Dear Editor,
I am brimming with giggles after having read Sally Giddings Smith’s recent commentary on the imminent demolition of Burlington’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. To compare that lifeless monstrosity to Notre Dame de Paris — for half the piece, for God’s sake — is a level of absurd that I could not beat out of Samuel Beckett.
Burlington’s cathedral had decades to turn downtown into an architectural mecca. Indeed, one would have hoped that the demolition of dozens of historic homes for an urban renewal project like the cathedral would generate an indisputable benefit to the downtown: busloads of tourists, shoppers and devotees. Mexico City’s Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not the sexiest structure, for example — concrete here, concrete there, on concrete grounds — but it rises to the challenge! Burlington? Not so much.
Let us not let a small cabal of historic preservation fundamentalists derail the demolition. Whatever takes the place of the cathedral, and I hope it is housing, will be worth far more to the city than whatever the status quo has provided.
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And let us send the old apse ‘n nave to a farm up north where it can frolic with the architectural marvels of yesteryear: the original Penn Station, the Library of Alexandria and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Adieu, chère cathédrale! Bienvenue, nouveaux voisins!
Geoffrey Battista
Montpelier
Read the story on VTDigger here: Geoffrey Battista: Raze the cathedral.