Inn at Loretto

Ages ago, in the mid-1970s, Milady and I had the mixed fortune of living in Santa Fe for a couple of years. There were several restaurants right around the Mission that we used to go to, and per Google Maps some still seem to be there.

Do you know about Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel? Short walk from the Mission. When folks left the East and headed down the long, long road which was the Santa Fe Trail, when you finally got to Santa Fe, there was "the Church at the End of the Trail." (And you'd get right down on your knees in gratitude for having survived the journey, I'm sure!) Nice little place. Lovely spiral "miracle" staircase built by a Mysterious Itinerant Carpenter. I've done some woodwork, and I am in awe of this staircase.

One of the coolest things, the very keystone over the front door has some Hebrew marking… I just asked Milady if that was right, and she said she didn't recall anything about that. Which is funny, because she's the one with the steel trap memory and I'm the one who can't recall what I had for dinner last night. [Some ixquick searching later] Okay, I had my churches confused. (It's only been, what, thirty-eight years since we lived there? Old neurons are stirred by Google street-cam images, though. "It all starts to come back to me.")

Just a little further up the road, again, is The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi (per NMCatholic blog article) has a "keystone brick arch… above the main entrance… [with] a carved triangle with the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew," reportedly in Bishop Lamy's appreciation for the contribution of a wealthy Jew for the completion of the church. Here's someone's photo of the keystone.

Uh-oh. Will this post with three links? (Pushing the envelope, I yam.)