Castle Shannon company restores 114-year-old windows for Point Park
Elmer Burger and Keeley Hancox with one of the larger panels undergoing restoration at Williams Stained Glass Studio in Castle Shannon
Windows at the Stock Exchange Building before removal
Start of the re-creation of one of the windows at Williams Stained Glass Studio
You’ve heard of old houses where the owners pull linoleum off the floors, only to find pristine red oak.
In terms of historical interest, Point Park University architect-planner Elmer Burger made an even more exciting discovery after the school bought the former Pittsburgh Stock Exchange building on Fourth Avenue.
“I walked into the building with our preservation architect, Ellis Schmidlapp, and we climbed the stairs up to this level to discover these beautiful stained-glass windows,” Burger said about their trip to the top story of the now-114-year-old structure. “And they were all there, except for one panel.”
As part of the university’s Pittsburgh Playhouse project – the anticipated opening is in the fall of 2018 – a Castle Shannon company is restoring the 21 surviving windows and, in the case of the missing one, re-creating it.
Williams Stained Glass Window Studio, family-owned since its founding in 1984, started work in April 2016 following a thoroughly handle-with-care removal and transportation process. Sixteen of the windows measure 62 by 78 inches, while the others are narrower at 25 by 78 inches.
Keeley Hancox, Williams project manager and designer, described an issue facing one of the unrestored larger windows.
“This whole border section is completely pulled out. It’s bowing and sagging from the weight of being a skylight and hung horizontally,” she explained. “What we’re going to have to do is replace the entire border area.”
Other sections are in better shape.
“We like to reuse as much of the original glass as we can,” Hancox said. “So in a lot of these areas, we’ll just need to flatten.”
Because the windows date back to 1903, finding matches for the glass and lead framework can be a challenge.
“For the most part, the original glass is obsolete,” said Mike Williams, who took over the studio after his parents retired four years ago. “A lot of those manufacturers are still in business, but they have changed up their glass. It’s a challenge.”
Paul Wissmach Glass Co. Inc. of Paden City, W.Va., which has been making glass since 1904, has provided considerable assistance.
“I mailed them some samples from the original windows,” Hancox said, asking if the company could fabricate something similar. “The ingredients are a little bit different, so it won’t be an exact match. But it will be very close.”
When Burger approved the glass samples, she said, observers could barely tell the difference between the replacements and the originals. She hopes that is the case with the windows as a whole when they return to Point Park, even the one that must be re-created.
“The design was done on the computer, which took probably about four days. It was pretty intricate,” she said. “I know when I go in there, I’m going to look for it. And I’ll probably to spot it, just because I’ve seen it.”
Nobody was able to spot the windows when the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange moved into the building, which originally was a bank, in 1962.
“Sometime in the ’50s – we believe that’s when it happened – somebody inserted a floor into the building such as that you couldn’t see the stained glass,” Burger said.
The exchange closed in August 1974, and the building later served such purposes as operating as a nightclub before the university bought it in November 2006.
As for the stained glass installed a century before, the belief is that it was by the Rudy Brothers Co., which made windows in the 1890s for H. J. Heinz’s factory and Point Breeze residence. But evidence is lacking.
“No one has found any kind of signature yet,” Burger said.
That mystifies Hancox, especially considering the quality of the work.
“This is just so insanely intricate,” she said. “You’d think you’d want you name to be somewhere on it. I know I would.”