‘Honoring the past, but moving forward’

Center Church in New Haven gets repairs and a new minister, who previously served in Greenwich

There was no daredevil steeplejack balanced on one foot and holding on with one hand, but it has been an adventure for the craftsmen who have lived it for the past two years.

The steeple on the Center Church on the Green in New Haven, which tops out at 205 feet, has been strengthened and repaired for the next century through a partnership of modern engineering and artistic understanding of the original builders.

Center Church, established in 1639, is synonymous with the New Haven Colony itself. It was founded a year earlier by the same Puritans and led by the Rev. John Davenport.

For more than a century the church has had an association with F.J. Dahill Co. of New Haven, which opened its doors in 1883, providing roofers and steeplejacks around the Northeast as part of its structural restoration firm.

Among them, daredevil Frank “Jack” Dahill was famously pictured untethered atop the steeple in 1936 — a height of 18 stories — a performance he repeated on tall structures multiple times throughout his long career. More about him later.

Now a fourth-generation local firm, Dahill provided construction manager Richard Barabas and carpenters Ted Keating and Phil Marsh, among other craftsmen, for the United Church of Christ project.

Jaret Lynch of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates Inc. was the structural engineer who worked with architects from the Shelton company.

“Dahill is wonderful in that they have true craftsmen that we can have conversations with. It is a dialogue. It is not an engineer in the office drawing details. It is more of a back and forth,” Lynch said.

Donna Hall, the church’s treasurer and member of the building committee, said since the scaffolding has been up for more than two years, there was were a lot questions from the community to answer.

The project, which started in September 2019, was extended in time because of the pandemic and in scope when they discovered the need to repair and find the source of water damage to the steeple.

Beyond the actual work, however, “there has been this fantastic convergence” of events, Hall said.

On Sept. 1, the church hired the Rev. Richard S. DenUyl Jr. as senior minister, reopened the physical space on a Sunday for the first time since spring 2020 and brought Karen Clute onboard as music director.

“We are pretty excited about the whole thing,” Hall said.

DenUyl, who was in the mental health field while his wife was a resident at Yale Medical School in the 1980s, is happy to be back in Connecticut and impressed with the energy he has found in New Haven. He also previously served for four years at the First Congregational Church of Greenwich.

“Greenwich gets a bad rap, but that was probably one of the most energetic congregations I have ever been in,” he said.

As for returning to New Haven, “this is a welcome home for me,” DenUyl said, as he takes up a new ministry as the physical upgrading of the church unfolds.

Jamie McAdams, son of Frank “Jack” Dahill and the company’s president, reiterated Lynch’s comments that all their clients are important, but the significance of this structure made the work special.

“Everything has to be done to historic standards. It makes everything fairly challenging. There were a ton of wood pieces that had to be recarved . ... None of it was easy, but everyone loved doing it because the church is such a cool church,” McAdams said.

The contractors started at the top with the weather vane, which, because of a possible lightning strike, was crooked for a long time.

“We had so many complaints about that crooked weather vane,” Hall said. It is now standing up straight and it works.

Measuring 8 feet from tip to tail, the weather vane was repaired with a new interior stainless steel rod; the exterior has new gold leaf.

Inside the steeple, its timber frame was built within the brick tower that sits on top of the twostory meeting house itself.

Lynch said it was a very clever way to do it, allowing the builders to hoist it straight up by windlass and tackle from this vantage in two hours.

This is the fourth church on the site since the Pilgrims constructed the original meeting house in the 17th century.

The engineer said the huge steeple frame was strengthened substantially in 1912 when the last major work was done here.

Barabas and Lynch pointed out that the timbers were hand hewed as you can actually see the ax marks on three sides. The last side is smooth after the pieces were cut in half at a sawmill in New Haven.

A shortage of truck drivers, a more modern issue, was never a problem as the roof timbers were floated to the city down a river from forests in northern New England.

The trees must have been in excess of 100 feet to get the 72 feet of usable structural timber, Lynch said.

While the repairs are still are difficult today, the workers building this latest iteration of the church in 1812-14 had geopolitical issues with which to deal.

The British had blockaded the waterways, but religion had some sway. After some negotiations, the soldiers made an exception for the lumber coming for the three churches that stand on the Green, including Center Church.

The timber also served as bulletin boards for many of the workers who have come through over the centuries, with names and dates painted on them.

Barabas found his grandfather, Hank Wheeler, dated 1979.

