Nonmiraculous Spiral Staircase

As an architectural element the spiral staircase always holds intrigue.  Where might it lead?   An alchemist’s lair, an artist’s garret, a lighthouse lens, the captain’s quarters?

My dorm room window during my sophomore year at Columbia College provided me a slantwise view of the front facade of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a place built for an epic congregation, frequented then by only a few, myself included, and now the resting place of James Gandolfini.  Once in my wanderings I encountered a deacon who asked me “Do you want to see something?”  Not what you think. What followed was an enthralling, rambling tour through the hollow walls of the building honeycombed with passageways, tunnels, bridges, spiral staircases, windows both outwards and inwards, a world of its own that few if any parishioners would even guess at.

So when presented with the problem of connecting the lobby of the Northland Aviation FBO at the Flagstaff airport to the briefing room aka classroom above without taking up valuable space, the spiral staircase solution naturally came to mind.  What ensued was a massive amount of geometry and trigonometry to align all the factors of rise, run, rotation, radii, step overlap, etc., all those numbers eventually converted to huge chiseled mortises deep into an APS (Arizona Public Service) power pole.  The treads were laminated hemlock 2x4's each embedded so tightly that the balusters might not have been necessary, though I would not venture even an approach to the Loretto Chapel’s miraculous staircase.   The 2x2 balusters rose into the room above and supported a circular railing laminated to them piece by piece of 1/8" baltic birch, eventually some 25 layers.

I taught my first ground school classes in that room above.  We could have been in the 40's, discussing aviation on the second floor of our Quonset hut hangar. The circular railing sat right in front of the instructor’s table with the student desks behind.  Latecomers, every teacher’s nemesis, would then be unable to sneak into the back of the classroom, but instead their heads would rise inch by inch through this cylinder for all to see, the instructor’s scimitar mentally poised to swing across the tube, the transgressor’s head sent evenly bouncing down the steps with their perfectly parallel and equal rises.

This spiral staircase paid for much of my commercial pilot’s license, and later one of my ground school students ordered a similar spiral staircase, the ascent to a loft in her own home and a rare instance in my custom woodworking career in which I utilized the knowledge gained from #1 to do a second of something.  The Quonset hangar itself, alas, was a victim to progress, the staircase salvaged.

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