In its long history, St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic Church in downtown Baltimore has seen its share of saints, sinners and Baltimore weather.
The first two have been easier to accommodate than the third, which has taken its toll on the church. A costly renovation is under way to make amends.
A few days ago, workers climbed scaffolding and removed two fragile stained-glass windows from the church's nave, a step in the restoration of the 1845 building renowned for its lavish Gothic Revival interior, high altar and no fewer than 84 saint statues.
"It's a remarkable landmark where you can't help but experience a sense of history," said Monsignor Arthur W. Bastress, the church's pastor. "And, yet, on one rainy Sunday morning a while back, there was so much water pouring through the roof, all you would have needed was a cake of soap and you could have taken a shower in the side aisle."
The church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was once the heart of Baltimore's German Catholic population and, later, home to Baltimore's Lithuanian community. St. John Neumann and Francis X. Seelos, a priest who is a candidate for sainthood, lived in the rectory adjoining the church.
For the past six years, the church has been undergoing exterior structural repairs (there are nine separate roofs in the U-shaped complex at Park Avenue, Saratoga and Pleasant streets). After stabilizing its 220-foot high steeple and accompanying spires, Bastress said, it was time to address the interior, including 32 stained-glass windows.
When the building opened in February 1845, an account in The Sun praised the church's nave windows' design, saying their art glass was "so traced as to render the effect very fine."
But decades of pollution (the building was once lit by illuminating gas), building settlement and exposure to the elements took a toll on the 164-year-old colored glass. About 20 percent of the 1,200 individual glass pieces in each window were broken.
"It's an excellent set of art windows," said glass conservator Gene Higgins, who is heading the restoration in his Middletown, Va., studio. "But the windows were clearly decaying. When the leading buckles, the glass tends to crack."
Higgins, who has restored glass in about 2,500 churches, said the St. Alphonsus windows were early examples of hand-painted American stained glass. The Sun's 1845 article said the windows were made in New York by "F. Thomas."
