Want a Piece of Pope Francis Carpet? This NJ Company Will Send You Some

Left: Pope Francis in Philadelphia, with carpet laid by NJ’s Event Carpet beneath his feet (Photo by Bradley Maule) / Right: Event Carpet’s Ted Resnick, holding a square of white pope carpet and a cross made from white and gold pope carpet (Photo courtesy Event Carpet)

Pope Francis is long gone from Philadelphia, but one New Jersey businessman has found a way to keep the spirit of giving going full force: He’s sending fragments of carpet from the papal events to people all over the world in exchange for donations to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children.

Flemington’s Ted Resnick, 68, is no stranger to high-profile carpeting. Through his longtime business Event Carpet (he also owns the Flemington Department Store, which his family has operated since 1963), he has installed carpeting for events at the White House and State Department, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, and even Ivanka Trump‘s wedding. And when Pope Benedict came to the United States in 2008, Resnick laid the carpet at Yankee Stadium and St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers.

“So when I heard that Pope Francis was coming to Philadelphia, I called the people in charge and gave them my credentials,” says Resnick. “The problem in this industry is reliability. They say they can do it, but can they really? We have the right track record.”

Resnick got the contract, and like many of the vendors providing services to the World Meeting of Families, he donated his company’s time, and most of the carpet itself was donated by suppliers. “I was happy to do it for a job like that,” says Resnick. “It’s the Super Bowl of our industry.”

Ted Resnick and son Joel Resnick after installing pope carpet in Philadelphia.

Event Carpet installed over 10,000 square feet of white carpet from Shaw Floors, but the gold carpet was a special order. Resnick explains that prior to Pope Benedict’s visit, he discovered that no one actually made the right color of gold carpet.

So he found a small carpet mill in Georgia that came up with a special dye and made the carpet, the color becoming known as Pope Gold. And when it came time to lay down carpet for Pope Francis, he called the same mill and had more made. “Fortunately, he still had the recipe for the Pope Gold dye,” says Resnick.

When the job was done, Event Carpet removed all of the pope carpet from the stages. Normally, they would throw the vast majority of carpet away, but in the case of the pope carpet, they kept it all.

People started asking Resnick for a piece of the carpet, and so he decided to offer up four-square-inch pieces in exchange for a donation to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children. Resnick attended an event for St. Jude’s and was touched by a 20-year-old woman who essentially lived at St. Jude’s for five years battling cancer. “She said that the biggest problem in her life was watching her friends die, the ones she grew up with at St. Jude’s,” remembers Resnick, adding that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Requests have been pouring in from all over the United States and as far away as Australia, and Resnick says that the campaign has raised between $40,000 and $50,000 so far. It’s all based on the honor system. If someone tells Resnick that they’ve made a donation to St. Jude’s, he assumes they wouldn’t lie about such a thing and sends them the pope carpet. We have a call in to St. Jude’s to find out just how much has come in since the pope carpet campaign began.

“One guy donated $400 and another person donated $500,” he says. “And some people say that they can’t afford to make a donation, so we just send a piece to them anyway.”

As of right now, he’s only making the white carpet widely available, though he insists that Pope Francis walked all over the white carpet during the Papal Mass and the Festival of Families. As for the Pope Gold carpet that was actually beneath Pope Francis, Resnick explains that he has a piece at home that was directly under the chair Pope Francis sat on. Owning the company has its privileges.

But he’s not being greedy. The rest of the gold pope carpet is being combined with the white pope carpet to make pope carpet crosses, as seen in the photo above, and they’ll be offered at a later date.

“We currently have over 5,000 emails that we still have to go through,” he says. “Demand is amazing. But the crosses, we’re really not giving them out right now. Well, my mother-in-law got one.”

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