Sold for a song, the windows of a church turned out to be Tiffany

Paul Brown, an antiques collector from Lancaster, Pa., said he typically collects 19th-century grocery items, old gas station signs and advertisements — bits of Americana that he can haul in the back of his Chevy pickup.

But last fall, he decided to buy two large round windows that were covered in dirt and encased high in the stone walls of a dilapidated Gothic Revival church in West Philadelphia, built in 1901 and originally called St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church.

The church’s new owner, the Emmanuel Christian Center, planned to remove the windows to convert the building into a worship and youth center for its 400 members.

Mr Brown, 56, said he heard about the windows on Facebook Marketplace and ran into a salvage worker he knew at the church, who told him: “Would you like to get these windows out before we knock them out?”

Mr Brown said he paid $6,000 for the windows, as well as some wooden pews and doors, and hired workers who spent weeks on scaffolding grinding and cutting the glass out of the wall.

He stuffed the pieces into moving blankets, put them in the back of his truck and took them to Freeman’s, an auction house in Philadelphia, to be appraised, he said.

What the auction house told him days later was a shock, he said.

According to Freeman’s, the rose windows, about eight feet in diameter, were made around 1904 by Tiffany Studios, the renowned New York firm founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the Gilded Age designer known for his ornate glass-and-glass lamps. in lead.

Both windows will be auctioned May 18 and are estimated to be worth $150,000 to $250,000 each, Freeman’s said.

Mr Brown said he had no idea the windows were Tiffany glass when he bought them in a deal previously negotiated by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“To be honest, in my world Tiffany has always been lamps, not windows,” he said.

He said he paid $15,000 to have the windows removed because they were “round and big and had purple in them.”

“From what I understand, round windows weren’t common,” he said. “I thought, because of the unique size and colors, someone must want them.”

After learning they were made by Tiffany Studios, he paid an additional $50,000 to have the windows repaired, he said.

William A. Brownlee Sr., the senior pastor of Emmanuel Christian Center, said he had no idea the windows were valuable when he sold them to Mr. Brown. Pastor Brownlee said he asked his contractor to get rid of them because he believed they were beyond saving. The windows, he said, seemed cracked and covered in mold and grime.

“I’m ashamed I didn’t know,” Rev. Brownlee said. “I feel like my ignorance was taken advantage of because I didn’t have an expert team.”

But it may be that no one knew that the church had Tiffany windows.

When a local historical society submitted a nomination in 2021 to have the church listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, report there was no mention of Tiffany glass on the historic significance of the building. And the group dropped its nomination last year amid opposition from the Hickman Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church, which has owned the church since 1972 and sold it to the Emmanuel Christian Center for about $1.7 million last year, according to records. Hickman leaders had expressed concern that the designation would hurt property values, reported Axios.

Identifying Tiffany windows is difficult, especially when they’re caked in dirt, said Carl Heck, a collector from Aspen, Colo., who has been collecting the windows since the 1970s. Some Tiffany windows are signed, but most are not, he said.

“How do you know if a painting was Rembrandt or Picasso?” he said. “You could look at the style or brushwork or things like that. But it takes an expert – someone who has been doing it for a long time.

Tim Andreadis, the director of decorative arts and design at Freeman’s, said the auction house was able to authenticate the windows by consulting experts. St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church was also mentioned in a list of window visitors published by Tiffany Studios in 1910, he said.

The windows, he said, were originally made for an auxiliary chapel to accommodate the prosperous and growing St. Paul congregation and Sunday school.

One of the windows shows a crown, representing Christ, in the center. The other has a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, with a cross in the center that is revealed only when light passes through the laminated glass.

While Tiffany may be best known for his lamps, his studio made dozens of rose windows for churches across the country, and even more vertically oriented lancet windows, which were often dedicated in memory of the relatives of wealthy church members, Andreadis said. .

“Tiffany was the gold standard that wealthy donors turned to to support their churches,” said Mr. Andreadis.

Pastor Brownlee said he was looking for his own donors to help him renovate the future home of the Emmanuel Christian Center. The church has a bracket holding up a wall, mold and asbestos, a bell tower falling down and major damage to the roof, he said.

“These windows cost $250,000, and we need that much to get the job done,” said Pastor Brownlee. “I would have kept them if I had known.”