Stoneangels: You have an artifact exhibit in the building next door-I remember seeing things when we were over there taking donated items down to the Gravedigger’s Ball auction.

Ross Mitchell: Actually it is a museum, an exhibit. We have incredible archives going all the way back to 1836. We have everything-we have all the obituaries, letters, we have maps, blueprints, glass plates, we have photographs going back as far as… photography goes back! We have the copper plates for all the ads going way back, we have journals. We have a Mitchell’s International Almanac from 1850 with maps of Philadelphia and New York. New York City stops at Houston Street near the [Greenwich] Village.

Stoneangels: So what was below Houston Street?

Ross Mitchell: That was the city! The city was below Houston! There was nothing above it! There was no Midtown Manhattan! I saw another old Philadelphia map. You know why it’s called Robin Hood Dell? This was the old Ridge Road [in front of Laurel Hill], and there was an old tavern called the Robin Hood Tavern right next to the cemetery. They named the Robin Hood Dell for the Robin Hood Tavern. We’d love to display more of our collection, if we had the time and manpower.

Stoneangels: I’d be happy to volunteer to help. I’ve been locked in the safe a couple times and have seen your rooms of artifacts and records. Years ago I needed to open my camera back to un-jam a roll of film, so I asked Leo, the person working at the front desk, if he thought the vault was light tight. He offered to lock me in and it worked great! Sometimes you just have to trust people…

Stoneangels: Let me ask you about Tiffany stained glass in the mausoleums. Do you know if there is any?

Ross Mitchell: There were! There were seven Tiffany stained glass windows and in the 1970s an article came out identifying where all the Tiffany stained glass windows were across the country in cemeteries. Within a number of years, they were all stolen. But apparently Tiffany keeps very detailed records and photos of all of their products. We are in the process of contacting them to get copies of those images that I will post on the Stolen Art Network. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get them back and maybe not.

Stoneangels: In 1999 a Tiffany stained glass window worth $660,000 was stolen from a mausoleum in Brooklyn.

Ross Mitchell: Wow. All of our missing windows have been replaced with glass block. Nothing is less romantic.

Stoneangels: At least you didn’t do what they did in West Philly where they replaced them with cinder block!

Ross Mitchell: That could be less romantic. When you look into a mausoleum and the sun is coming through the stained glass it really is a very special event.

“…not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life.”

Stoneangels: I only recently started appreciating the subtler things in cemeteries like the stained glass.

Ross Mitchell: One of the tours we’ve been talking about doing is having our superintendent Bill Doran, who is this great Irish stonemason give a “Behind the Scenes” tour of the cemetery. He’s got all of these great stories about working here. Like the time he was working in one of the mausoleums. One of the crypt covers had fallen off so he was doing some repair work in it and it was totally dark in there and the door closed and he heard this noise behind him! He just ran out of there! Apparently it was a fox or opossum that had gotten into the crypt. He said he was never so scared in his whole life!

Stoneangels: I can’t picture anything scaring Bill!

Ross Mitchell: Neither could I. He has these great stories about the logistics of working in the cemetery. The “Behind the Scenes Tour with the Superintendent” is not on the schedule yet but we’re working on it.

Next: Ghost Stories and the Filming of Rocky VI

The American painter and designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, essentially brought new high quality, high technology stained glass as an art form to the world in the late 1800s. Prior to that time, most of the stained glass used in windows came from Europe, and then only as seconds. European craftsmen kept the best quality glass for themselves. Tiffany manufactured new types of colored glass in over 5,000 colors!

In the late 1870s (sometimes referred to as The Gilded Age in the U.S.), European-made stained glass windows were highly prized by the American elite. Tiffany’s experimentation could not have happened at a better time. It also corresponded with the enormous religious fervor that was spreading across America, resulting in the construction of thousands of High Gothic churches. Deceased parishioners and clergy needed to be memorialized, and stained glass became the medium of choice. As the U.S. population spread westward on the North American continent, new municipal buildings, colleges, and libraries were built and needed to be decorated. Demand for windows made by Tiffany’s company skyrocketed, offering the proud owner social status and panache.

In this excerpt from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, we see that tiffany had much more to offer than the technology to colorize the glass:

“Tiffany also introduced new subject matter into his windows. While continuing to provide figural windows of saints and biblical themes for churches, he at times eliminated the figure altogether, conferring religious significance on the landscape and the natural world itself. Memorial windows in churches and mausoleums often featured verdant woodland themes, streams meandering through mountain valleys, or floral motifs. Tiffany’s lifelong preoccupation with gardens inspired some of the most naturalistic depictions of flowers and plants in all of stained glass.”

Today, collectors and admirers of this art form are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction for Tiffany windows, lamps, and other artwork. Hence the allure for thieves. What easier target than an old mausoleum’s Tiffany window in an abandoned cemetery?

Why do they call it ‘stained’ glass? Is it actually stained with a pigment? Well, that’s the process Tiffany perfected. Rudimentary experimentation with color began in the Middle Ages, but much of the early ‘stained’ glass was just clear glass painted on with shades of translucent paint. Tiffany evolved the process of coloring glass in the late 1800s to the point where he was able to make thousands of different colors. Metallic oxides are mixed in with the molten glass to color it-copper was found to create a greenish hue, nickel for purple, manganese for violet. Use of the glass in creating stained glass windows was advanced by the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader William Morris in England.

In 1879, Tiffany’s contemporary, John LaFarge, invented opalescent glass, the medium for which Tiffany is most noted. Opalescent glass is glass that is not transparent–you can’t see through it because of its dense color. Look at the Shell Glass image as an example (this is from a mausoleum in Philadelphia). Tiffany popularized a new art form based on opalescent glass to international applause and success, much as the Japanese popularized consumer electronics based on the (American-designed) transistor! As the great philosopher David Bowie said, “It’s not who did it first, its who did it second.”

Read more:

• Wikipedia
• StainedGlass.org

The first 2 Tiffany Stained Glass pictures are from Wikipedia – here and here.