Weird Island

24. SISTINE CHAPEL OF NEW ENGLAND: St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center

Episode Summary

Hidden away in Woonsocket, RI is a church that has been called the Sistine Chapel of New England. Inside is one of the largest collections of frescoes in the United States. While the artwork is incredible, it’s only the beginning. After the paintings draw you in, what you find are stories--because all 475 people painted into the frescoes are real people who lived in Woonsocket in the 1940s. And some of these stories will make you say, “Wow, I’ve never heard something like that before.” To Visit: 84 Cumberland Street, Woonsocket, RI 02895 - Tours Sunday 1-4

Episode Notes

To Visit: 84 Cumberland Street, Woonsocket, RI 02895 - Tours Sunday 1-4

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

Imagine you’ve just stepped into a beautiful Catholic church, with 65 foot tall ceilings, an interior dome, an altar featuring 7 different colors of rich marble. There are over 40 massive stained glass windows, designed by artists in Chartres, France, and colorful beams of light stream in, making up for the fact that there is very little artificial light in the building. And on every inch of available space--on the walls, and ceilings--there are frescoes. Beautiful, detailed frescoes--featuring colors that are unexpected and much more vibrant than most of what you’ll see in the old world European churches.
This building has been called the Sistine Chapel of New England--and it’s one of the largest collections of frescoes in the United States. Actually, when it comes to the Sistine Chapel, you could fit two of them inside of the church I’m talking about. If I told you that this incredible artistic treasure is located in Woonsocket, RI, would you be surprised?
The church itself, though it absolutely glows with beauty on the inside--it’s actually completely unassuming on the outside. You could drive by it every day and never know what was there. In fact, I basically did just that. And 20 or so years ago, it was almost lost completely.
But the artwork, it’s only the beginning. Because after the paintings draw you in, what you find are stories--and some of them are so incredible they feel right out of a movie. There are working class parishioners who literally save nickels and dimes to build the church, a hunchback painter with an inspired vision, a world war and a misunderstanding that sends the painter to an internment camp, and an elaborate plan to paint a beautiful girl into the church frescoes despite her wishes. It’s those stories, the ones that make you say, “Wow, I’ve never heard something like that before,” that make this place come to life.
I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, as part two of my Woonsocket Day Trip series, I’m going to be telling you about the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center--and the real life people behind its incredible frescoes.
Before I get to the beginning of this story, I first have to tell you the end, because today, St. Ann is no longer a church. It is the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center, and that’s because in 2000, with membership declining and maintenance costs rising, the Diocese of Providence announced it would close the church. And it might have been demolished, had it not been for the efforts of a small group of determined individuals who knew they had to save it. These people, they became the guardians of this place and the people on the walls and their stories. And I couldn’t tell these stories without their help. So, Dominique Doiron, executive director of the arts and cultural center, helped me not only tell the stories of the church but pronounce the many French names involved in them, including his own:
Do you mind, actually, pronouncing your name, first and last, to make sure I don’t get it wrong? Well there’s two ways you can do it. You can do it in the French way, Dominique Doiron, or you can do it in the English way, Dominique Doiron.
And Dominique, he’s been here - involved in the church for quite a while.
“So actually, I was born and raised here. This was my parish growing up.
So, if you listened to last week’s episode, I told you that we could start this story at the train station, so let’s go back there, because it will help explain why there are so many French names in this story. In the early 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution developed in nearby Pawtucket, Woonsocket was identified as another prime location for textile mills. The first mill was built in 1831, and it wasn’t long before the textile industry expanded, so much so that there weren’t enough people to work in the mills. One of the first groups of people to work in the mills were Irish immigrants, many of whom had come to build the Blackstone canal. But by the mid 1800s, as steam power enabled mills to be made bigger and it powered the railroads, mill agents traveled north to Quebec to recruit French Canadians to leave their farms and take up work in the US. Some saw this as a temporary opportunity to earn money, and the inexpensive railroads allowed them to go back and forth between the US and Canada relatively frequently. But many moved permanently to New England and to Woonsocket specifically, which became one of the most French cities in America. A 1913 survey by the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers estimated Woonsocket had the 6th largest population of French or French Canadian citizens in the country. The French Canadian immigrants who moved to Woonsocket would frequently travel home to visit with family, and here in the city they formed tight knit communities to preserve their culture, language and faith.
