The Roman Catholic Church of St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City stands at the southeast corner of Lexington and 66th Street, dates from 1918, was commissioned by the Dominican Order and designed by Bertram Goodhue in French Gothic style. This was one example of the four or five masterful churches that Goodhue knocked out before he departed from traditional idioms, towards the end of his career, in favor of his simplified mix-and-match modernism or whatever it is, that's a different story.

This is a quiet "Gold Coast" corner, as New York City corners go, and this church doesn't get the recognition or the attendance that it deserves. At St. Vincent Ferrer the services are sort-of-Catholic and sort-of-Anglican at this point. The St. Vincent Ferrer priory and school stand in separate buildings immediately to the south of the church. (Across the street from them, south of E. 65th Street, at 142 E. 65th Street, was the New York home of Judge Learned Hand for about sixty years, then afterward the home of President Richard Nixon after his resignation and national disgrace.)

Goodhue's original design for St. Vincent Ferrer included a fifteen-story steeple but the subsoil conditions wouldn't allow it. Surprise! There was both an old canal and a new subway tunnel down there.

It's the facade I want to talk about.

The interior is said to be remarkable. I don't know. It was closed that day. It's supposed to be relatively dark, lit by sunlight filtered through magnificent cobalt-blue stained-glass narratives by Charles Connick, a former newspaper cartoonist. There's Guastavino tile, naturally. There's a big organ. There are relics of the true cross and of two relics of St. Vincent Ferrer, and too much complicated symbolic art to document here.

If there are complaints about the look and feel of the high-ceilinged, masculine, limestone interior, they say it's too chilly and businesslike and Gothically academically correct. Those complainants haven't been paying attention. Everybody's a critic. There's a repeated dog-with-a-flaming-torch-in-its-mouth scultpural motif in reference to a dream of St. Dominic's mother, repeated pelican sculptures representing the virtue of sacrifice, and repeated dolphins representing St. Deskey of Streamlining.

But it's the facade I want to talk about. Those figures up top.

Why is this worth your attention? That's a multiple choice question.

A) This page is primarily a tip for Scottsdale homeowners who are considering erecting their own Dominican-saints-and-doctors-of-the-church-emerging-from-Indiana-limestone kind of thing for their mansions' facades to impress the neighbors and start conversations with their golfing partners and for resale value.

B) We as a society no longer have the technical skills, or the bravery, or tight coordination between architect and sculptor to execute this kind of facade, and this is meant as a bittersweet examination of a few architectural tactics that were swept away when Modernism struck like a killing frost and settled in for decades. If ornament is a crime, this facade is a daring high-stakes jewel robbery and multiple kidnapping.

C) It's kind of cool to look at.

There are human figures all over the facade, including a cruxifiction group down about the front doors, but it's the figures on top of the octagonal turrets that I'm most curious about. These spiritual patrons are all Dominicans and on close examination the figures are remarkably expressive and differentiated.

I have a very good authority (more on that later) identifying these figures as follows:

"North turret, from left to right: Fra Ristoro and Fra Sisto (architects of Santa Maria Novella in Florence), Henry Suso (medieval German mystic), Albert the Great, Savonarola."

Excellent information -- but that order can't be correct. Matching those names to the figures below: numbers 2 and 3 are supporting a cathedral, so they must be Fra Sisto da Firenze (also known as Fra Sisto Fiorentino) and Fra Ristoro de Campi. That cathedral, by the way, looks absolutely nothing like the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella they're credited for. Not a complaint, just an observation.

Number 4 is Savonarola (who carried out the original Bonfire of the Vanities, did you know that?) identifiable from his hooded cloak. He resembles Emperor Palpatine more than a little bit. No, of course, that's wrong, it's the other way around. This leaves Albert the Great as number 1, holding a skull not as a symbol of mortality or morbidity, but simply in the spirit of scientific examination, and the mystic philosopher Henry Suso praying to heaven as figure 5.

"South turret, from left to right: Hugh of St. Cher (medieval scripture scholar), Martin de Porres (16th century Peruvian patron of the poor), Jordan of Saxony (2nd Master of the Dominican Order), Diego de Deza (friend of Columbus), Louis Cancer (protomartyr of America)."

Well, I don't believe this order is correct either, but the iconography is less clear. Hugh of St. Cher was a church official and Biblical scholar in the 1200s of French descent, and number 6 in the wide-brimmed hat is likely him. He has the biggest book. Number 9, protector of the child, is Martin de Porres, based on his establishment of an orphanage and a childrens' hospital. And it's mainly posture and demeanor that lead me to believe that:

Diego Deza, not only friend to Columbus but successor to Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor of Spain, is figure number 8

Luis Cancer, missionary to the Americas and the first martyr of Florida in 1549 (apparently not the protomartyr of America, that was Juan de Padilla in 1544), is figure number 7,

leaving the Blessed Jordan of Saxony, teacher and scholar and first historian of the Dominicans, as figure number 10.

Lee Lawrie was the sculptor. He was born in Rixdorf Germany and studied under Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Karl Bitter, producing a lot of allegorical sculpture for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair for instance, before Bertram Goodhue took him under his wing as mentor and made him part of the Goodhue Collaborative Repetrory Company.

Lawrie worked under Goodhue on at least six or seven buildings and developed into the world champion integrator of human figures into stonework, which is not an easy trick. Human shapes and building shapes are hard to reconcile aesthetically, they don't mix, and then it's hard to keep these things from looking stiff, or ridiculous, or out of place with the rest of the ornamental scheme. One false move and the whole game is up.

Notice the segue from the curved lines of the robes into the vertical lines and planes of the buildings. Notice their postures, their body language, the way each one engages (or in the case of number 5, brilliantly enough, disregards) the spectator. Making these work as sculptural groups, and as individual and recognizable figures, and as captive figures on turret-tops, sounds like an impossible assignment to me.

According to a 1930 description by O.H. Murray of Goodhue Associates, collected in Dover's "Masterpieces of American Architecture," the architect wasn't quite happy with the result. "Mr. Goodhue felt that the heads projected too far from the plane of the wall, and in later examples of this sort of thing, notably in the Nebraska State Capitol, the whole figure was merged more completely into the fabric of the building."

Is there psychological significance here? Yeah, I think so. Architecturally their scale influences the perception of the scale of the whole building.

Socially they attach heritage, character, meaning and identity to the structure. In a way they provide guidance. They're modelling behavior. Their physical attitude and posture is important. Although we don't know them, their identities are important. Their posture towards each other and towards the rest of the building carries social meaning. Their posture towards you, down on the street, carries social meaning.

And to me their appearance out of the stonework somehow modulates the rest of the building's surface, makes it more sculptural, more carved, more of a fabric or medium that allows the manifestation of spirits, a more mysterious building with a more clearly human purpose.