God Is In the Details
Woonsocket’s own Sistine Chapel ducked the wrecking ball six years ago. Its second resurrection requires $3.5 million. Can it survive without divine intervention?
By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 2006
Photographs reproduced here courtesy of Nat Rea.
This piece was awarded 1st place in the in the religion category in the Rhode Island Press Association's 2006 Editorial Awards.The red and white house on the corner of Robinson Street and Progresso Avenue in
Woonsocket has always been a busy but orderly place. The Doiron family has five kids, with eleven years separating the youngest from the oldest. But Yvette Doiron, the matriarch, “ran a pretty tight household,” recalls Dominique, twenty-seven, the youngest. And, like most of the other families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were a working-class, French-Canadian family. The parents of both Yvette and her husband, Ray, moved to Rhode Island from Quebec as teenagers to work in the mills, and Yvette and Ray spoke French as their first language. And, like most families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were also very involved in their Catholic church. They went to mass every weekend, Yvette was the leader of the parish’s Girl Scout troop and a Eucharistic minister, the boys were altar servers, the girls taught Catechism class, Ray was the parish sextant and sang in the choir. St. Ann’s Church on Cumberland Street was less than ten blocks from the Doiron household, and those blocks were heavily trodden by the fourteen feet that resided in the red and white house.So it was only natural, when the Diocese of Providence announced in 2000 that it was closing St. Ann due to dwindling parishioners and rising building maintenance costs, that the Doirons would get involved. “They didn’t close this church without a fight, let me tell you,” says Sue, the second-oldest Doiron sibling, thirty-seven. “Though we didn’t get as far as chaining ourselves to the church.” What the family and a handful of other former parishioners have done, however, will probably have a much more lasting impact on the fate of St. Ann’s than any short-lived stunt might have had.
One way or another, St. Ann’s was going to be torn down. Either the Diocese would have dismantled it and sold the pieces – “they could have made a lot of money selling the marble,” says Sue –or they would have sold the whole parcel to developers, who likely would wrecked the church to build condominiums or a shopping plaza. A scrappy group of former parishioners hatched the idea of “a major center, a tourist attraction, a place of opportunity for local artists,” says Dominique. In 2001, the non-profit, non-sectarian St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center was born with the Doiron family at the helm. In 2002, the Diocese agreed to lease the building to the group at $1 per year for ninety-nine years. Ninety-nine years is a long time; the group is hoping they’ll last through this winter.
The stretch of Cumberland Street surrounding St. Ann is nondescript, a run-down thoroughfare with a Dunkin’ Donuts, dry cleaners, service station and funeral home, all fronted by big empty parking lots. From the outside, St. Ann’s Church also looks much like any old-fashioned cathedral on any run-down main street in any aging former mill town. Behind the building’s giant wooden doors, however, is the church’s sanctuary, a room so magnificent that it literally takes your breath away.
Smothered in color and light, the sanctuary is ringed by forty-eight elaborate stained glass windows. Its sixty-five foot vaulted ceiling and half of its walls – 20,000 square feet in all – are covered in buon-style frescoes, paintings whose pigments are integrated into the plaster itself and whose angels, prophets, saints and devils throb with brilliant color. Standing underneath them, head tipped back, you almost want to take chunks of the delicious scenes in your mouth and suck on them like hard candy, or climb into them and lie in the grass and pick flowers. Each of the individual paintings is a masterpiece, but the effect of them together is literally stunning. It’s as if a whole world is in this one room. You could spend a lifetime and never see it all.
BOUNDED TO THE NORTH BY THE Massachusetts border and to the east and west by North Smithfield and Cumberland, Woonsocket has the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest per-capita household incomes in the state, trailing only Central Falls and pockets of Providence. “Woonsocket,” says Dominique with a laugh, “has come to be known as the armpit of the state.”
It wasn’t always this way. The late 1800s and early 1900s was a boom time for towns along the Blackstone River, the epicenter of America’s industrial heyday. Woonsocket grew up around Woonsocket Falls, whose thirty-foot drop generated power for the town’s forty or so textile mills. Meanwhile, farmers in the countryside of Quebec were finding it harder to eke a living out of the land, and word spread about the many jobs in New England’s textile mills. By the time Woonsocket was incorporated in 1888, more than 40 percent of the city’s population – some 8,500 people – was composed of French-Canadian mill workers and their families.
