Eighty-three years of building, from 1907 to 1990, raised the Washington National Cathedral on the highest point in Washington DC.
The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, to use its formal name, is not a government building. It belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, but was intentionally designed as a national house of prayer for all people — a place where no single denomination would have exclusive claim, where state funerals, national days of mourning, and presidential inaugural services could be held.
Franklin Roosevelt's funeral was held here. Dwight Eisenhower's. Gerald Ford's. Ronald Reagan's. After September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush stood at this pulpit to address a grieving nation. Helen Keller is buried in the nave.
Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last Sunday sermon from this pulpit on March 31, 1968. Four days later, he was assassinated in Memphis.
The building is Neo-Gothic in the English medieval tradition — carved stone, flying buttresses, gargoyles, stained glass. If you look carefully at the gargoyles on the exterior, you will find Darth Vader. The cathedral held a gargoyle design competition in the 1980s, and a schoolboy from Illinois submitted the design of the Star Wars villain. It was chosen and is now carved into the northwest tower.
The earthquake of August 2011, centered in Virginia, damaged the cathedral's four pinnacles significantly. Restoration is ongoing. The stone is Indiana limestone — the same material used for the Pentagon and the Empire State Building.