I wanted to know whether anyone who set the last finial in 1990 had met the men who laid the foundation stone in 1907. Eighty-three years to the day — long enough for an apprentice to go grey on that same scaffold and teach the boy beside him. Stand at the west end and look up: two generations taking their turn at it. There's a fundraising page from about 1923, BUILD THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL in serif capitals.
The charter language is Isaiah's — a house of prayer for all people — and they meant it structurally, not just decoratively. Theodore Roosevelt came out for the 1907 stone-laying and spoke to a crowd of thousands standing in a field, as far as I can tell; the foundation stone itself had a small stone brought from a field near Bethlehem set into it.
One of the grotesques up on the west towers is Darth Vader, carved in the eighties off a children's design competition entry. Somewhere there's a stonemason who spent a fortnight on a helmet he'd only seen in a drawing.