Although the concept of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine was first formulated around 1828, it only obtained official recognition when Rt. Rev. Horatio Potter, Bishop of New York, proposed the idea at the Diocesan Convention of 1872. The proposal received unanimous support. The New York state legislature granted a charter for the Cathedral in 1873 and fourteen years later, Bishop Potter and the Cathedral Trustees approved the purchase of the land on which the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum had formerly been situated. With the charter granted and the location of the cathedral decided, Potter began the search for an architectural design that would do justice to the objectives of the cathedral project. In 1888 the Trustees sponsored a contest for the design of the Cathedral. The chosen design was submitted by Messrs. Heins and LaFarge of New York. The design, which called for a church five hundred and twenty feet in length, emphasized features of both Romanesque and Byzantine architecture (Harris 5-7).