Religion is the opiate of the masses, but pretty, too

Glenn Collins has an article in The New York Times about the revival of a Gothic Revival:

Music has been restored. That is to say, the 77-year-old painted Gothic Revival window of that name— a stained-glass celebration of the glory of religious music— has been refurbished and is returning, piece by piece, to St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street in Midtown. For several weeks now restorers have been toiling outdoors on scaffolding fifty feet up, reinstating a dozen windows to their rightful place at the north and west sides of the church. Built in 1914, St. Thomas is renowned for its London-made windows, its choir school and for recitals on its Ernest M. Skinner organ.
The 32-by-18-foot Music, with its eighteen thousand pieces of colored glass, was one of twelve windows removed from the church last year as part of a formidable two-year-long restoration intended to renew the splendor of its 33 windows with nine million panes of glass designed by the firm of the architect Ralph Adams Cram. The windows’ absence was hidden by great translucent vinyl window scrims, printed with stained-glass images, suspended 55 feet above the church sanctuary.
The real windows were transported to nine glass-restoration studios from Massachusetts to California, where the glass was cleaned and patched, and then releaded. The renovation of the largest windows required 4,500 worker hours: the equivalent of the labor of one artisan for two and a half years. The scrims are expected to come down— revealing the north windows’ full majesty— by the end of the summer.
“This is exacting work,” said Julie Sloan, a glass-conservation consultant from North Adams, Massachusetts, who is overseeing the project. Each window section weighs twenty to fifty pounds, thanks to the heft of the lead that holds the panes in place. “The windows are robust, yet the glass is fragile.”
The windows, installed from 1927 to 1974, were mostly created by James Powell & Sons of Whitefriars in London, a long-shuttered, but still revered, maker. Each Powell & Sons window is marked with a distinctive, diminutive signature portrait of a white-robed friar.
On a recent afternoon, with music from the Skinner emanating from inside the church, the restorers sweated to reinstall the windows, each protected within a 30-foot-high plywood construction shed that provided a platform for the laborers and kept weather out of the church. The windows had been covered in grit through the decades, and some panes had cracked. Worse, the lead holding the glass together had corroded, causing some windows to bow out, jeopardizing their structural integrity.
Ms. Sloan pointed to a broken piece that had been painstakingly repaired with a silicone adhesive. There, the Glory of God had been cracked: that is, a seven-inch-long piece of a 25-inch panel proclaiming, in capital letters, To the Glory of God, had fissured through the generations from the incessant pressure of freezing and thawing water. The beauty of transmitted light is the essence of these windows’ art, but “you couldn’t even see the broken glass for all the dirt,” Ms. Sloan said. “It is glorious now to see the light shining through these clean panes.”
The $22 million window restoration project was announced last spring as the most expensive ever undertaken in the United States. Now St. Thomas expects to spend $9 million to $10 million to complete the initial twelve windows. Given the recession and its impact on the church’s finances, the second phase— the southern windows— “will be postponed for a period of time,” said William H. Wright, the church’s senior warden. He added: “Last fall the economic environment radically changed. We remain a healthy institution, but our finances and support have changed markedly. In the future we are looking at the potential of addressing windows individually, not as a group. But any window that is in imminent danger will be attended to.” The windows were difficult to dislodge, since their ancient glazing putty was rock hard, and chisels and days of effort were required to release the larger windows. They haven’t been all that much easier to install. “This work is a lot of heavy lifting, yet it’s fussy,” Ms. Sloan said.
On the scaffold, Andy Cushen, 43— a conservator from Jack Cushen Studio Restoration Inc. in East Marion, New York on Long Island— was muscling a newly refurbished twenty-pound segment into place. The crew was installing it not with putty or sealants, but with a mortar of lime, which is expected to last for a century. “It’s a great feeling now,” Mr. Cushen said as he peered through the rainbow of glass, “to be able to see the light.”

Rico says he's done a little (a little, as in tiny by comparison with any of these pieces) stained glass, and he can appreciate the incredible work they're doing...