Work proceeds at the studios

Glass has arrived at the various studios that will be working on it. Panels are placed on lightboxes so that rubbings can be made, insuring a full record for panel reassembly.

Panels are then disassembled. At left, A shows a whole lead came. Cames at B have had the flanges removed, leaving the heart (the thin bright stripe in the middle) and putty (tan stripes on either side of the heart). At C, the putty is gone, leaving only the heart. At D, the glass has been lifted out, revealing the flange on the other side.






Once the glass has been removed from the cames, it is wetted and left to sit for about 15 minutes.








Putty can then be carefully scraped from the glass using a razor blade.









The work done at the original installation of these windows seems to have varied in its quality. In places the putty seems to have been poorly mixed. Some of the traceries were installed with their meeting joints upside down, so that they caught rainwater, rather than shedding it. Below you can see the front and back of a tracery kite, which appears to have been broken during installation and then badly patched with sealant.

'The New York Times' Covers the Saint Thomas Windows

There is an interesting piece in today's Arts Section, written by Glenn Collins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/arts/design/15stai.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

Glenn and his photographer visited the church a couple times, and also traveled to one of our studios. Alongside the piece, there's a beautiful multimedia slideshow that puts my efforts on this blog to shame, but it's a great read!

Phase 1 Windows Are Out!

As of noon on Tuesday, February 26, all the windows of Phase I have been removed and are either in transit or at the restoration studios. Work has gone amazingly well – very quickly, very professionally, with a minimum of problems. Everyone working on the project deserves credit for this.

One window did not have to be cut out by cutting the fillet glass. This is the youngest window in the building, installed in 1974. Removed by Guarducci Studio of Great Barrington, MA, it came out with its fillets intact, which will mean much less time in the studio during restoration. The trade-off, however, is that it took at least four times as long to get it out. This is no reflection on the studio – it’s simply the nature of the work.

Using one Fein knife, the other studios had only to slice through the glass, moving at a rate of about five to six feet per minute. The team from Guarducci used two knives, one on each side of the window, to free the glass from the stone, moving at less than one foot in five or even ten minutes. The caulking that the window was set in melted, rather than cut, making it necessary to stop every 6 inches or so and clean the knife blade, then go back with a linoleum knife and try to pull out the sticky caulk. In many places, the window had been wedged tightly into the stone. Here, the work slowly to a snail’s pace as the studio tried not to break any glass.

But it was worth the time, because unlike the rest of the window, in C15, the fillets are painted with a variety of tiny patterns. Not only would it be time-consuming to replace them, but they represent the artistry of the original maker of the window, Willet Studios of Philadelphia, and in conservation, we try to preserve as much of that artistry as we possibly can.

Windows are coming out!

Last week window removal began, and the first window, C11, "Music" (above the organ in the choir) was fully crated by Friday, February 1. Removing stained glass windows is both exciting and unnerving, but the seasoned professionals working here seem to have seen everything before. Their collective experience is staggeringly broad, and the collegial atmosphere permits open conversation and comparison. Trading both tips and war stories, we arm one another with confidence.

In this project, we have very thick, Norman-slab glass and huge, heavy lead cames, set in a stone groove, the most unforgiving framing type. Normally this would make removals slow and hard, with the craftspeople using chisels, hacking knives, hooked linoleum knives, and hammers – all hand tools – to break the setting putty out of the 1/2 inch by 5/8 inch groove without breaking glass. In windows this big, with such complex and extensive tracery, this should entail weeks of hard, dusty work, advancing no more than a few feet a day.

But the situation at Saint Thomas is different: we are forbidden to hack out the setting putty, because it is laced with and further covered by asbestos. Extensive testing by Air-Tek Environmental Corp. and Warren & Panzer Engineers, PC revealed that all but one window on the north side was set in and/or later waterproofed with putty and caulk containing asbestos fibers. Although the amounts are tiny – less than 3% -- health and safety regulations require that it be handled and removed by licensed asbestos abatement (ACM)contractors – which our stained glass conservators are not. By contrast, ACM contractors are not qualified to handle important stained glass windows. So we have had to devise a new method to remove the stained glass.

