Eighty-three years after the first stone, the last one goes on

For eighty-three years, Washington National Cathedral had been a work in progress, its towers rising in fits and starts, halted by World War I, the Depression, and World War II. At noon on September 29, 1990, workers set a 1,008-pound finial of Indiana limestone atop the south tower, completing the towers of St. Peter and St. Paul and the west facade. President George H. W. Bush attended, wishing "God speed the work completed this noon and the new work yet to begin." The date was deliberate: it fell exactly eighty-three years after Theodore Roosevelt laid the cathedral's foundation stone in 1907…