And this is how this church was started. The St. Ann parish was a French-Canadian Roman Catholic parish founded in 1890, and it wasn’t in the building that exists now. The original church complex included a gym and a theater, intended to encourage young people to stay within the community. And people did stay within the community. As the church grew, it needed to expand into a larger space. So the parishioners, many of them mill workers making as little as $7 a week, pinched pennies to raise the $150,000 it would take to build the new church.
“When people walk in, the first thing they think is, “wow, this must have been an incredibly wealthy parish, usually you see artwork like this, it’s in big mansions, it’s in wealthier parts of cities or states. And it couldn't be farther from the truth. “Everything from the construction of the building to the installation of the various types of art in here was nickeled and dimed. We really do mean nickeled and dimed. They pooled their resources together, everything from extra collections on the weekends, to holding your church fundraisers, literally collecting nickels and dimes to do everything that was done here. So it really truly was a community effort to build for themselves a magnificent structure.”
In 1914, construction began on the new building. But just before construction wrapped up, the money--it ran out. The building was there, but the big windows intended to let in light were just plain old windows--no beautiful stained glass. And the walls were plain, grey, unfinished stucco. But, in 1918, the church opened its doors anyway, unfinished walls and all.
By the 1920s, a little more money had been raised--enough to replace those plain glass windows with 40 beautifully detailed stained glass windows created by French artists.
In the 1930s, the church really flourished. It was the hub of the community--with over 6,000 members. The building could fit roughly 1,500 people inside, but even so, every Sunday, seven masses were said to accommodate the huge population. And if you wanted to attend midnight mass on Christmas, you had to buy a lottery ticket and hope your number was pulled.
By 1940, the thriving church was in a position to do a little more decorating. So Reverend Ernest Morin led a drive to raise another $25,000 to add more color to the grey walls. And when the money had been raised, he went out in search of an artist.
What was happening was the pastor at the time was visiting different churches that were being decorated. He actually pretty much went over all over NE looking at different artists
But then, he walked into St. Matthew’s church in Central Falls, where a tiny, devout hunchback named Guido Nincheri painted away, and there was something about Nincher’s art that just felt right. He invited Nincheri to St. Ann’s to see if he’d be interested in doing some sort of artwork on the walls.
And when he walked into the church, the first thing he noticed was that the walls and ceilings hadn’t been plastered.
Suddenly, Nincheri knew this could be more than just another commission. This could be his Sistine Chapel - because the unfinished, unplastered walls provided a rare opportunity to do something called a buon fresco - a style of painting in which paint is applied to wet plaster. Just like Michelangelo did.
And that’s very very important, because to do a true fresco, it’s painting on a wet plaster. And if the walls are already plastered you can’t put plaster over plaster. The walls and ceilings were finished in a grey stucco cement. Now why was it finished like that? Why not plaster? Because normally the last thing you do to a building is you plaster, you put that final smooth coat on there to paint. Well the answer was simple, when they were constructing the building, they simply ran out of money. So they left the walls and ceilings as just stucco cement. And then 25 years later, here comes this artist who looks at these walls and says, oh my gosh, here is this extraordinarily rare opportunity for me.
So, Nincheri excitedly pitches the idea to the pastor. But, the pastor hesitates.
And he talks about the fresco style to the pastor and says, oh, it’ll be just like the fresco style in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Fresco doesn’t fade like an oil painting does, it doesn’t peel like an oil painting, and goes on and on and on. And the pastor, being the business administrator that he has to be, says to Nincheri, Well, how much extra is this fresco thing going to cost. And Nincheri says to him, nothing. Because no matter what he does, if he’s going to paint directly on the wall, if it’s oil or if he’s going to paste a mural to the wall, he has to smooth out that surface. He has to plaster it anyways. So if he’s going to plaster, why not do this whole fresco thing. And I guess the pastor had no other arguments about, it, so he said, alright let’s do it. And this building became Nincheri’s Sistine Chapel. This was his biggest masterpiece, his biggest fresco work that he ever created.
