Designed by James Renwick, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral’s construction started in 1859, but the building was not completed until twenty years later, on May 25, 1879. Chapter fourteen situates the spectator on the west side of Fifth Avenue probably at Fifty-Third Street, looking south towards the north-west corner of the church.

The chapter’s prose is remarkable for the attention it pays to issues of distance and proximity, especially as they relate to architectural form. Also of note is its assertion that the Cathedral can "best be seen" from Fifth Avenue. More than any of the preceding chapters, "The Cathedral on the Avenue" allies itself with the postcard’s standardization of perspective. Marcus’ invokes, more explicitly than ever before, the authority of a "View."

"One longs to see it" outside this View – from a point outside the hegemony imposed by the grid of streets and avenues, but the seer is, like the church, completely circumscribed within the grid. Chapter fourteen seeking to suspend the reader in the space of this longing. The reader is asked to wish the city could be looked at in the terms made utterly and permanently unavailable by the advent of twentieth century Manhattan. There is no suggestion that this lost way of seeing could ever be recaptured; what the book suggests, rather, is that the sadness and frustration which originate in this hopeless longing for the irrecoverable past are useful in themselves. The book advocates not resistance to the modern world but grief over the impossibility of that resistance. Marcus asks not that the reader attempt to refuse, but that s/he inhabit the melancholia of refusal’s impossibility.

Chapter fourteen is New York, the Nation’s Metropolis’s bleakest moment in terms of the narrative trajectory along which it organizes its understanding of grief. It is not clear in this chapter that the book conceives of its mourning as a provisional measure – a catharsis which will eventually enable joy; there is no suggestion that this sorrow can ever come to an end. Marcus is perhaps suggesting that, because this grief is engendered in part by the realization that grieving itself has been made impossible, its work can never be completed. It is also possible, however, that Marcus sees a grief which is recovered from as one that has been deprived of its power to critique. If he believes that sorrow is the only context within which critique of modernity is possible (and it is certainly the context which he believes to enable it most effectively), it follows that he would likely see any disavowal of this sorrow as too great a concession to the twentieth century. In this sense the book might be read as an insistence upon melancholia’s efficacy as a mode of political and aesthetic dissent. Read in these terms, the book would advocate not so much a mourning process as the restructuring of subjectivity itself around the discourse of mourning. It would demand that its readers neither refused nor accept the twentieth century but that they resign themselves – with overwhelming and everlasting dejection – to its spirit-crushing hegemony.