hidden stories of aq 6 The first mention of the apartment was in a 1925 article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “Above the Aquinas cafeteria,” the reporter noted, “is a caretaker’s living quarters—kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and a bath, as well as a veranda.” Today, that small apartment is used for storage. “You can find the grades of students, school records, handwritten examinations, and attendance reports— from about the 1930s, up to the present day,” Vicky Lopuchowycz ‘98, Aquinas Registrar, tells me. “We keep the doors locked and very few of us have keys.” She and I are standing there surrounded by boxes–in rooms where the paint is peeling and the rooms are largely gutted. Vicky remembers when, in 1996, she and other members of the stage crew carried the old stove down the stairs to use as a prop in “The Boys Next Door,” an Aquinas play directed by Ted Mancini ‘88, P’26, who led the theatre department before he became principal. When Larry Ansini ‘70, was in college, Aquinas hired him to clean and paint the place. Now, as a member of security at the school, he provides additional details. He’s opened a door in the fieldhouse that was once on the exterior of the building; it’s one entrance up to the apartment. Larry talks of those who lived there through the years. In 1946, Harry Wright, the young football coach Aquinas hired, moved into the apartment with his family while looking for a place to live in Rochester. And Larry remembers, “Willy Hill, a cook for the school and for the Basilians when they lived at 402 Augustine Street, lived here and so did C. Moody Johnson, an assistant football coach.” David Martin, school band director in the 1980s, was its last occupant. There are two stairways to the apartment; the other is off the first-floor corridor near the Women’s Locker Room; it’s so unsafe it’s seldom used. But once it led directly to the Aquinas Boiler Room. “The school’s night watchman lived in the apartment,” Larry says, “so he could take that stairway to tend to the boiler without having to go outside the building.” Larry opens another door just outside the Aquinas library; we go down into the Aquinas basement which stretches only under the northern half of the school. Under the rest, there’s dirt—and tunnels, some hand dug. Larry calls the basement ‘the dungeon;’ it now includes the Boy’s locker room, showers, coaches’ offices, a maintenance shop, other small rooms, a corridor, and— in the largest area—the boiler room with two large gas-fired boilers and pipes running everywhere. “In the beginning,” Larry says, “the boilers burned coal—and trash from the building— to heat the school.” He takes me down a narrow underground passageway. “For several years,” he says, “this was a ‘Civil Defense Corridor.’ There were olive green drums with Geiger counters, blankets, and boxes of crackers lined up along the walls. In the late 1960s, the government came and took it all away.” Now athletic uniforms hang here. We end up in a small room where buckets of paint are stored. He points to a large hole in the ceiling. “That’s a chute,” he says, “with openings on every floor. They used to dump school trash—paper mostly—down the chute. It was collected here in a cart and wheeled to the boilers to be burned.” They don’t do that anymore. Parts of this dungeon hold a special memory for Larry. In 1967, when he was an Aquinas sophomore, the Buffalo Bills played the Boston Patriots at Aquinas Memorial Stadium. “ e Bills were using our locker room, down here in the dungeon,” he remembers, “and I had the assignment to make sure they had everything they needed. When quarterback Jack Kemp got off the bus, he said, ‘I hear you have a beautiful chapel in this building.’ I took him to it—and waited while he prayed for about fifteen minutes.” Although Kemp threw for a 32-yard touchdown, the Patriots won 13-10 on a field goal. As we come back up to the first floor of Aquinas, Larry puts away his keys. We’ve gone from the highest hidden place in Aquinas—the apartment—to its lowest, the dungeon. “When you come back,” he suggests, “I could tell you some ghost stories.” at could be interesting... The Apartment & the Dungeon Aquinas has a number of hidden places: in back of walls, beneath floors, behind locked doors. Today, we’ll explore two—the apartment and the dungeon. Pipes lead everywhere in the building from the gas boilers in the dungeon. One of two doors to the Aquinas apartment, with the doorbell still in place. One of two stairways into the Aquinas apartment. e Aquinas apartment is now used to store school records going back to the 1930s. Athletic uniforms now hang in this underground corridor where civil defense materials were once stored. e Boiler Room is in the basement behind a locked door on the rst oor of the school. By Bob Gibbons ’65 AQUINAS LANDMARK | WINTER 2026
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