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Saturday, February 04, 2012
Feature: August 2006
Holy High Point
Craftsmen call the renovation of Sacramento’s downtown cathedral a career climax
Story by Wes Sander
It wasn’t the typical job site. The clashes that normally spark up between contractors on a job of this size weren’t there. As Project Manager Tim Spence describes it, “You wouldn’t know who worked for who because they were all working together.”
For the craftsmen, builders and construction managers working on the renovation of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, this job was like no other. Now, nine months after the reopening of Sacramento’s downtown cathedral, they talk about feeling a shared sense of humility while tearing into the region’s most historic and imposing house of worship with power saws and heavy machinery.
There was a sense of awe as well while they experienced what they knew was a career-marking moment, personally and professionally, because a job like this represents the essence of a craftsman’s pride in his work. The roof of this culturally important, century-old building had to be disassembled, the walls pried open, even the altar relocated and reworked, and it all produced some intense feelings among those involved.
“I don’t know what made it this way; just the people, or maybe because it’s a special building and the spiritual aspect brought it together,” says Spence, a project manager with Sacramento’s Harbison-Mahony-Higgins Builders, “but the team was seamless. That whole camaraderie throughout the process was something I’ve never seen before.”
There were many memory-making moments, like the time a mass schedule, published 70 years before, was found behind a sacristy cabinet. “The historic value makes it nondenominational,” Spence says of the attraction to working on the cathedral. “It’s not just for Catholics. Everybody appreciates art and history.”
And for the builders, a big part of appreciating history meant seeing firsthand how their predecessors performed the job a century ago. They saw the original millwork, some of it smoothly finished, some done hastily and roughly; they saw the walls supported by red-brick columns and wood beams milled to measurements no longer used.
There was the gravity-dependent technique for setting walls into the foundation, and strewn here and there were antique square nails, from which one worker fabricated crosses that became popular among coworkers and friends, family and clergy members.
“It was very interesting to see everyone involved became attached to the project. These kinds of projects don’t come along that often.”
— Harry Hallenbeck, vice president, Vanir Construction Management
People’s initials were carved inside the lantern, where daylight enters through the top of the cathedral’s dome, and in the attic and around the foundation there were forgotten items, like the remains of a lunch — a bottle and some discarded bones — and an old smoking pipe.
“My imagination used to go wild sometimes when we uncovered some things,” says Job Superintendent Roberto Marquez, also of Harbison-Mahony-Higgins. Marquez admits to feeling, at first, trepidation mixed with fascination. The cathedral occupies sacred space, after all, and Marquez and the rest of the assessment team were digging into its foundation, pulling away pieces of the building’s skin to peer inside.
Because scant records had been kept over the years, the cathedral’s structure needed extensive surveying, a job that took a year’s time before the renovation began in 2003.
The historical figure behind the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament is Patrick Manogue, an Irish immigrant and former mineworker who was named bishop of the Grass Valley Diocese in 1884.
Two years later, Manogue persuaded the church to move the diocese to Sacramento and immediately set about planning for a new cathedral. Construction would cost $250,000, some coming from Manogue’s mining friends, the rest from sources that remain unknown.
Manogue consciously positioned the new church at 11th and K streets, where its 216-foot bell tower could share Sacramento’s nascent skyline with the Capitol. He modeled his cathedral on the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris, a building he had come to know while attending seminary in France. Once completed in 1889, the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament was known as the largest religious structure west of the Mississippi.
When Manogue died six years later, he had yet to raise enough money for a marble altar and statues for the niches in his cathedral’s façade. The quarter-million dollars, despite being a vast sum in the 19th century, was apparently a stripped-down cost: During the year spent exploring the building, the construction team found that certain parts of the interior — like the ornamental designs at the tops of the columns — were made from different materials from one to the next.
“We found sheet metal where we might have thought it would be plaster, or cast iron where we thought it might have been terra cotta,” says Harry Hallenbeck, the project’s supervising architect and a vice president of Vanir Construction Management in Sacramento. “That leads me to believe that, at that time, there were people contributing their services.”
