North Side church will host summer solstice tours of its Tiffany stained glass windows

You’d be hard-pressed to find a time when a multi-story Tiffany stained-glass window doesn’t look stunning.

But toss the summer solstice into the mix — when the Earth’s tilt toward the sun is at a maximum and we get the longest day of the year — and the view gets even better.

“Our windows are really large, some of the largest in the city, and they really showcase the ingenuity of what the Tiffany Company was trying to do in terms of glass manufacturing,” said David Grinnell, a member of Calvary United Methodist Church on Pittsburgh’s North Side, which will offer free tours every 15 minutes during the June 20 summer solstice.

Louis C. Tiffany, son of Tiffany & Co. founder Charles Louis Tiffany, changed the way stained glass was made in the U.S. by re-creating medieval techniques and using solid stained glass to create designs, rather than painting details onto a pane of glass.

Tiffany had traveled to Europe and taken note of the way scenes were largely painted onto stained glass in its churches.

“He had a notion it could be done better,” Grinnell said.

From twisting glass in order to achieve new colors, to unique techniques like tossing glass confetti onto a slab of molten glass and sandwiching up to five layers of glass together, Tiffany innovated and found new ways to create beauty out of the leaded glass.

“Tiffany was very interested in how the light hit a window, and so one of the features he exploited was what he called ‘gems’ — he’d take a glass sphere and basically chop it up, creating a lot of new flat surfaces,” Grinnell said. “And then in spots like the bottom of a window where the memorial panes are, he added a bunch of those ‘gems’ so that when the sun moved, it would hit them at a different angle and cause the prism to change. It’s really wonderful when you get up close and see what’s going on.”

In the mid-’80s, with Calvary’s congregation dwindling, church leaders formed a nonprofit in order to pursue grants for things like the restoration of the windows. It was a project undertaken by the Allegheny Historic Preservation Society and Pittsburgh Stained Glass Studio in the city’s West End.

The church, itself, was built in the late 1890s. And Grinnell said while he doesn’t know for certain, it’s highly likely that the architects and builders were considering how sunlight would strike the windows as they constructed the building.

“I think that’d have to be part of the consideration,” he said. “The orientation of Gothic churches in particular are very proscribed — the front door always faces west, for example.”

Grinnell said his favorite is the window behind the church’s choir loft.

“It’s just absolutely spectacular when the sun comes through,” he said. And owing to some of the ways that Tiffany layered glass, the unique angles of sunlight during the solstice will reveal color details that can’t always be seen.

Calvary Pastor Beth Nelson said the windows are so stunning, they can sometimes be distracting.

“It’s such a beautiful place, but that can also be a challenge,” Nelson said. “You want to make worship meaningful and ensure the congregation can relate. That can be tough in a big Gothic church like this, but we make it happen.”

Tours will take place every 15 minutes from 4-8 p.m. June 20 at the church, 971 Beech Ave. in the Allegheny West neighborhood of the North Side.

But Calvary is hardly the only place in the Pittsburgh area to see Tiffany stained glass windows.

Calvary’s sister church, First United Methodist, has a Tiffany window. First Presbyterian, located Downtown, has more than a dozen.

Chatham University has one of Tiffany’s earliest works, which was stored in the school’s basement for more than 50 years before being rediscovered, restored and placed on display in the late 1990s.

In Westmoreland County, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art has a Tiffany window in its collection, and Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Fayette County has a nine-section Tiffany window featuring bright flowers, leaves and vines on its atrium ceiling, as well as a number of Tiffany table and floor lamps.

Grinnell said the Calvary congregation counted several local glass company owners among its congregation back in the late 19th century.

“Glass manufacturing was extremely important in Pittsburgh,” he said. “For those owners to say that Tiffany glass was the way to go speaks volumes.”

For more, see CalvaryPGH.com.