Loretto Chapel: The Staircase With No Center Column

The Loretto Chapel was built for the Sisters of Loretto in eighteen seventy-eight. It is a small Gothic Revival church on Old Santa Fe Trail, modeled on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, with a vaulted ceiling and delicate lancet windows. It is not famous for any of those things. It is famous for a wooden staircase.

The staircase rises to the choir loft in two complete three hundred sixty-degree spirals, with no visible central support column. Its structural integrity comes from the geometry of the helix itself. Carpenters who have examined it describe the joinery as exceptional. The wood species used, a spruce or fir variant, is not definitively identified in the documentation. The staircase has no nails. It is held together with wooden pegs and its own geometry.

The legend, which the chapel cultivated for a century, was that the staircase appeared miraculously, built by a mysterious carpenter who arrived at the chapel asking only for a glass of water in payment and then disappeared. The legend suited the Sisters of Loretto, who had prayed for a carpenter who could solve the problem of the choir loft.

Research conducted in the early two thousands by the amateur historian Mary Jean Cook identified documentary evidence suggesting that a French-born rancher and carpenter named François-Jean Rochas may have built the staircase. The identification is credible enough that it has appeared in museum materials. It is not settled with the completeness that archives of this period typically provide. The carpenter's identity, as the historical record stands today, has never been definitively established in the documentary sources. No signature on the work survives, and the one logbook entry that might refer to it, a payment for wood in eighteen eighty-one, is disputed: critics argue it describes school construction rather than the staircase. What stands is the staircase, which is structurally remarkable regardless of who built it.

The chapel is now a private event venue. The staircase charges a small admission fee.