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.