The windows over St. Stephen’s doors once blazed with a symbolic message—at night on the street!
The three soaring windows over St. Stephen’s front doors are easy to dismiss as dimmed, like most of the church’s other windows, by thick outer glazing required for protection.
Not so, I found. . . .
These front windows were instead literally extinguished, deprived of their original purpose. Unlike the others, designed to be seen inside, the front windows were dramatic nocturnal apparitions on the street, electrically backlit. In daylight, they rested, enticingly muted, as you see in this photograph I took last week. They lost their night life after 1952, when the extensive chest of the Wicks organ built on the balcony that year cut off access to the windows’ lights when in need of repair.
These were also at least the second set of windows for the entrance to this church built almost a century before (1822-3). Unfortunately, we don’t yet know what they replaced. Earlier photographs aren’t clear enough and texts don’t mention the front windows at all—for all the sustained curiosity about the church’s quirky towered and crenelated façade.
The project, according to the Vestry Minutes, moved forward in the summer of June 1920, when D’Ascenzo Studios of Philadelphia won the bid for “improved” windows there. These are the first windows that we can document as commissioned from the studio by St. Stephen’s or one of its donors (others have been attributed to the studio). D’Ascenzo Studios had been producing stained-glass windows for buildings throughout the United States since the early 20th century, within a decade of its founding as a decorating firm in 1896 by Italian-born, Philadelphia-trained painter-designer Nicola D’Ascenzo. The studio produced some of its most famous windows just before the St. Stephen’s project. The popular 14.5-foot Little Nipper windows for the RCA Victor Company tower in Camden NJ were installed in 1916. All four, similarly night-lit, were visible even in Philadelphia. When the towered building was sold (it’s now the Victor Lofts), the four windows eventually went to regional cultural institutions, including The Camden County Historical Society Museum and the Smithsonian in Washington. Among religious projects, D’Ascenzo Studios’ windows at Washington Memorial Chapel (Valley Forge National Historic Park) were executed by 1918.
The Vestry Minutes also state that St. Stephen’s rector, Dr. Carl E. Grammer, was charged with the new windows project, joining an especially learned clergyman with an especially learned artist.
The result was unlike any other window project at St. Stephen’s, perhaps because of its location on the church (I’ll explain the site’s symbolism later).
Like the Little Nipper windows, this trio, I imagine, aimed for visual impact to communicate its message for blocks at night, when especially visible in luminous color. I wonder about this stretch of 10th Street as a nightscape in 1921. Did it include the commercial neon lighting that spread across the country since it first appeared in 1910? Were there signs with any scale and elevation to compete with the church’s soaring windows?
Dominating the most public face of the building, our portal to the church life within, the three new windows broadcast a comprehensive vision of the Church. Their means, a field of familiar symbols that showcased the central motif, the cross. I show you the clearest image we have of the lit windows, a grainy black-and-white photograph taken when they were first installed in either late 1920 or early 1921, from an article that applauds their symbolic richness and power. Thanks yet again, Mike Krasulski!
From Church News, March 1921; courtesy of philadelphiastudies.org
I now offer you a reading of the whole from the article’s interpretation of individual elements. The cross, signifying the redemptive crucified Christ, rests on a decorated architectural base that stands for the Church. That Church-base prominently displays the escutcheon of the first Christian deacon and martyr, St. Stephen, with attributes of his office and martyrdom (especially the five stones). By this means the window identifies the importance within the entire Church of the saint to whom this one congregation and its place of worship are dedicated.
The windows repeatedly render Christ in the natural form he invoked to describe his defining role within the community, as the vine from which we, the Christian community, develop as branches. Flanking the cross and emerging from the Church-base are two energetic vines with branches to represent the Church’s vitality, growth, and burgeoning activities over time. Within the branches are symbols of the Eucharist (chalice, wafer), the Holy Spirit, and the Four Evangelists. The flanking windows feature vines with medallions bearing other natural Scriptural emblems, among which are the rainbow and Ark (signs of the Covenant) and the Paschal lamb (the self-sacrificial Christ). All are framed with borders bearing crowns, perhaps emblems of triumph. Color, claims the article, was also symbolic: white for the purity of divine light and Christ; blue for heaven; yellow for the sun, God’s greatest natural gift, and the sign of the Evangelists’ “commanding position among the disciples.”
The complexity of this three-part image apparently did not compromise its visual and symbolic focus on the huge central cross. The article suggests its impact on the street could be as consequential as it was theatrical: “the great cross . . . may be seen flaming as if out upon the night like the cross of Constantine.” Rendered in white, signaling Christ’s cleansing purity, instead of red, as in Constantine’s vision, this ”flaming” cross, in the words of this article, has the power to draw, even to possibly convert those who, like Constantine, see it at night— metaphorically, the condition from which the converted emerge.
We hope to restore at least some of these windows’ intended night-time presence. We might be able to light the central window; our experiments already have compelling force on the street in the dark. In the meantime, look hard at the muted daytime appearance of all three—the forms and colors are there—and imagine.
—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator.