“It’s almost like the guy who likes
to restore cars,” says Henry Swiatek. “You know people who do it because they
love doing it, they rebuild an old car. Well, this is me, this is what I like
to do.”
Swiatek is standing in St. Margaret
Mary Church in Irondequoit, his work clothes covered in so many paint colors it
looks like a Technicolor dreamcoat. He’s gesturing to scaffolding against the
east wall, where garnet and gold paint details have already been applied. In
the rear of the church, on a work table covered with design plans and brushes,
sits a small radio softly playing classical music.
This is a little bigger than a car
engine. Swiatek is a restoration artisan. He has been keeping the decorative
plaster, painted interiors, and murals in churches throughout Western New York
looking beautiful — and beautifully old. He’s an artist without a signature.
“One of the ways of explaining it is
that there is a distinction between being the composer and the musician,” he
says. “You can be a musician, you can play Chopin, you can play Beethoven, but
you’re not going to compose those pieces. Sometimes people fail to see that
line. We do artistic things, but I don’t see myself as an artist in that
respect.”
At St. Margaret Mary, Swiatek has
already painted the ceiling between the wooden trusses sky blue and has painted
the plaster arches in the sanctuary to look like stone. He is now working on
decorating the wall behind the crucifix. Rambusch Company, a design and crafts
studio in New York City, developed the concept for the sanctuary’s design,
turning a plain beige wall into a rich tapestry with gilded accents and vine
motif extending from the four corners of the cross.
“It has a lot of symbolic meaning to
it,” Swiatek says. “All spiritual life is derived from that very moment. And
scripturally, too: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches.'” He goes on to
explain that the church’s sanctuary is an echo of the enormous baldacchino, or
canopy, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He then explains the
thousands-year-old history of that architecture.
He knows all this because he has read
“every book I could pick up” on architecture, sacred architecture, and
religious decoration. He does most of his work in churches, which he says is
both a conscious choice and also where a lot of the need for restoration
happens to be.
“I get to do the type of work that I
like to do, and I get to do it in the places that I like to work. There is just
really a total lack of interest, an almost apathetic, ‘Oh, so what, it’s
getting old, it had its day.’ I love Genesee Country Village Museum, but we’re
preserving Hemlock cabins and we’re letting European cathedrals be abandoned.
Where’s the rationale behind that?”
Swiatek
is actually the “son” in his company’s name, H. Swiatek & Son. He
learned how to treat old plaster and paint the old-fashioned way: He
apprenticed with his father. And an appreciation for old church buildings, combined
with the knowledge of how to treat them, has become a passion for keeping them
beautiful.
“It may be I would have never become
aware of it or sensitive if it wasn’t for the fact that my dad and I painted
and decorated churches. There were so many places we actually did work pro bono
just to save things. They would say, ‘Oh, no, take that out. How much would it
cost? No, no, just take that out.’ I knew in my heart it was wrong.”
And the business is now incorporating
the third generation. Swiatek’s daughter Stacey works with him on many jobs,
learning as he did, through practice. His youngest son Brett is getting his BFA
from Alfred University in May. Swiatek hopes his son will take the company
“global.” Or at least get a website up.
Swiatek grew up in a Polish
neighborhood in Buffalo, and he says it was a combination of a religious family
and a European upbringing — Polish was spoken in the house, Polish food was
on the table — that brought him to an appreciation for European-influenced,
cathedral-style churches.
He remembers his childhood church,
Corpus Christi, and its copy of the Raffaello Santi
painting, Disputation on the Blessed
Sacrament. “The painting is life-sized,” he says. “There are probably a
hundred figures, saints, and popes, and patriarchs. I grew up with all those
images in my eyes, and I figured that’s how the rest of the world is.”
But it wasn’t. When Swiatek first
started working with his father, there was very little interest in
preservation.
“During the ’60s and ’70s up until
the late ’80s, everybody was taking everything out because they thought it was
irrelevant,” he says. “Everything was faster, cleaner, and then you started to
develop a brutal minimalism. ‘Less is more; elegance is found in simplicity.’
Those things are true. But we don’t go to Europe to look at off-white walls or
90-degree angles. We go there to see Westminster Abbey; we go there to see
Florence; we go there to see Venice.”
Now, with a growing interest in the
value of old architecture, there are a handful of restoration graduate programs
throughout the country. And Swiatek is glad to see more attention paid to the
gems he loves. His aesthetics are rooted there.
“In this type of architecture,
there’s an arch, and then that pulls your eye through another arch, and then
into another,” he says. “It creates almost a mystery. It’s deeper space. It’s
harder and more time-intensive to produce that. I think religious space should
be transcendent space, that when you walk into it, it takes you somewhere else.
We’re starved for beauty right now. Where is beauty? Where do we find it?”
The
work Swiatek is doing at St. Margaret Mary is simple compared to the work
he’s done at other churches in the city. Think of a well-preserved urban church
in the Rochester or Buffalo areas, and chances are Swiatek has had a hand in
keeping it looking amazing: St. Michael’s, Ss. Peter and Paul, St. Stanislaus,
St. Andrews, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. For all the work he’s done, and for
being an artisan in the true, nearly lost sense of the word, last year the
Landmark Society created a Craftsman Award to give him.
He thinks it was won through his work
at St. Stanislaus: “That’s very baroque, all plastered walls, a lot of fresco work.
To really give a background on what I specifically do, that’s a better
example.” But talk to anyone who’s struggled to get the funds and find the
right craftspeople to restore a poor parish’s church — to each of them,
Swiatek is a hero.
Marion Wilmot, for example, at St.
Michael’s Church on North Clinton Avenue, halts the conversation at the word
“renovation.” “Wait a minute,” she says, “renovating is tearing out; restoring
is taking what you have. That’s what Henry does.” Wilmot is a parishioner and
volunteer on the church’s buildings and grounds committee, and she estimates
it’s been five years since the church started to tackle the extensive water
damage inside from a leaky roof. Swiatek was called in to restore huge swaths
of murals, stenciling, and plaster work.
He taught Wilmot how to refurbish
statues so she could work on a Last Supper relief on the altar where the “paint
was coming off like potato chips.” He and his daughter reapplied faux marbling
to the columns in the sanctuary, cut stencils copying what was left from the
existing wall designs, repainted, regilded, replastered, and cleaned wall
paintings. Nearly every inch of wall in the sanctuary is covered with ornate
designs.
Then, when he realized the lighting
was too poor to show off details hidden high in the neo-Gothic ceilings, he
added light fixtures, too. He’s planning to go back to replace a deteriorating
cornice after he’s made a rubber mold. “He does it willingly,” Wilmot says.
“He’s a real craftsman.”
Swiatek says when he walks into a
church for a restoration job, he finds the results of what he categorizes as
indifference: painted-over murals, crumbling plaster, additions or decorations
that don’t match the building’s style. His job is to make everything look as if
it had always been there.
“One of the things I tell people when
they first start working is you pretty much have to bury your ego,” he says.
“If you do it right, they don’t even see your work at all. You just really want
to mold yourself right into the space, and when you leave it just looks as
though it was cleaned. Then you know you’ve done the right job.”
He gives the example of work he did
in a secular space: restoration of some panels in the Davis Opera House at the
Genesee Country Museum, the replica 19th-century village in Mumford. After six
weeks the museum was still trying to decide who could do the least obtrusive
job.
“They even wanted the dust on it,”
Swiatek says. “We did one panel between one window and another. When they came
back in, we said to them, ‘Well, we’ve done a panel. But you’re going to have
to find out which one it is.’ When they couldn’t find it, that was the
convincing point that we knew what we were doing.”
Swiatek is a man behind the scenes.
He leaves behind happy customers and happy buildings — but he’s not getting
famous, and he’s not getting rich. So why do it?
“We have no pyramids in America,” he
says. “We have no Sistine Chapel. But we do have these, we have things of this
value. We need to hold on to them because they’re not just architecture,
they’re history, too, because they tell a story of the way things were. How are
we ever going to know that if we wipe them all out?”
Neighborhood churches
As city neighborhoods change, so too
does the role of urban churches. There are a number of architecturally
significant churches in Rochester — St. Michael’s Church on the corner of
Clinton Avenue and Clifford Street, Ss. Peter and Paul on West Main Street, and
St. Stanislaus on Hudson Avenue are three examples, and all have recently
launched restoration efforts — in neighborhoods that are constantly changing
around them.
Their imposing cathedral-style bodies
stick out amid boarded-up storefronts and poverty-ridden residential streets.
Today, these churches look like they were put down in the wrong place; they’re
actually monuments to another time. And their existence is not unusual.
“If you were to study American
church-building, you could draw almost a direct correlation between waves of
immigration and the way churches were built,” says Henry Swiatek, church
restoration artisan. “They wanted to create a little piece of where they came
from.”
Swiatek says immigrants in ethnically
Irish, German, Italian, and Polish neighborhoods often donated money and labor
to build, before anything else, a church. Huge parishes and ethnic pride meant
a high concentration of inner-city churches. “If you were to go to any major
urban area anywhere in the Northeast,” he says, “if you go to the old ethnic
neighborhoods you’re going to find a lot of inner-city, very significant
buildings.”
“It used to be when you stood
anywhere you could see another steeple,” says Marion Wilmot, a parishioner at
St. Michael’s. The church was built by German immigrants who, in 1890,
mortgaged their homes to create the enormous, neo-Gothic church. Now, the
neighborhood is predominately Spanish-speaking and poor. The church has adapted:
All signs and literature are in English and Spanish; each week there are both
Spanish and English masses.
Wilmot, who identifies herself as one
of “the Anglos,” says the church campus is morphing into something of a
community center. The original church, built in 1874, is a meeting hall, where
many neighborhood families hold their Quinceaños and other celebrations, and
it’s home to St. Mike’s Clothing Closet. The former rectory now houses an
intergenerational daycare center.
While Wilmot acknowledges that
attendance is hurt by the neighborhood’s reputation, and that “suburbia won’t
come down here,” she says the church itself — and anyone associated with it
— is safe. “Nobody hurts us,” she says. “Nobody bothers us.”
Ss. Peter and Paul, a 1911,
Lombard-Romanesque church, also built by German-Americans, is another example.
Its surrounding neighborhood is now predominately African-American and
Hispanic, and also very poor. Craig Murphy, a parishioner, says that attendance
has dwindled to a Sunday average of 80 people. He forecasts that the diocese
will soon close it and other area churches, combining them all at St. Monica’s
in the 19th Ward.
“Sometimes the quality of a parish
can’t be measured on numbers— not only the beauty of the church, but the fact
that it’s in an area in need of a positive force,” Murphy says. “It’s a rough
section. We’re feeding the poor, we’re churching people. Even if they’re not
Catholic, it’s a community connection. It’s not this white, suburban, ‘I’ll
drop some money in the basket; I don’t want to see the poor people.'”
The building is unbelievable. Walking
in from West Main Street — the church is kept locked except for services, a
necessity that bothers Murphy — is like stepping through a portal into
Europe. Paintings by famed Italian artist Gonippo Raggi — carefully restored
by Swiatek — are set into the altar and dot the entire ribcage of the
barrel-vaulted ceiling. Murphy says most of the parish commutes to the city for
mass. He drives from Hamlin every Sunday to attend the church he was baptized
in, and where his parents and grandparents were married.
The parish has tried to come up with
ideas to keep the church open, including a building within a building, where
office space is walled off within the church.
“What do you do with a building like
this? Who’s going to buy it? Who can afford it?” Murphy says. “If you rent it,
you still have to maintain it. If you leave it vacant, then it’s going to be
vandalized. If you push it down it’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars. We’re hoping that we can kind of keep going in some capacity.”
Swiatek remembers a case from his
hometown. “In Buffalo, the former Our Mother of Sorrow Church is now a center
for learning,” he says. “At one time they were thinking of tearing it down. An
African-American gentleman said, ‘How can they think of tearing down the most
beautiful thing we have in our neighborhood?’ That’s a beautiful concept.”
The Landmark Society will hold its 19th Annual Regional Preservation Conference,
“Maintaining Hometown Character in the 21st Century,” on Saturday, April 30, at
Trinity Episcopal Church, Fall Street, Seneca Falls, 8 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. $40.
www.landmarksociety.org, 546-7029 ext 10
Henry Swiatek will discuss his
restoration work at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 14, at Ss. Peter and Paul Church, 720
West Main Street, as part of a free Landmark Society-sponsored event. Both Ss.
Peter and Paul and West Avenue United Methodist Church will be open to tour
during the afternoon. Info: www.landmarksociety.org, 546-7029 ext 10.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2005.
