Ely Cathedral The relief scenes were built into the wall, so each face or statue was individually hacked off, but leaving many finely carved details, and numerous puzzles as to what the original scenes showed. After the reformation it was redeployed as the Parish Church (Holy Trinity) for the town, a situation which continued up to 1938. The central octagonal tower, with its vast internal open space and its pinnacles and lantern above, forms the most distinctive and celebrated feature of the cathedral. However, what Pevsner describes as Ely's 'greatest individual achievement of architectural genius' came about through a disaster at the
Mather Tower footprint. This resulted in a multitude of tall, slender, "setback" towers, of which the Mather is an extreme and unusual example. The top floor of the octagonal spire has only of floor space. Mather Company's founder, Alonzo Mather (a descendent of Cotton Mather) is said to be responsible for a number of the building's distinctive design features, including the octagonal tower. Initial plans called for construction of a second, identical building on North Michigan Avenue, behind the Mather and connected to it by a ground-floor arcade, but onset of the Great Depression in 1929 forced its cancellation. By the 1990s