Dates for other workers were 1907, 1933, 1979, 1939, some in the 1880s — with the largest amount around 1912. Very old timbers likely were recycled from the earlier churches.

Barabas described Wheeler as a big guy physically, not someone you would associate with the steeplejacks who would throw ropes out the small doors high up on the steeple and lower themselves in bosun chairs to paint and repair the structure.

McAdams said when the workers “were on the top of a steeple or smokestack you were the painter, the mason, the carpenter, the roofer. They did everything because no one else was going up there. Our company evolved because of what they did.”

Lynch said there are five ledges throughout the steeple and when they transition from one to the other, the architecture gets fancier. It ends with Corinthian “the closer you get to heaven.”

As for the overall architecture of the church, Lynch said “it reflects the three primary orders of Greek architecture that were being revived in the early 1800s.”

The main part of the church shows the Doric order, which has the least ornamentation, followed by “moderately ornate Ionic,” which covers the tiers of the steeple transition before ending in the “highly decorative Corinthian.”

A lot of the wood decay was out at the cladding, or facade, and was not structural. The main timbers were in good condition, with the exception of one brace.

Where there were problems with decorative columns, to replace a piece of the wood they needed to source a tree to make it and find a lathe big enough.

The biggest section that needed replacing was 7.5 feet long and 20 inches in diameter. They matched the wood species to the original lumber in each case, finding sources for red oak, white oak, Eastern white pine and a little bit of black locust.

The upside is that they were not competing for lumber at stores hit by supply chain problems.

They found the lathe they needed at Mystic Seaport, which has one to make sailing masts.

Each ledge has new copper roofing to replace the deteriorated sheathing and stop them from sagging. Barabas said you can’t see it because they are painted white, but it is one of the upgrades that make this a 100-year repair.

The clock, which dates to 1923, will tell the right time before the project is finished, something that hasn’t happened in a decade. The hands on the clock face have been changed to rebalance it and the mechanicals upgraded.

The workers took the frames of the windows out and refurbished them before reinstalling. At the bell level, they found the mechanism used to hoist it up and a discussion broke out on the use of oxen.

What rules?

Back to Frank “Jack” Dahill: granddaughter Beth Lovestead summed up his life.

“He was a colorful character to say the least,” Lovestead said. She said he followed in the footsteps of her great-grandfather, but (Frank Dahill) “sort of took it to another level of crazy and fear of nothing.”

He “didn’t think the rules applied to him,” she said.

According to a feature story on him in the New Haven Register in 1957, in an accident when he was 21, he fell 102 feet from a chimney in Waterbury, then bounced off a corrugated roof of a shed before

hitting the ground.

He sustained multiple fractures, broken vertebrae, torn ligaments, a concussion and split his tongue. He spent three weeks in the hospital but soon was back at work.

She said he would rig a new job under cover of darkness to hide his method, but Lovestead said it was really a way “to get free publicity.”

McAdam agreed he was very good at getting press. He very much understood marketing in order to land a job.

“People were very impressed. He got a kick out of it,” said McAdams, who has run the company for 45 years and oversees its 100 employees.

Mary Ann McAdams, Jamie’s mother and Frank Dahill’s daughter, is the keeper of the newspaper clippings and photos her father collected during his career.

“He was a scrapbook keeper of his antics all over the state and New York,” she said.

Mary Ann McAdam, at 93, still comes to the office where she works in accounts receivable.

“I call it my happy place — I get to come in to work every day and it is lovely. I like to think I’m the money bounty hunter,” she said.

Mary Ann McAdam called her father a “maverick” and liked the idea that he set his own path.

His daring has kept the company moving, including during the Depression when he didn’t have to lay off any of his field workers.

“As Katherine Hepburn once said, ‘if you obey all the rules, you will never have any fun.’ He was a lot of fun and we had a lot of good times,” she said. He died at age 81.

Hall said the next project will be the roof, as they continue to work their way down through the building to repairs of the front steps and the shoring up of pillars in the crypt.

The Green was a graveyard with most of the headstones moved to the nearby Grove Street Cemetery. Center Church was built over the graveyard.

Hall gave a shout out to the state Department of Economic and Community Development for the $200,000 grant it gave Center Church to go toward the extensive work, the main purpose of which is to keep out the water and preserve everything inside.

“Preserving the cultural history of Connecticut is one of the things that they are committed to. I think it is important because you see a lot of religious buildings being turned into housing,” Hall said.

“It is forward looking in its own way. It is honoring the past, but moving forward,” Clute said.