At 6 a.m. on Dec. 18, 2001, a lone custodian at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine smelled smoke and quickly called security. By 7 a.m., the world's largest cathedral was the scene of a five-alarm fire.
Firefighters squelched the fire by 9:30 a.m., but by then the church had more than $40 million in damage.
Everything, including priceless statuary, paintings and tapestries, was burned, obscured with grime or covered with soot, including the church's four organs.
The organs were smoke-encrusted and unplayable. One, an Ernest M. Skinner organ from 1910 that was revised by Aeolian-Skinner in the 1950s, is one of America's most important pipe organs, widely admired for its color and mixtures and superbly maintained by the church's staff.
It was a $3 million job.
To bad my friends Kris and Shelly didn't get this job. They could have retired.
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