For Whom The Bells Toll

Some of you may remember this building:

Night blip of the Cathedral


The Cathedral of Saint Paul is a Roman Catholic cathedral in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. One of the most distinctive cathedrals in the United States, it sits on Cathedral Hill overlooking downtown St. Paul and features a distinctive copper-clad dome. The current building opened in 1915 as the fourth cathedral of the archdiocese to bear this name.

The building of the current cathedral was instigated by Archbishop John Ireland in 1904. At Ireland's direction, the archdiocese commissioned well-known French Beaux-Arts architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, who was also the chief architect of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and construction began in 1906. Masqueray's open design allows visitors unobstructed views of the altar and pulpit. Masqueray died in 1917, having completed only a few designs for the interior, which has been filled by other designers in the subsequent decades.
The design was inspired by French Renaissance architecture. The dome of the cathedral is 76 feet (23 m) in diameter and 186 feet (57 m) high. Warm-colored paint and gold leaf were added during a major renovation of the dome in the 1950s. The exterior walls of the cathedral are Rockville granite from St. Cloud, Minnesota (from the Clark quarry). The interior walls are American Travertine from Mankato, Minnesota. The interior columns are made of several types of marble.
In 1987 the Cathedral acquired five bronze bells cast in France. The copper dome was renovated in 2002. You can see that the copper is just beginning to patina nearly a decade later.

If you view BIG, you can see a long ladder (which looks tiny) leaning against one of the spires.