to which people would be centripetally drawn.
Instead of "go," "go in the mission of God," cathedrals became a place of "come," "come and be drawn into the one, true church.”
