First designs date from 1906, the church opened for services in 1913. Its magnificence is the happy result of a dramatic, impulsive act of compassion: The 1906 San Francisco earthquake had so shocked the rector, Rev. Ernest M. Stires, that he rushed the accumulated balance in his parish's building fund to aid the stricken city. Throughout New York and beyond, an impressed public responded in kind to his generosity with unsolicited gifts that more than replenished the fund. This masterpiece of a city church, with bold massing and a strong profile, has plain ashlar limestone exterior surfaces and sandstone interior surfaces in French High Gothic style, embellished with dense French Flamboyant Gothic detail in the window tracery, in the small arches of the triforium, and in the rich stonework of the reredos, where Bertram Goodhue's original genius in decoration, and sculpture designed, by Lee Lawrie, are inspired by the altar screen at Winchester Cathedral in England. Saint Thomas church is characterized by a high main arcade and an open triforium, and clerestory. Making the most of a restricted rectangular urban corner site with no space for transepts, St. Thomas has the scale of a large parish church (which it is), and, except for its foreshortened length, the proportions of major European and English cathedrals, with nave vaults high. The church, like New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest Gothic church in the world, whose nave and west facade were designed by Cram, is built of stone on stone, without any steel reinforcing. The ribs of the vault are load-bearing structure. Cram's approach to a structurally authentic and a scholarly, but not imitative Gothic style, emphasized originality through logical development of the historical Gothic styles, tempered by creative scholarship and employing the use of modern machinery in the execution of stonecutting and dressing. In a letter of 1925 Cram said that he considered a rigorous modern Gothic to be "a logical continuation of the great Christian culture of the past, but also a vital contribution to modern life." However, in 1925, eleven years after completion, the north wall of the church was found to be bulging dangerously and hidden steelwork added. Subway construction on 53rd St. in the 1930s prompted additional steel under the altar and massive reredos as a precaution. Cram excelled at planning buildings and at the general massing of forms, while Goodhue had an inventive eye for appropriate decorative detail.