When we removed several sections from each window in order to get the scaffolding to the interior of the church without using the nave floor in October 2007, we approached the ACM removal as if the ACM handlers were stained glass conservators: we had them chop the putty out of the grooves before we took the stained glass out. The result was that the fillets (the narrow borders around the edges of each opening) were destroyed and a great deal of adjacent glass was also broken. The ACM contractors had to return to the site after the stained glass was out to fully remove the putty. This was both extremely detrimental to the windows – the amount of breakage was unacceptable – and very expensive because of the two intensive, time-consuming visits of the ACM contractors.












The alternative was to remove the stained glass before the ACM contractors came in. Since this has to be done without disturbing the ACM caulking, we have to cut the windows out by cutting away the fillets. These fillets are traditionally called “break-out” fillets. They are intended to be sacrificial in stone-groove settings – the windows’ original designers theoretically know that they could be destroyed when the window has to be removed. Usually stained-glass conservators try valiantly not to destroy them. But that is impossible here.






It is traumatic to a dedicated conservator to have to destroy part of the object they are charged with conserving. Last week, the team from Studio Restorations, Inc., of East Marion, NY (working with E. S. Taylor of Richmond, VA), gritted their teeth as they revved up their Fein knives, power tools similar to small saber saws designed to cut window caulk in automobiles. The first day working on "Music" was probably the hardest emotionally, getting used to slicing through painted, colored glass that a confrere had labored over some seventy years ago. But sometimes in adversity we can find benefits: the Fein knives are miraculous in their efficiency, cutting site-work hours dramatically. What would have taken eight hours to chop by hand took only 20 or 30 minutes with the power tool. Most wonderful is the lack of glass breakage: although the fillets are destroyed (they will be matched in the studio and replaced), no other glass is damaged. Chopping the putty out in our test panels had damaged a great deal of glass within the fillet border, but the Fein tools, which vibrate at a high speed and pulverize the glass that they contact, do not affect any other glass that they do not contact.

Ultimately, the removal of "Music" took three and a half days, as opposed to our initial assessment of six weeks, and the percentage of broken glass is very low. Bits of the fillets have been gathered and saved for matching and replicating in the studio, including part of the Powell signature. This week, teams from Reflection Studios of Emeryville, CA, Northeast Stained Glass of Newton, NJ, and Jersey Art Stained Glass of Frenchtown, NJ, will start removing their windows. In another entry, I will describe the work of Guarducci Studio, which is removing the most recent window, Temperance, made in 1974 by Willet Stained Glass. It is not set in asbestos, so its process is completely different.

Happy New Year!

While I was absent from the church during the holidays, the scaffolding erection continued and is now reaching its conclusion – it will be finished in two weeks, in time for the start of removals on January 21.
My assistant, Bill, says it is the best scaffolding he’s ever worked on, after more than 10 years in the stained glass field. Eagle Scaffolding, the company responsible for building this wonderful structure, is rueful that no one will be able to actually see it once it is complete, because it will be fully enclosed. To clarify, here is a cross-section of the scaffolds.



Left is a photo of the exterior sheds, looking east from the chancel. Right is a shot of the scaffolders building the sheds, looking west from the Fifth Avenue end of the walkway.



On the inside, the interior scaffolds are just about finished and lighted. Currently they're visible down the length of the nave, but they will soon be covered by scrims.

Each scrim is a photograph of a window, printed on vinyl and hung in front of the scaffolding, so that it won’t be so obvious that the windows are missing. The first scrim was hung on the window closest to the reredos. It is presently lit only by the lights on the scaffolding, but when the stained glass is removed, natural light will come through the windows in the scaffolding sheds.

Bill has been putting in many days removing the protective glazing, the old and dirty plastic covering the windows. Here is a photo of the tracery pieces. We will not be replacing this material, since the windows won’t need to be protected from the weather once they are restored.

Hidden Initials and Camel Constitutionals

As members of the congregation will have seen, scaffolding continues to rise. Eagle Scaffolding, our fabulous riggers, have spent many days lifting pipes and planks to the roof from the garden, one or two at a time, and walking them from the west end down the length of the building. They build the outside towers first, then pass pipes through the window openings we made several month ago to erect a narrow scaffold on the clerestory walkway inside. The walkway is only 2’ wide, and so is the scaffolding. But it is as sturdy and comfortable as can be, thanks to our architect, Robert Bates (Walter Melvin Architects), and construction managers, Dan Wrzesinski and Lloyd Westerman of Westerman Construction.