The story doesn’t end there, though. It’s just the beginning. Because while Nincheri was originally contracted to finish the project in two years, it ultimately took eight. And there were a number of reasons for that. Some of them are kind of what you would expect.
He couldn’t paint in the summer or the winter, because the extreme NE temperatures had negative effects on the drying time of the plaster, so that time was used for planning. He was also working on other projects at the same time. He would make frequent trips up to Canada where his stained glass studio was, which was his primary trade, uh you know to check on that factory and come back down.
But there were a few things that delayed the project that I can’t imagine anyone expected.
WWII broke out, you know, because the project started a year or two before WWII, before the US entered it. And that delayed his ability to get supplies. And then on one of his trips back to Canada, he gets arrested. A few years prior, there was an italian church up in Canada that hired him to do some frescoes, and they insisted that he do a portrait of Mussolini. Uh, it was something he didn’t want to do. He wasn’t very political, but he definitely didn’t agree with the politics of Mussolini at the time, and it was one of those situations where they forced his hand. They said, well you either do the portrait or we rip up your contract. And reluctantly he did the portrait of Mussolini, and because of that portrait, on one of his trips back to Canada, he was arrested and he was imprisoned in a hard labor concentration camp. So that delayed the project. So there were a number of factors that went into delaying the project here at the center. A lot of dignitaries from the city, the state and the diocese went up to Canada to plead his case, but it still took a long time to get him out of prison.
But when the weather conditions were right, and he wasn’t arrested, and supplies were able to be obtained, Nincheri was hard at work filling every inch of the walls and ceilings with frescoes. They built special scaffolding for him, because unlike Michelangelo, who would lay flat while painting the ceilings, Nincheri, because he was a hunchback, had to sit on a stool or a bucket and look up to paint.
And when it came to the design of the paintings, Nincheri asked the parishioners of St. Ann to model for him.
The nun who played the church organ modeled as St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Nincheri’s wife Giulia became St. Ann. He asked one of the nuns who taught 7th grade to send him the two most mischievous boys, and he paid them each 50 cents and a peanut butter sandwich to model as the devils in the Last Judgment scene. He also portrayed the Mother Superior, who he frequently butted heads with, as a fallen angel.
But the really amazing thing is that, because we’re really only a generation or two removed from many of these people who modeled for the frescoes, in some cases we know more than just a quippy one liner about each person--we know who they really were and what they were like. And many of the people who are still connected to the church or come to the church, they have this direct connection to the artwork. Including a woman I met named Jenine.
Jenine Osiur - her grandfather is on the ceiling, he’s portrayed as Saint Joachim, Mary’s father… and he was a belgian immigrant. He was actually descended from a line of Dukes. So he technically was Belgian royalty. He came to the United States, he immigrated here to Woonsocket, and he was also, his trade was a printer, but his trade was a playwright, and back in the day, St. Ann’s as a property, part of the structure that they called a gymnasium. And within this theater, among other things, was a 750 seat vaudeville theater. And so he directed and wrote plays for that theater, and he was here in the 40s and he was already an older, and he was one of the people that Guido Nincheri chose to portray on the ceiling and he was portrayed as St. Joachim.
To me, the amazing thing is that Guido Nincheri didn’t discriminate. He painted Belgian royalty on the walls. And he painted the janitor.
Someone else on the walls, um we have a painting of Jonah and the Whale... the guy that’s portrayed as Jonah, his name is Alphone Lavalle, and he actually worked for the church, he’s what they called in French le bideu, sometimes the term sexton will be used. The most common term is the janitor. And what people marvel at is Jonah and the whale, he has this incredible sculpted body, and that was not only his face but his body as well, again harking back to that st anne’s gymnasium, in that gymnasium there were workout rooms, and this was back in the days when the furnace was fired by coal, and so he would be one of the people down in the boiler room shoveling and having to move lots and lots of coal to keep the furnaces running in the winter time, and he was chosen to portray Jonah in Jonah and the whale.
