Consulting work, Cathedral of St. John the Divine

1047 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY

c. 1909 | Church | Extant (Minerva’s contributions undetermined)

According to biographical fragments written by her grown children years later, Minerva worked on some scope of work related to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in Manhattan. This account—which has yet to be corroborated in other archives—is nevertheless plausible, given the timing of those project’s construction and the relationships that Minerva is known to have established in New York. Moreover, the fact that Minerva’s children mentioned these projects in their partial biographies of her suggests that they heard about them from Minerva herself.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine was designed and expanded in several stages, beginning in 1892, and continuing until 1941. During the period when Minerva lived across the East River in Brooklyn, the first phase was underway, under architects Heins & LaFarge; it culminated in 1911 with the completion of the crypt, choir, and crossing. Although Minerva was not the primary architect on any stage of this project, and her name does not show up on any of the Heins & LaFarge drawings archived at Princeton University, she may nonetheless have contributed studies and details that informed those drawings—apparently (according to her children) based in part on her observations during a family trip to Europe.