Chuck Yarborough gets perspective on stained-glass artistry

I go to baseball games with H.G. Wells. The instant I hear the ball pop into a mitt, I'm 12 years old, back behind the plate, trying to catch Eddie Boles' 200 mph fastball (hey, it seemed that fast to me!).

No matter where I sit, I see a game through the bars on a catcher's mask. For me, anyway, it's the best way to spend an afternoon at the Church of Baseball.

And now, thanks to Mary Zodnik and Ben Parsons, partners in Azure Stained Glass in Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood, I'm going to have the same feelings Sunday when I step into St. Therese in Garfield Heights and scope out the Stations of the Cross in stained glass on either side of the sanctuary.

Mary, Ben and I worked on our suntans on the roof of Central Congregational Church in Madison. It's a venerable church whose members first congregated in the mid-1800s. The current structure is "only" about 110 years old.

Mary and Ben have been restoring the stained-glass windows there for a couple of years. If you could see windows like that up close and personal, you'd really appreciate the artistry in them -- and the difficulty of the profession Mary and Ben have been in for 20 years or so.

The two windows we worked on were not the largest in the building but are among the more intricate.


They're each about 2½ feet wide and 12 feet tall. The bigger windows -- probably the size of a Parma bungalow -- are all "mirror-image" windows with repeating patterns, like butterfly wings.

The two we spent our day on are NOT mirror images. Each piece of glass is uniquely shaped. That's a problem. But not nearly as much a problem as finding the exact colors and textures to replace broken or cracked pieces.

Yes, I said textures. Some of the glass -- and I'm thinking in particular of the blue pieces that fade from one side to the other like layers of an evening sky deepening into space -- have raised rivulets of striation throughout them. Glass like that has not been made for a hundred years in this country.

Germany and France have some, but the odds of an exact match are about the same as Shaquille O'Neal hitting a hundred free throws in a row. Maybe even worse.

Each of the pieces in this rainbow of glass is held in place by lead. Ben said he thought lead-lined stained glass weighs about 4 pounds per square foot, but he didn't want to be held to that number. I found an online estimate of about 3 pounds per square foot. Either way, you've got 90 to 120 pounds of glass jigsaw puzzle hanging in one place for more than a century.

The life of a well-made stained-glass window -- and the ones at Central are extremely well made -- is about 100 years, so we were right on time.

But what didn't help was the addition of Plexiglas "coverings" on the outside of the sills. Designed to protect the stained glass, it actually has the reverse effect; it traps heat and air inside, working against the joists. Plus, weather opaques even the best Plexiglas, defeating the purpose of a stained-glass window.

So you can see why such care has to be taken when removing a stained-glass window, which, by the way, is never in your conventional sill; it's always uniquely shaped, usually scalloped and waaaaaaay off the ground.

The first step is chipping away all the putty holding the window in place. That's done with a utility knife, a hammer and a lot of patience. Next, the window is taped all around on the border glass -- if you'll notice, nearly all stained-glass windows have inch-wide strips of glass all around them, which allows for give and take.

It's also the most likely place for a window to break, and rectangular strips are a WHOLE lot easier to replace than pieces an amoeba might see and holler, "Mom!"

Then the window is taped in a grid, like a masking-tape checkerboard. Surprisingly, as fragile as the windows are, this taping usually holds it together. But lifting the window out of the sill and moving it to the A-frame carryall in the back of Mary's truck definitely is the diciest part of the job.

I didn't get to do the restoration work on the glass itself. Just removing those windows was an all-day job. Mary said the shop work exceeds the time in the shop by about 8:1.
Once in the studio, she and Ben -- both of whom have art backgrounds, he in painting and she in ceramics -- will wash, restore and, if necessary, replace the glass. All the old lead is removed, and the puzzle is soldered back together with new lead. Then it's back to the job site to rehang and reputty the window to ensure a water- and airtight barrier.

Which you will have -- providing no one comes around and hollers, "Play ball!"

From: http://www.cleveland.com/
Chuck Yarborough is moonlighting at a variety of unusual, scary and dirty jobs.