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.