Throwin' Fitz: May 2008

This memorial day weekend we spent some time traveling around New Mexico and seeing some of the sites. Last Saturday we headed up to Santa Fe and visited a couple of old churches and walked around the plaza. The plaza has a bunch of shops, but they are either art stores or jewelry stores - all with turquoise jewelry. Once you have been in one, you've been in them all.

We started the trip by going to the small town of Chimayo, NM. This is where a small church is that is said to be built on ground that has healing powers. The church itself is a very small adobe style church that looks like it may only hold 30 people or so. In the back is a small room that has a hole in the floor where people can take some of the dirt home. It was really a neat church.

After Chimayo we went back down to Santa Fe and went to the Plaza. Like I said, it has about 100 stores that are all the same. But there is another small church there, that is no longer active, but it has an amazing staircase in it. As the story goes, the church was built in 1873, but they were told by local carpenters that the a staircase could not be built to reach the choir loft 22' above without interfering with the seating in the chapel and therefore a ladder would have to be used. The nuns prayed to St. Joseph to help them build a staircase for the chapel. 9 days later a man came to the church with a donkey and some tools looking for work. He proceeded to build a staircase for the church over the next 6 months. The resulting staircase is a spiral one that makes two complete 360 degree turns and had no railing and no center support. The wood is not indigenous to New Mexico, and how the stairs are supported is a matter of debate - some say that it should not support the weight of a person, others say it acts like a spring. The staircase was used for many years by the nuns. It has sense had a railing added and some iron supports. They do not know who the man was that built the stairs as he left without payment or thanks. While the Church has not formally said who built the stairs, some believe that St. Joseph himself was the carpenter that answered the nun's prayers.