Too large and expensive, JFK airport stained glass coming down

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This article was published 21/02/2008 (6467 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK – It was called the longest window in the world when its red, sapphire and purple panels were unveiled to airport travellers in’60. Artists called it one of the most important stained-glass works in the United States.

But American Airlines quietly began dismantling the window’s 900 panels last week at its old John F. Kennedy International Airport terminal, after years of debate and pleas by employees and artists to find a way to keep the abstract piece intact.

Many museums asked to display the window – more than 90 metres long and seven metres high – said it was too large. The airline said removing it in one piece, transporting it and storing it would cost millions.

“It’s not necessarily the outcome that everyone might have hoped for,” airline spokesman Tim Smith said Wednesday. “But any solutions were extraordinarily expensive and no one would be able to do that.”

Smith said small pieces of the window would become floor displays at Kennedy Airport, the airline’s Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters and a Long Island museum. The rest is being given to an antique salvage company that is taking down the glass for free.

An artist who said he studied with the window’s designer said the airline was too cheap to properly restore a priceless work of art.

“That was American Airlines’ visual identity at Kennedy for 50 years. To just throw it in a trash heap is incredibly disrespectful,” said Kenneth vonRoenn, an architect and glass artist in Louisville, Kentucky. “To intentionally destroy it because it was more cost effective . . . it’s regrettable.”

Artist Robert Sowers created the modern glass facade for American’s terminal when it opened in’60 at Kennedy, then known as Idlewild Airport. It was believed to be the world’s largest stained-glass window.

“I don’t know that a building had ever been designed previous to that in which the entire facade was taken up with an enormous graphic statement like that,” said Ed Carpenter, a stained glass artist in Portland, Oregon. VonRoenn said the piece “singularly set the stage for contemporary stained glass in the United States.”

The airline announced plans more than a decade ago to build a new, larger terminal at Kennedy. The US$1.3 billion facility opened last summer after years of discussion on what to do with the window. A proposal to scrap the glass and convert pieces of it into employee key chains was instantly derided and fell through.

Eileen Clifford, a 29-year American flight attendant from Long Island, east of New York City, said the window was a beacon for her home base. She called dozens of conservation groups, asking museums such as the Smithsonian to preserve and display it.

“It’s too big,” she said they told her. She said the Cradle of Aviation museum in Garden City had agreed to take it, but a museum official said it might only be able to use a small part of the window.

Smith, the airline spokesman, said no group came forward with an offer to display the window in its entirety.

American Airlines needs to work fast to take down the building the facade is attached to and use the empty space to store ground equipment such as snowplows and de-icing machines. The airline spends around $50,000 a day in construction costs as long as the building stands.

The company removing the glass panels has already taken down about 10 per cent of the panels and hopes to have the entire window dismantled in three weeks, Smith said. The airline will then select which pieces – about 60 by 120 centimetres – it would like to use for the three separate displays.

VonRoenn said the company doesn’t specialize in removing stained glass and would likely damage the surviving pieces. Furthermore, he said, small displays of the window panels “won’t visually make any sense.” Sowers, who died in’90, wouldn’t want it, he said.

“Just destroy it,” vonRoenn said. “He would rather have not any part of it seen than to have it portioned off.”