At 364 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 120 feet high, with a seating capacity of 1,700, Holy Cross Cathedral is the largest church in New England. Dedicated in December 1875, it was built of locally quarried Roxbury puddingstone and Quincy granite to designs of noted ecclesiastical architect Patrick C. Keely. The advent of cast-iron construction permitted exceptionally slender nave columns supporting the largest wooden vault of its time. An unfashionably remote location – the former site of the town gallows -- betrays Anglo-Saxon Protestant Boston’s ambivalence toward waves of "foreign" immigrants for whom the new cathedral’s completion after nine years of construction was a signal achievement. - Ross Wood
Photo by Len Levasseur
The 1875 Hook & Hastings organ at Holy Cross Cathedral is the largest extant organ built by the firm.