Good As Old: Making Old Windows Look Old Again

Spend a couple of hours with Hans Rohlf, and you’re likely to hear him refer, approvingly, to the fact that many things in his business have been done the same way for the last 400 or 500 years.

That’s hardly surprising, considering his family’s business is making and restoring stained-glass windows, the greatest examples of which have been around for even longer than half a millennium.

Rohlf is the president of Rohlf’s Stained and Leaded Glass Studio, which occupies a busy corner in the industrial section of Mt. Vernon, not far from the St. Paul’s Church national historic site.

The business, which traces its roots back to 1920, has restored windows in many of the greatest churches and other historic buildings in this country and abroad, starting with St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, both in New York.

But it was a project for a church closer to home that sparked my curiosity about this specialized calling. Rohlf’s is repairing a large stained-glass window for Pelham’s that shows Jesus blessing a group of children.

The 1913 window, which I , was found to be badly deteriorated when repairs were made to the outside wall of the church in which the window sits. Because the outside of the window was covered with a plastic pane that was intended to protect it, moisture couldn’t escape, Rohlf explained. That caused the wooden window frame to rot, and the lead holding the panes of stained glass in place had oxidized, weakening the lead and turning it chalky white.

“They’re the first Scottish stained glass windows we’ve worked on,” said Rohlf as he showed me around the workshops where employees were assembling new windows and repairing old ones. “You don’t see a lot of stained glass coming out of Scotland.”

Rohlf should know. Now in his 50s, he’s worked in the business since he was a teenager. He’s the third generation of his family to be involved in the company, and one of five Rohlfs who currently work there, including his father, Peter, and brother, Greg.

Although the majority of the studio’s clients are churches, Rohlf’s has also repaired stained glass windows at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library and the New York State Capitol in Albany. And Rohlf’s also designs and installs new windows, including a large expanse of stained glass at a shopping center in Nagoya, Japan, and a imposing, full-length depiction of Jesus for a church in Monrovia, Liberia.

The studio currently has about two dozen employees, many of whom have worked there for 15 years or more. But the business was hit hard by the financial crisis and recession.

“On the new end of it, we’re a luxury item,” Rohlf said. “On the restoration end, we hope that keeps going. The thing about churches is that they think about their roofs, they think about their pews, but they leave their windows until they’re ready to fall out.”

The Christ Church windows weren’t quite that far gone, but after 98 years, they were in need of attention, he said. The process of repairing the windows has followed a well-established, if not centuries old, routine.

First, workers made rubbings of the windows to have an exact record of their dimensions and the thickness of the lead between the stained-glass panes. To soften the lead, the windows were heated in a water bath, and then the pliable metal was cut away.

After a cleaning, the windows were reassembled with new pieces of lead. A cross-section of a strip of lead looks like a capital H; the glass panes fit in the slots between the two long sides of the lead strip.

New lead looks, well, new, so the leading is brushed to darken it and make its appearance fit in with the age of the windows.

Using putty knives, workers then apply a thin coating of putty to the edges of the lead to waterproof the windows.

“It’s the same method that’s been used for 400 or 500 years,” said Rohlf, invoking his favorite phrase.

With the passage of decades, some pieces of stained glass inevitably crack or break. Broken pieces of glass are mended with copper foil to be less obvious. As we looked at one of the Christ Church windows, Rohlf pointed out a few thin lines of metal that revealed where broken panes had been mended.

“Everything we do is a challenge,” he said when I asked him if the Christ Church windows had posed any special problems. “But it’s something we’ve done a lot of.”

Over the next couple of weeks, the restored windows will be placed in new, rot-resistant mahogany frames. They are likely to be reinstalled by mid-April, he said.

With that, the windows should be set to last another century. And this time, Rohlf said, the windows will not have a protective covering.

“If the windows are properly restored, you shouldn’t have a problem,” he said. ‘That’s the way they’ve been doing it in Europe for 400 or 500 years.”