This month's museum pick...

The Miraculous Staircase

by Dea Adria Mallin

The miraculous is no stranger to New Mexico. Ranked as one of the nation’s poorest states, it is rich in the phenomenal. On lengthy summer visits for the past eighteen years, I have seen too much to doubt the magic.

It is not unusual for double and triple rainbows to spread across the New Mexico sky. Once, driving around a volcanic caldera in which bucolic horses and cows looked like pin dots, a storm arose instantaneously. Wild lightning strikes descended vertically all around me, and hail the size of tennis balls pelted my rental car. As I crouched in terror on the car floor, the entire caldera turned from summer green to a hard carpet of white ice. When it stopped, the sun came out as suddenly as it had disappeared, and within 15 minutes, a foot of hail balls had melted and the caldera was once again green and bucolic, as if nothing had ever happened.

Another time, I waited for two hours to ascend 10,678 feet up the Sandia Tram into the mountains while an electric storm raged in the vicinity. Finally, in the darkness, it was deemed safe to make one last trip, and as we rose, the lightning strikes over 80 miles away were breathtaking. Some went directly into the ground like giant primordial bolts; others lit entire mountain ranges. Son et lumiere was followed by our ascent through four of the earth’s seven life zones, so that what began as fierce rain turned into fierce hail balls pounding the roof of the tram. By the time we reached the summit, the air was pure and pristine and Edenic.

Then, there is the Santuario de Chimayo on the High Road to Taos, a chapel where 300,000 pilgrims trek annually to be healed. Abandoned crutches, wheelchairs, canes, eyeglasses, hearing aids, and other devices attest to miracles in this tiny chapel where belief and holy faith outweigh medical texts.

And then, in the center of Santa Fe, there is the small jewel of a chapel, the Loretto Chapel, with its Miraculous Staircase. Today, after closing in 1968 and deconsecration of the church in 1971, the Loretto Chapel is a private museum, operated and maintained for the preservation of the chapel and staircase, its beauty and spiritual resonance drawing couples from all over the country and the world for wedding ceremonies. But once upon a time…

In 1850, Jean Baptiste Lamy was appointed as bishop of Santa Fe with a mission to build churches and educational facilities. He asked the Sisters of Loretto, a teaching order, to come from Kentucky to the frontier city of Santa Fe and establish a school for girls. By 1853, the energetic Sisters had done just that with the Academy of Our Lady of Light, and despite such frontier challenges as smallpox, tuberculosis, and a leaking mud roof, the boarding and day school expanded, even flourished.

In 1873, the school decided to add a chapel in the Gothic Revival style, inspired by the French clergy in Santa Fe and patterned, with vaulting, buttressing, and spires, after the Sainte Chapelle in Paris instead of the adobe churches of the area. Stone was quarried locally and hauled to town by wagon. The ornate stained glass was purchased in 1876 from the DuBois studio in Paris, sent to New Orleans by sailing ship, then by paddle boat to St. Louis, and finally, by covered wagon over the Old Santa Fe Trail to the chapel.

Completed by 1878, there is the matter of the Miraculous Staircase. Two mysteries are built into the staircase: who, exactly, built it, and how to explain the physics of its construction.

On with the story. When the Loretto Chapel was nearing completion, the architect died (one source states that Bishop’s Lamy’s nephew’s wife caught the eye of the architect, and the nephew, in a fit of fury, killed him), and there was no way to access the choir loft, 22 feet above. Carpenters were consulted, and they concluded that a ladder would have to be used since any staircase would aesthetically upset the small interior space and would also limit seating.

Undeterred, the Sisters made a novena to St. Joseph, father of Jesus and the patron saint of carpenters, and here, legend really takes the reins. On the ninth and final day of prayer, a “humble workman” appeared at the chapel, looking for work. Some say he was “leading a burro laden with carpentry tools.”  In one version, the staircase was completed almost overnight, and in the other, it took six months. When the Sisters came in to pray, the carpenter would quietly leave, returning only when they were gone, to work in solitude.  

One day, the Sisters came to pray, but the carpenter was gone. He had disappeared without pay and before he could be thanked. A dedicated search for the man yielded no results, and there is no record of anyone selling wood for the staircase to the man. Popular belief, then, calls the carpenter St. Joseph himself.

Whether he was a skilled itinerant or St. Joseph, the result of his work is an impressive free-standing spiral staircase, rising in a double helix with two 360-degree turns and no visible means of support. And no nails and no screws!

And no one can identify precisely what kinds of wood were used in the construction.

At first, the Loretto staircase had no railing, so the sisters ascended to the choir and descended on their hands and knees. In 1887, an artisan named Phillip August Hesch added the railing, which was described as “a work of art,” but not a miracle.

An MIT engineering professor has called helix staircases “inherently unsafe and unstable weight-supporting structures which require more than being secured at the top and bottom.” Usually, they are braced by an attachment along the height to a central pole or adjacent wall. In a 1998 article in The Skeptical Inquirer, Joe Nickell found that the Loretto staircase is not entirely freestanding and has “one iron bracket stabilizing the staircase by rigidly connecting the outer stringer to one of the columns supporting the loft.” Still, since the mid-70s, the public has not been permitted on the staircase, with the exception of brides and grooms posing for photographs and choir members. The laws of physics are heeded here, if only as a cautionary measure.

In 2000, the discovery of an obscure obituary identifies a hermit rancher, Jean-Francois Rochas, from Alamogordo, as the Loretto Chapel builder. He died in 1896, and his brief obituary calls him “an expert worker in wood” who built “the handsome staircase in the Loretto Chapel.” 

Maybe. Maybe not. There have been television specials, a TV movie called “The Staircase,” and a movie slot in “Unsolved Mysteries” inquiring into the Miraculous Staircase. But fact and fiction notwithstanding, what else would we expect from the City of Holy Faith? Or from a state whose license plate declares it “The Land of Enchantment”?

I hear the message from the obituary, I accede to the iron bracket support, I note that while they are no screws or nails used in the structure, there are wooden pegs, and I would happily have the U.S. Forest Services Center for Wood Anatomy (which worked on King Tut’s tomb) identify the wood. But ever since a well-known Santa Fe historian told me, in the same breath, about the construction of the coyote fence before me and about how New Mexico’s actinic rays make the light here do things that light elsewhere cannot replicate (photographs I have taken on utterly cloudy days in New Mexico scintillate with light), I am content to live in the ambiguity, or duality, of science and of miracle. Besides, the existence of a miraculous staircase sets the tone in this small jewel of a chapel where weddings are held, for the miracle of love.