BERLIN-NEW YORK CONNECTION: A LITTLE SECRET OF A BIG CATHEDRAL

The Riverside Cathedral (actually Church) seen from the Hudson River. Photo by BriYYZ via Wikipedia, Licence CC BY-SA 2.0.

Did you know that the main portal of a 1930 church built in Manhattan, NYC (in Morningside Heights) and paid for by - whom else? - John D. Rockefeller, has an interesting link to Berlin?

The said portal features relief figures of saints, philosophers and men of science: from Jesus’s followers to Euclid to Immanuel Kant, each of the archivolts (the arched bands of ornamental mouldings following the underside of the main arch) presents between 14 and 18 historic or religious characters.

Only one sticks out by being none - at least not at the time when the cathedral was completed. The man was neither religious nor historic: Albert Einstein found himself elevated and commemorated on the Riverside Church’s portal during his lifetime.

Headline in a September 1930 issue of the “New York Times”

Certainly flattered, but also slightly uneasy, Einstein - who at the time still lived in Berlin and his little summer house in Caputh near Potsdam - visited the church in winter 1930 on the way to Pasadena, California where he was to spend the following three semesters teaching and doing research.

Seeing himself fixed in perpetuity between an angel and Sir Joseph Lister, he is said to have quipped: “From now on, for the rest of my life I will have to be very careful about what I do and what I say.”

You will find Albert Einstein on the second archivolt from the bottom, as the second figure from the right - moustache and all - on the western portal on the Riverside Cathedral.

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