Frank Capassso & Son’s Restoration Project at Greenwich’s St. Roch Church preserves what was built with ‘loving hands’
“Stone buildings, if properly maintained, can last indefinitely,” Dan FitzPatrick, chair of the parish’s finance advisory council that is overseeing the work, told Greenwich Time. “The issue is making sure there is proper maintenance. We live in a climate that can be challenging during winters and we have storms coming through. Water can get between stones and crack it so you have to maintain it.”
Rain and snow have taken a toll on the exterior and created leaks inside the building. Over the years, there have been “well-intentioned” but not necessarily effective measures taken to provide short-term fixes for the problems, such as using cement instead of mortar to make repairs, FitzPatrick said.
“We needed to do something,” FitzPatrick said. The church brought in the Shelton-based engineering firm of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates to do a full study of the building and determine what fixes were needed. Those recommendations formed the basis of the privately funded project.
Work began in the summer of 2021 and is now nearly complete.
“It was like going to the doctor,” FitzPatrick said. “First the doctor diagnoses and then prescribes. What we have learned from the past is that you had to understand how the building breathes and works as well as seeing what was important and what needed repair.
“Without that we would have most likely done a repair job that wouldn’t have been ideal. We wanted to do this right and give us decades of use,” he said. “We had to fix the exterior before we did anything else.”
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