Ray Clagnan knows the Rose Window.  For some months, he and his partner, Tom Garcia, and their crew have carried on a close relationship with it.  They’ve studied it, worked with its parts, and have seen it in finer detail than anybody who’s ever glanced up at it in its normal home at the west end of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd.

At Gil Studio in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn, they’ve rebuilt the window.  It’s the final part of a $350,000 restoration project on the Chapel, funded in chunks over a six-year period by the New York State Assembly, courtesy of Assemblymember Pete Grannis, who represents the Island.  The Rose Window had been threatened by a decades-old attempt at restoration that wasn’t holding up with time.  So, back in July, scaffolding was erected both inside and outside the Chapel, and the window was removed, replaced with plexiglass cut to fit.

“We photograph it in transmitted and reflected light,” says Clagnan, describing a process his shop carries out with all the leaded-glass windows it handles.  “We put it flat on a table, and a paper rubbing is made.”  The rubbing shows the location of all the “came” (pronounced like the past tense of come), which is the lead that holds the stained-glass puzzle together.  With the rubbing completed to serve as a kind of map, “the panels are put into a tank – in hot water with a mild soap detergent.  Most of the time, we use Orvis, a horse shampoo, because it won’t hurt the glass.”

Describing the process, Clagnan displays a genuine enthusiasm for the work he picked up from his father, and he looks the part.  With mustache and a slight graying at his temples, looking over the top of half-glasses, he wouldn’t be out of place at the turn of the century.

“Then we disassemble each panel of the window in the tank – we don’t want to kick up the dust from the lead.  We save some of the lead for reference.  The glass is placed on the working rubbings, telling us where everything goes.  Then we reassemble the panel.

“If the glass is completely broken, we replace it with the best match available.  If there’s just one break, we’ll join the pieces together with copper foil.”

Scattered around the spacious, well-lighted studio are a number of workers handling a variety of tasks, tending to windows from a chapel at West Point, the lobby of an apartment building on the upper west side, the Union Theological Seminary, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and private residences.

“After the window is assembled, the joints are all soldered, then you take putty and push it into the channel.  That’s the weatherproofing process.  You do that on both sides.  That provides a tight seal between the glass and the lead.”

Asked about the continuing use of lead in stained-glass windows, Clagnan says, “The industry would be lost without it.  They’ve tried various things – lead-free solder, for example.  But as long as the lead is inert – and we’re not kicking up dust when it’s new – it’s safe.  The danger comes when you remove windows, because you’re kicking up dust when you remove the putty.”

The Rose Window is expected back at the Chapel sometime in the next several weeks – though not in time for Easter, according to Ann-Isabel Friedman, who directs the Sacred Sites Program for the New York Landmarks Conservancy.  There’s been a delay for fabrication of a new metal frame for the window; it has to accommodate a protective layer of glass.

As a connection with Roosevelt Island’s past, along with the Chapel it decorates, the window is also a connection to the past of art.  Stained-glass windows go back to the 8th Century, though it wasn’t until the 12th Century that it became common as a part of buildings in the form known today.  Clagnan says that little about stained-glass windows changed after the year 1200, but tells how American leaded-glass artists introduced a change by “letting the glass do more of the work.”  Rather than relying on painting on the glass to carry the burden of texture in garments, for example, rippled glass came into fashion.  American artists also brought opalescent glass into the creation of stained-glass windows.

There are records, from the 1600s, of stained-glass work being paid for in New Amsterdam (now New York) with beavers.  Not this time.  The cost of the Rose Window work this time is about $80,000.