Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out about the return of pipe organs that went silent for five years after fires broke out at their cathedrals. We’ll also look at a mayoral candidate’s proposal for city-owned grocery stores.
Daniel Ficarri, organist and associate director of music at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.Credit…James Barron/The New York Times
Within a day of each other in April 2019, fires broke out in two cathedrals, one in Paris, the other in Manhattan.
The world gasped as the spire fell and two-thirds of the roof was destroyed at Notre-Dame on April 15. The fire at St. John the Divine a day earlier was not on the same scale, filling the 124-foot-high nave with smoke but doing far less damage than a devastating blaze did there 18 years earlier.
The huge pipe organs in both cathedrals went silent. At St. John the Divine, where the fire started in a crypt in the basement, soot had been sucked into the organ pipes — some more than half the length of some subway cars, others no bigger than a pencil.
The world heard both instruments again for the first time in the same week: The organ at Notre-Dame was played in the reopening service last Saturday, an emotional ceremony showcasing a reconstruction that cost almost $800 million. The organ at St. John the Divine took part in a Sunday service six days earlier.
