Catch Our Stonemasons at the Smithsonian!

We call them our Rock Stars, and next month the Cathedral's talented stone masons and stone carvers will take center stage at the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival.

This year’s festival, focusing on Youth and the Future of Culture, will be held on the National Mall July 2-7.  Our Head Stone Mason, Joe Alonso, will be joining Stone Carvers Andy Uhl, Sean Callahan and Brianna Castelli to talk about Next Generation Artisans in the Traditional Building Trades.

Brianna, if you remember, is the first woman hired as a Cathedral stone mason, and she’s already made quite a splash.

The Festival’s blog caught up with our stone crew, and here’s a sampling:

Alonso sees the final stretch of earthquake repairs—which will include repairing the top of the skyscraping central tower—on the Cathedral as his “magnum opus.” Figuring out the logistics and strategy for the repairs is a lot of work before the masons even pick up a hammer or chisel. But the repairs have also given them access to parts of the building they would have never been on otherwise, which has led to unique opportunities to contribute to the building. Recently, they were on the Cathedral’s roof and discovered a small, uncarved block.

“I haven’t touched it yet, but Joe said that I could put a little creation up there one day,” Castelli said. “That’s pretty crazy, because we normally don’t add new things to the building. It’s all re-creation and preserving. But someone forgot way back then to decorate it.”

For Alonso, who plans to retire when the tower repairs are completed in a few years, it’s all part of passing along the trade.

“When you’re on a building like this, it’s handed over to you from the previous generation,” he said. “It’s like, okay, here you go. It’s now yours for the next twenty or thirty, or in my case forty years. And now here we are. And eventually we’ll say, ‘Here you go, Bri.’”