Burnett & Sons Mill and Lumber Co. was 17 years old when it produced the cathedral’s original wood-carved confessionals over a century ago. Twelve decades later, a highlight of the company’s renovation work is its enlargement of the same confessionals.
Computer-driven automation was used in much of the woodworking added to the first floor and rear balcony, says company President Jim Miller, whose father’s great-grandfather established Burnett & Sons in 1869. But the sections added to the confessionals were crafted by hand, allowing them to mesh with the original work, which bears slight imperfections.
“I don’t know what made it this way, but the team was seamless.
That camaraderie was something I’ve never seen before.”
— Tim Spence, project manager, Harbison-Mahony-Higgins Builders
“It’s just fun being part of a historical renovation like that,” Miller says. “To create artwork, and to see the place [finished], it’s just … wow.”
Roundels added to the dome’s interior portray scripture verses — produced by EverGreene Painting Studios of New York — and are painted on an open-weave material and backed by sheets of perforated metal through which sound waves are absorbed by a fiberglass layer.
It’s all intended to compensate for what was likely a central reason for the closure of the cathedral’s interior dome in 1932. During months of investigation and preparation, the assessment team found a newspaper article that only vaguely cited structural and acoustic concerns as reasons why the dome was sealed from below, an alteration accomplished by installing a saucer-shaped laticework “false ceiling” that rose only a few feet. Restored to its original grandeur, the dome interior rises 110 feet from the floor, and there’s now a 1-ton crucifix suspended beneath it by aircraft cables.
The reopened dome is generally considered the crowning element of the renovation. Its interior decoration, including the roundels, probably doesn’t match what was there before, as no visual record could be found, despite a public call for pre-1932 photographs of the dome from below. But it does contribute to a stylistic unification of the interior style, which Monsignor James Murphy, the cathedral rector, describes as French interpretation of Victorian renaissance.
The renovation’s cost ultimately totaled $34 million. The Sacramento Diocese says the scaffolding alone cost $1 million; interior work cost another $2 million, and a seismic retrofit ran to $3.3 million.
The walls had to be attached to the foundation and the roof attached to the walls by drilling holes and inserting 10,000 pieces of epoxied rebar. The job involved steeplejacks hired from New York to rework the seven crosses on the roof, finishing them in gold leaf.
Earthquake renovation involved inserting steel beams and columns into the walls. The cathedral now rates a collapse-prevention level of earthquake resistance, meaning that, in the event of a large earthquake, the building may not escape damage, but it will remain upright.
“The significance of the role it plays in Sacramento’s history is the reason we wanted to be a part of this project,” says Dave Higgins, once president of Harbison-Mahony-Higgins Builders. To be part of the project, Higgins came out of retirement and assumed the title of project executive. He served as part of an overseeing group, a kind of informal board of directors that consisted of Harry Hallenbeck and several diocese members.
Builder Roberto Marquez grew up Catholic,
but the faith had lost prominence in his life.
Since the renovation, he’s been approaching things a little differently.
Hallenbeck has done historic preservation before — his firm has completed restoration work around the Western states, plus Texas and Virginia. The Diocese of Sacramento, which encompasses 20 Northern California counties, has been a Vanir client for years. The cathedral renovation qualifies as the largest project Vanir has performed for the diocese. The impression it has left, says Hallenbeck, is likewise large.
“It was very interesting to be a part of that, to see that everyone involved became attached to the project,” Hallenbeck says. “These kinds of projects don’t come along that often.”
Hallenbeck, a Catholic, says the project has made an impression on churchgoers too. “I had the opportunity to admire the walls and so on,” he says of attending Mass. “But now I look at the people and see the fulfillment that they get out of this.”
Roberto Marquez of Harbison- Mahony-Higgins grew up Catholic, but the faith had lost prominence in his life. Since the renovation, he’s been approaching life a little differently.
He’s becoming reacquainted with Spanish, the language of his Catholic upbringing, and has become a member of his local parish. At the cathedral’s reconsecration in November, it was Marquez who performed the task of placing a relic of St. Toribio Romo inside the new altar.
“At first it was overwhelming,” Marquez says. “But it came along real well. You have to look at it as, she’s in distress, she needs help, so that others can enjoy it.”
