The Spires of St. Anne's

As reported in the Republican-American on May 2, the iconic spires of St. Anne's Church will be removed by All Saints Parish this summer. The job will cost the parish an estimated $881,255. The plan is to remove the Vermont blue marble blocks carefully, so that they can be used to someday restore the spires if enough money can be raised. The dome of the church is also in need of repairs; parishioners have told me there is water coming in through the dome windows.

The twin spires of St. Anne in 2006

This is not the first time that stonework has fallen from the building. Major repairs were done in the 1980s and the 2000s, but the problems have continued.

I have, frankly, had trouble tracing all of the repairs done to the towers, as very little information is available, and what I can find seems contradictory in places. A newspaper article in 2004 stated that $329,000 had just been spent to repair the towers and dome, but in 2006 there was a chunk of stonework missing from the west tower. Another newspaper article, from 2006, stated that the parish had raised nearly $2 million for repairs to the building. When I curated an exhibit about Waterbury architecture in 2009, repairs to the spires and dome had just wrapped up the previous year, but in 2011, the parish was once again talking about raising money to repair the spires.