ANCIENT ENIGMAS
Staircase Without a Spine Baffles Carpenters in Santa Fe Chapel
The helical stair at Loretto Chapel rises twenty feet with no central pole, and nobody recorded who built it.
SANTA FE, N.M. — A spiral staircase in the Loretto Chapel of Santa Fe continues to puzzle admirers, according to the website Futility Closet, which this week revisited the structure known as the Miracle Stair.
The stair, the site reports, has no newel, the central pole around which most spiral stairs are built. Its treads are instead upheld by stringers, the notched structural supports found in an ordinary staircase. Here the stringers make two complete turns as they climb 20 feet to the choir loft.
The whole assembly is said to be held together by wooden pegs, with neither glue nor nails.
According to the post, the stair was built sometime between 1877 and 1881. The identity of its maker is not recorded, a gap that has given the staircase much of its air of mystery.
The post cites the master carpenter Tim Carter, who wrote in the Washington Post in 2010 that building such a stair with modern tools would be "a feat." He added that it is mind-boggling to consider doing so with crude hand tools and minimal resources.
The post offers no explanation beyond the craftsmanship itself, and the builder, whoever he was, left no name behind.