Notre Dame Cathedral is about to open again thanks in part to this New Yorker
He showed Paris some love — and some specialty carpentry skills.Jackson DuBois, a 49-year-old from Cooperstown, NY, spent three months in France last year working to rebuild the 850-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral, which was severely damaged by a fire in April 2019.
After an estimated $767 million in repairs by skilled craftspeople from around the world, it is set to reopen to the public Dec.7.
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” DuBois told The Post of being part of the restoration.DuBois specializes in timber framing — a traditional building technique that was popular before the 20th century and involves using heavy pieces of timber, not slender wooden two-by-fours or steel beams, for construction.He’s restored historic barns and other agricultural buildings in Upstate New York for both private clients and museums and worked on landmarks in Estonia, Denmark, Poland and the United Kingdom.
His timber-framing skills are relatively rare.The Timber Framers’ Guild, for which he serves as Executive Director, only has around 2,000 members.
The Notre Dame job came to DuBois in a roundabout manner.In the summer of 2021, he joined a 40-strong team of other American carpenters in Washington, DC, on the Handshouse Truss project.
The group worked off of original drawings to hand-build an identical replica of one of Notre-Dame’s giant trusses to raise awareness for the cathedral’s plight and show solidarity with their French counterparts.Their efforts caught the eye of Notre Dame’s lead architect, Phillippe Villeneuve, who invited some of the Americans to come work on the cathedral.DuBois was the perfect man for the job.
Not only is he skilled in historical carpentry techniques, he also has French heritage dating back to the Huguenots who fled France to settle in New York state in the 17th century.His last name even means “of wood” in French.
But, he admitted his language skills aren’t amazing.“My French is quite poor.In France th...