The Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe is a former Roman Catholic church that is now used as a museum and a wedding chapel.
Loretto Chapel is known for its unusual helix-shaped spiral staircase (the "Miraculous Stair"). The Sisters of Loretto credited St. Joseph with its construction, at the time.
The chapel was commissioned by the Sisters of Loretto for their girls' school, Loretto Academy, in 1873. Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy had brought in two French architects, Antoine Mouly and his son Projectus, to work on the St. Francis Cathedral project, and suggested that the Sisters could make use of their services on the side to build a much-needed chapel for the academy. The chapel was built from locally quarried sandstone and took five years to complete, being officially consecrated in 1878.
Loretto Chapel was used on a daily basis by the students and nuns of Loretto Academy until the school closed in 1968. Afterwards, it became a privately owned museum and wedding venue, while the rest of the Academy campus was demolished.
Loretto Chapel's "miraculous" spiral staircase, which rises 20 feet (6.1 m) to the choir loft while making two full turns, all without the support of a newel or central pole. The staircase is built mostly out of wood and is held together by wooden pegs and glue rather than nails or other hardware.
Apart from any claims of its miraculous nature, the staircase has been described as a remarkable feat of woodworking. According to a Washington Post column by Tim Carter, "It's a magnificent work of art that humbles me as a master carpenter."
The staircase as originally built lacked handrails and was reportedly so frightening to descend that some of the nuns and students did so on their hands and knees. Eventually, railings were added in 1887 by another craftsman, Phillip August Hesch.
In the early 2000s, research by amateur historian Mary Jean Cook identified the probable builder of the staircase as François-Jean "Frank" or "Frenchy" Rochas (1843-1894), a reclusive rancher and occasional carpenter who came to New Mexico from France around the 1870s. A key piece of evidence was a short article in the Santa Fe New Mexican describing his death by murder in 1894, which noted "He was a Frenchman, and was favorably known in Santa Fe as an expert worker in wood. He build the handsome staircase in the Loretto Chapel and at St. Vincent sanitarium." Cook also found an entry in the Sisters' logbook stating that Rochas had been paid $150 for "wood" in 1881, confirming that he had done some type of carpentry work for them. At the time of his death, Rochas was reported to own an extensive set of carpentry tools.
Although the design of the Loretto stairs is highly unusual, other spiral staircases without center supports are known to exist. One example can be found at the Old Washoe Club in Virginia City, Nevada, which also dates to the 1870s. This staircase was described by Ripley's Believe It or Not! as "the longest of its kind without a supporting pole", though it has fewer turns than the Loretto staircase. Further afield, another staircase is in the Gdansk Town Hall in Poland, which was reported to the New Mexican in 1944 by a government official named Bonnie Foster. The paper wrote "It is tall, spiral, and without steel nails, but the wood is different. It is in the town hall, of the 14th to the 16th century. How it was constructed, and whether there is a miracle story back of it, Mrs. Foster could not say. But she declared it is strikingly like St. Joseph's in design."
Негізгі бет Santa Fe: Loretto Chapel & Miraculous Stair
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