There are, in total, thought to be 475 people painted within the church. That’s over 400 lifetime's worth of stories to explore. Unfortunately, not every story is remembered. But there’s one more incredible one I want to share with you.
There was one member of the church who really stood out to Nincheri, this beautiful young girl named Marguerite Forget. And Nincheri was dying to paint her as the angels.
She had this look. There was a certain look to her that he just liked, maybe he had a little infatuation with her, you never know. Maybe she became a type of a muse for a while. Who knows, you know?
The problem was, she was incredibly modest and she and her parents didn’t feel it was proper to model. So she refused Nincheri’s request. But he was determined. So he formed a friendship with her family, and he would stop by in the evenings to talk in French. And Marguerite would be around, maybe she’d offer him something to drink, and at the end of the evening, he would race home. The family thought it was a little strange, but he was a busy man, after all, and he sat all day, so maybe he was racing home to exercise. But one day, Nincheri approached Marguerite in the church. “What do you think?” he asked, and pointed up to 40 portraits of angels, representing virtues like faith, hope, and charity. And every angel had her face. Nincheri had spent those evenings with her family memorizing her face, and had raced home to sketch it until he got it right.
It’s one of those things where he was determined to do her portrait, and he did what he needed to do to get her portrait. And here we are. She’s in here, as far as we know, 40 times within the building memorialized. And she’ll be here forever.
By all accounts, Marguerite was a beautiful woman her whole life, and she remained a part of the community.
Even a few years after the church closed, she lived in her childhood apartment where she grew up on Golden Avenue before going in to a nursing home, and she a wonderful, wonderful person, I knew her very very well, She was also a really great singer, so she was a member of the choir, she soloed a lot, she had this beautiful, beautiful angelic voice and she passed away, quite a while ago, I want to say it's close to 15 years ago, give or take a couple of years.
There are so many stories to tell. Before I let Dominique go, I asked him to tell me the one thing he wishes people knew about St. Ann’s.
One of the biggest things I try to impress upon people is that, first of all, there are two paintings in here, because it was done during WWII, there are two paintings dedicated to the war, dedicated to WWII, which is something else that is super, highly unusual to have something like that done within a church, and here they are, two of them here. We often times talk about the greatest generation, and the church was painted during WWII, so a lot of the faces on the walls, on the ceilings, were… these were all people who were part of that greatest generation they were part of the war effort. Some of them literally went off to war, some of them never returned. Many of them worked in the factories that sewed the blankets, made the boots, that went over to the soldiers, overseas, and the rest of them were here back home doing what they could to support the war effort. And what we have here, these aren’t wealthy people. But these are regular people who lived through an incredibly difficult time. And what we have here, although done in a religious medium, is a living scrapbook. And the only difference with this scrapbook is that we can’t fold it up into a neat little book and tuck it into the back of a closet. These greatest generation are permanently on display, and that’s a part of what we’re trying to save here. Is a moment of time. If we can keep the building going, we want to make sure we can pass the building off to the next generation, so at least this small group of people will never be forgotten. Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, so that’s what we do here.
I couldn’t have told any of these stories without the help of Dominique and Joe, who was my tour guide, and all of the other incredible volunteers who keep these stories alive. While the church is only open for tours on Sunday from 1-4, Dominique and Joe and Wally, who is chairman of the board of directors, and many others are there every single day maintaining the building and running events. I urge you to visit the church. If you only visit one place I’ve mentioned so far, make it this one. And when you do, thank the volunteers for the work they’re doing, and ask Joe or Dominque to tell you what it takes to do something as simple as change a lightbulb - because it sounds like a simple task, but it will blow your mind what that team does to make it so the stories and artwork are not forgotten.
Thank you so much for listening. And a big thank you to Dominique Doiron. If you lived in Woonsocket or know someone who did and is up on the walls in St. Ann, I would love to hear that story! You can email me or send me a recorded voice memo at weird rhode island @ gmail.com. See you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!