The Bishop begins
Bishop Doane proposed to build a school, a convent and a hospital in that order. Only when they were established was he prepared to contemplate the construction of the cathedral. Shortly after his consecration as the first Bishop of Albany in Febraury of 1869, Bishop Doane began to elicit support for a girl's school. The bishop felt strongly that there was a need for better education of young women in America. Although politically conservative, Doane was passionate in his belief that women should be educated to be self-reliant. St. Agnes's School, which he founded in XXXX, produced some remarkable American women, including Alice Morgan Wright(1884-1977). Miss Wright was baptized in the Foundy Chapel of the Cathedral and graduated from St. Agnes in 1903. She rose to prominence in the Women's Suffrage Movement and was one of the founding members of the American League of Women Voters. Eleanor Roosevelt was a friend and frequent visitor to Miss Wright's home on State Street, which had been designed by William Gibson for Wright's father Henry. An important sculptress, she exhibited in the controversial New York Armory Show of 1912 and exerted a strong influence on cubism in the United States.
On September 7, 1870 Bishop Doane opened St. Agnes School with sixty pupils in a rented house on Columbia Street, three blocks east of the current cathedral. Over the next two years increasing enrollment strained the confines of the rented house and Doane began looking for a larger site for the school. "I needed to find some place in which the children could gather as a school formally for their worship", Doane wrote. "I cast envious eyes upon a vacant lot near the house,[Bishop Doane had purchased a house on Elk Street, two doors up from J.V.L.Pruyn and one block from the future cathedral], which was an unused foundry, and I went up to Mr. Townsend the owner, to ask him whether he would sell it, and at what price." Townsend wanted forty-five thousand dollars for the property, and Bishop Doane had no money to buy it. He then approached Erastus Corning, a legendary figure in Albany, who was then nearly eighty-five and in failing health. It was Corning who, in 1831, had first realized the enormous potential of the railroad in America, and who with J.V.L. Pruyn created the New York Central in 1854. "I went to old Mr. Corning, Erastus Sr., and laid my plan before him," Doane wrote in January of 1872. "He was in bed, at the beginning of his last illness [he died later that year], during which I was in the process of visiting him. He was quite feeble in body but very strong and clear in mind. He said he must consult his son Erastus, so I went down to New York where Mr. Corning was, and begged him to come back at once with me and secure his father's consent, which he did. He said he would buy the land if I could manage to get control of it without using his name, the money to be paid in three notes of $20,000, $10,000 and $15,000, at nine, six and three months. I made the proposal to Mr. Townsend, telling him I could not give him the giver's name. He naturally concluded that it could only be Mr. Corning, and the agreement was drawn up which ended in the purchase of the land. When I reported to Mr. Corning that the land was his, he said in his droll way, 'Well, do you expect me to give it to you?' 'No,'I said 'I expect to incorporate the Corning Foundation for Christian work in the City and Diocese of Albany, and that you will deed the property to it.' 'Well,' he said, ' when you have raised $50,000, put up your building and I will transfer the property' and this was the beginning of St. Agnes School."
Within six months Albany architect Thomas Fuller designed and erected the school building in the prevalent Eastlake style. At the same time, the old Townsend Foundry, which had incidentally built armaments for the Union Army, was refurbished as the Chapel of the Cathedral of All Saints, and both the Chapel and the new school building were consecrated on Sunday the seventeenth of November 1872. J.V.L. Pruyn remembered the day in his journal. "We went to All Saints Chapel in the AM. This is Bishop Doane's new chapel in the old Townsend Furnace Building near the new St. Agnes School on Elk Street. The Scholars took possession of the school building a few days ago and the chapel was finished about two or three weeks ago. The service was conducted by Bishop Doane and one clergyman who aided him. It was of a very highly ritualistic character..."
Moving rapidly, Bishop Doane between 1872 and 1875 went on to found the Childs Hospital, one of the first hospitals in the nation devoted exclusively to "incurable" childhood disease; the Sisterhood of the Holy Child Jesus, an order of nuns created to care for children's hospital; and St. Margaret's Home for Babies, which also in turn created one of the first day-care centers in the country for working mothers.
The idea of a permanent cathedral, however, was never far from the Bishop's mind, and as early as March 25, 1871 Doane wrote in his private journal, "The cathedral is not an interest just of this city, or of my own, but that of the NATION, and the most permanent results depend on the success of this enterprise of faith. A center which you will grant, will be a confluence of all Christian people, and a center which will gather, please God, about it the central elements of which the cathedral is simply the fulcrum." The "central elements" continued to take preference over the cathedral and it was not until 1882 that Doane was able to tackle his last and greatest challenge. The site for the future cathedral was problematical as the Townsend Chapel site was not large enough. "In looking the ground over carefully, " wrote Doane early in 1886, "we decided not to put it on the same site, [which the old foundry occupied], because we wanted to go on using that for church service, and meanwhile, young Mr. Corning, (Erastus Corning II 1819-1893), who had already given me $25,000 toward the $50,000 I had to raise, concluded to buy the rest of the land on that side of Elk Street up to Swan, which he did, and shortly after we began the building where it now stands. I vainly tried to persuade the Trustees to buy the rest of the land on the other side of the street,[the future site of the State Education Building] which of course could have been bought then at a very reasonable price."