Woonsocket’s French-Canadians were deeply religious people and the Catholic Church was the heart of their community. In 1890, with the city’s only French parish, Precious Blood, bursting at the seams, church officials decided to create a new parish. Members of the new St. Ann’s parish envisioned a magnificent building and began knocking on doors and digging deeper into their pockets at Sunday mass to build it. “This was a parish of poor immigrants, of French-Canadian mill workers who were really devoted to their faith, and wanted to build a temple for themselves,” says Dominique. The nickels and dimes started adding up, and by 1917, the French Renaissance-style church on Cumberland Street was completed.
In 1920, looking towards the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the parish, congregants decided to replace the church’s enormous windows with stained glass. Once again, the parishioners dug into their pockets. Plays were staged as benefits. Some of the wealthier parishioners donated the cost of windows as memorials to family members. The windows, shipped from Chartres, France, were installed in 1925. The centerpieces are two windows on either side of the transept, which are so large that, were they laid end-to-end, their square footage would exceed that of the floor plan of an average ranch-style house. Portraying the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, what makes these windows exceptional is their multilayered artwork. In the foreground of “The Crucifixion,” for example, are kneeling worshippers and Roman soldiers on horseback. Jesus on the cross rises from their midst. In an ordinary stained-glass window, behind this scene might be decorative colored panels. In this one, the scene is backed by the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Behind the walls, the hills. And behind the hills, a frightfully churning purple sky. The windows face north and south such that “The Resurrection” is always the brightest window in the building.
Nineteen-forty marked the parish’s 50th anniversary, and St. Ann’s pastor decided that the church’s interior should be decorated in honor of the upcoming golden jubilee. Father Henry Morin had always admired the paintings at St. Matthew’s Church in Central Falls, and he invited the artist, Guido Nincheri, to visit St. Ann’s. Nincheri, who lived in Quebec, had been raised in Florence, Italy, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. He was best-known for his stained glass, but he was an accomplished artist in many media, including painting, mosaic, sculpture, and the Renaissance method of fresco painting known as buon fresco. Michelangelo used this method to paint the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. During Nincheri’s initial visit to St. Ann’s, he noticed that the walls and the ceiling were still unfinished, covered with cement stucco and not plaster. Father Morin was apologetic. Nincheri was delighted.
Instead of applying oil or tempera to pre-existing plaster, fresco pigments are applied to fresh, wet plaster. The chemical changes which occur mean that the painting is integrated into the wall itself. The moment the pigment touches the plaster, it is permanent. The artist cannot remove paint, or paint over anything he has already done. If he makes a mistake, the plaster must be cut away from the entire area and the process must begin again.
The result is that the paintings never fade. They never chip or peel. And the colors are so rich and bright, they look like they’re glowing. “If you come back 400 years from now,” says Dominique, “these colors will be as bright and vibrant as they are now.”
Over the course of eight years, from 1940 to 1948, Nincheri painstakingly covered the entire church with frescoes. He used the congregants as models for his work, integrating more than 400 individual faces into the paintings’ 175 scenes. One of the centerpieces, “The Last Judgment” depicts three devils being cast into hell, two of whom face us. When the time came to paint the devils’ faces, Nincheri went across the street to St. Ann’s school, and asked for the two naughtiest boys in the class. The nun who serenaded Nincheri while he worked is immortalized as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of Church Music, playing the organ over the choir loft.
Roger Nincheri, the artist’s grandson, is cataloguing his grandfather’s artwork, which can be found in 220 churches throughout North America. “I consider St Ann’s to be Guido’s Sistine Chapel, in terms of the size and complexity,” he says. Dominique agrees. “If you take [all of Michelangelo’s frescoes in] the Sistine Chapel as a single piece, this is bigger. By a lot. People spend thousands of dollars to go to Italy, but here it is, in this country, in Rhode Island, right in Woonsocket…It’s part of our heritage. Our ancestors came here and built it.”
