Cobalt blues, ruby reds and oranges predominate in the glass panels, which is also filled with decorative painting, including fleurs-de-lis, and Christian symbols.
Higgins said his staff carefully removes the windows from their original cast-iron frames and makes a full-scale detailed drawing of the glass pattern to serve as a key when individual pieces of glass are taken out of the frames. The glass is carefully cleaned and sections that must be replaced are painted by hand and fired at 1,200 degrees. In the final step, conservators replace the lead around each of the 1,200 pieces.
"The leading in a window lasts about 100 years," Higgins said. "The sun has a lot to do with the way the lead deteriorates and the sun is very hot on the Park Avenue side of the building."
He said that as the windows return to the church - three have already been restored using some replacement glass from Germany and Indiana - they will be faced by an extra layer of clear safety glass. He said the added protective layer would help retard the effect of ultraviolet light.
Bastress said that his congregation of about 400 and friends of the church have been generous in paying for the window restoration, which will cost between $800,000 and $900,000. He said the congregation was "amazed and delighted" at the initial efforts at window restoration.
"We don't have all the money yet, but we are moving ahead with the project," Bastress said.
He recalled an attorney in town for a convention visited the church for Sunday Mass.
"A couple months later, I got a letter from him with a check for $10,000," Bastress said. "He said he'd won an important legal case."
The church offers traditional Latin Mass on Sundays and priests hear confessions six days a week. In a booklet he distributes about St. Alphonsus, Bastress tells the story of how many downtown shoppers visited the church while on trips to the old Hutzler's, Hochschild's and Stewart's department stores before their closings more than 20 years ago.
"The stores are all gone, but St. Alphonsus is still standing. ? want it to last another 100 years," the monsignor said.