In preparation for scaffolding the chancel windows behind the reredos, my assistant Bill Patriquin and I removed sections from the three windows. There is no access to them from the inside of the church – there’s no way to get behind the reredos, which was built years after the windows were first installed. Before removing the glass, I made a rubbing by taping paper over the panel and rubbing it with a crayon to record the pattern of the lead cames. This serves as a map of the window so that we know where pieces of glass belong after the window is removed. For all of the other windows, the rubbings will be done in the studios after the windows are taken out.




Here is the section I rubbed resting on the floor awaiting crating. Although it’s only about 2’ square, that one section weighs almost 30 pounds. There are 8 sections like this in each of the three lancets (the tall, thin vertical openings) of the center chancel window – 24 square panels in all, or 720 lbs. From the spring line up (the spring line is where the arch starts), there are an additional 36 sections in the tracery (the oddly spaced openings at the top). The stained glass panels are supported by bronze bars. The square bars that span the window on the inside are called saddle bars. The taller flat bars have an H profile. The sections of stained glass are held between the parallel legs of the H. There are 36 saddle bars and 12 H-bars in the center chancel window, totaling about 170 pounds. The entire center chancel window weighs, therefore, over half a ton.

Once the window sections came out,

we had a nice view of the back of the reredos. Some of the carving goes completely around to the back. One mason left his initials in the mortar. It looks like “J L G” or “J C G.”

On December 5, arriving via the 53rd Street Subway stop, I was

greeted by three camels out for their daily constitutional down

W. 53rd Street past the church. They were getting a break from their work at Radio City Music Hall, taking in the shopping on Fifth Avenue and munching a few trees along the way.

That same day we had a visit from the craftspeople who will actually be restoring our windows . The conservation studios for Phase I (the north side) visited the church for the first time. They’ve had to wait until the scaffolding was far enough along to allow them to get up close to the windows.

My assistant took the protective glazing (the plastic coverings) off one window so that we could all see the conditions on the outside of the glass. On the left you see the protective glazing still in place, looking yellowed and milky. On the right, it has been removed. The green arrow points to the aluminum mullion that held the plastic in place, and the pink arrow shows where it hit the stone frame. This is about 3” away from the surface of the stained glass.

Underneath the protective glazing, the lead came and solder holding the windows together is corroding. When lead corrodes, it becomes white. You can see the white spots all over the came. The center photo shows repair caulking in one of the tracery kites (we call them kites because of their shape, which is loosely like that of a child’s kite). This piece of glass is about 4” x 6”, but the caulking reveals only about 1” by 1”. The left photo shows the protective glazing that came off a section like this. For some reason, the contractor put 3 pieces of plastic over the glass – the rest of the window has only one layer.

The scaffolding construction is moving ahead at a good pace. The 60’ tower in the garden is almost complete.

It contains the stairs by which the craftspeople will get to the roof from the first floor of the Parish House.

The wall of the Museum of Modern Art is behind it on the left.

There will be a hoist in the scaffolded area between the stairs and MoMA to lower the windows down from the roof.

From the top level of the stairs, the craftspeople will walk to the right to the north-aisle roof.



On the north-aisle roof, the window scaffolding is going up.

This is the exterior tower on the western-most window.

The window itself is just visible through the pipes in the lower left corner.

The scaffolding tower for each window sits between the buttresses that support the walls and roof .

These scaffolding towers will be enclosed with plywood sheds before removals start in January.



We have also removed a section from the chancel windows behind the reredos in order to see how we can get to them for removal. There is no access to them behind the reredos, which is attached to the west wall of the church.






The removed section being crated. All of the windows come out in sections about this size.






A view of one of the reredos windows looking upward from the sill.

A detail of the reredos at the top of the window – notice all the little faces looking down at me!

In order to get the panel out of the chancel window, we had to remove some of the glass. The photos above show the contrast in thickness from one piece to the next. The glass in the right-hand photo is a hair less than 1/8” thick. This is the usual thickness of hand-made stained glass, which is called “antique” glass. (This term does not mean the glass is ancient – antique glass is still made today. It refers to it being hand-blown, which is an ancient process.) By contrast, the glass in the left-hand photo is almost 1/4” thick. This is called “Norman slab” glass. It was made by Powell’s of Whitefriars (the manufacturers of the window – they also made glass) by blowing the glass into square mold, then separating the square at the corners into small slabs that were about 6” x 8”. Slabs are very thick in center and thinner at the edges. Norman slab glass is made by only one or two companies today, and is very difficult to replace.