IT’S WEDNESDAY, BINGO NIGHT at St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center, and though it’s only 4:40, the church basement is already half-full. The mostly elderly crowd is lining up their bingo daubers like many-colored soldiers on the tables, and hunkering down over baskets of French fries and games of cards.
Bingo is just one of the many offerings on the calendar. The building is open from 1 pm until 4 pm every Sunday afternoon for tours. The organization tries to offer at least one event each month. Some notable recent performers were Elisabeth von Trapp, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Community College of Rhode Island chorus and orchestra, and the Ocean State Summer Pops Orchestra. A production of Carousel is slated for May, and the Providence Singers are performing Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” in June. Ultimately, the organization hopes to use some of the un-frescoed part of the sanctuary as gallery space for local artists, and to host weekly events that serve as an anchor for the Center’s calendar, such as a Sunday afternoon piano recital series. When he’s really thinking big, Dominique envisions removing the pews so the sanctuary can be used for weddings, banquets and balls.
The word is not out yet, however, and Center events are not always well attended. When von Trapp performed, it drew 100 people; in a room that seats 1200, “it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” says Dominique. Even when the Vienna Boys’ Choir visited, he recalls, “there were only about five or six hundred people, which wasn’t enough to pay the bill of bringing them in.”
Part of the problem is the church’s location. The old joke about having to pack a bag to travel from Providence to Warwick has some truth to it; Rhode Islanders are notoriously reluctant to travel more than a stone’s throw from home. What’s more, says Dominique, “it’s hard to get people to Woonsocket because they still think of it as a burned out town with nothing to do.”
Ticket prices are very reasonable. Events are usually pay-what-you-can, and the most expensive to date were $10. Ironically, however, this may deter visitors accustomed to performances at Providence’s Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium or other such posh venues. “There might be people who think that ten dollars isn’t going to get you much,” says Sue.
Bingo brings in about $1,000 each week, which was just enough to cover the building’s heat and electricity in 2004. Given the rising cost of oil, however, Ray says that this winter will decide whether the organization can stay afloat. St. Ann’s needs more than to just stay afloat, however; major structural repairs are necessary. The building has four different kinds of roof – slate, copper, rubber, and gravel – and all of them need to be repaired or replaced. The roof in the building’s north tower is leaking, which has destroyed some of the decorative stonework on the outside and some fresco work on the inside. The entire heating and electrical systems need to be overhauled. Right now the Doirons and a core group of 20 volunteers do all of the work, but most of it is band-aid work, like patching leaks. They need more volunteers, and they need more money, fast. According to a building survey, the necessary repairs and upgrades will cost an estimated $3.5 million.
The organization has received some funding from the Rhode Island Foundation, the City of Woonsocket and Preserve Rhode Island, among others. Recently, Lowe’s and the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded a $100,000 grant that the center will use to repair the slate roof in order to preserve the frescoes, which are starting to show signs of water damage. Senator Jack Reed has secured a $300,000 federal appropriation which will become available sometime in the next year. But St. Ann’s has lost out on at least as many grants as it has secured, and its finances are increasingly precarious, meaning that the $300,000 may arrive too late.
“The premise of the lease is that we would be solely responsible for the building as long as our organization was in existence,” says Ray. But this guardianship causes a Catch-22; before they will allocate repair funds, many grantors require a building’s owner to take financial responsibility for unforeseen costs associated with the project. Because the building is owned by the Diocese, the organization cannot agree to these terms, and therefore is ineligible for the funds. Further, many grantmaking organizations will not fund religiously-affiliated organizations. Although the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center is technically not religiously affiliated, “every piece of art in this building has a religious theme,” says Sue. That the building is owned by the Diocese does not help.
“We’re sort of hoping some of our programming will become more successful,” says Dominique, acknowledging that “it still may not be enough to cover the costs” of keeping the building open. Beyond that, the organization does not have much of a plan to get through the winter. Still, Dominique describes the mood among the organizations’ members as “nervously optimistic.” Nickels and dimes built the church, Sue reminds him, and nickels and dimes will save it.
