A Touching Tale of Preservation

The losses and disasters of historic preservation often get attention, while the little victories sometimes go unsung. So I was delighted when a reader shared this story with me and gave me permission to tell it on Gossips.

Recently the Gossips reader was walking with a friend down in what for them was "the old neighborhood"--Union Street below Third. They stopped to study the stained glass windows in the church at Union and Second streets, which had been Our Lady of Mount Carmel and is now St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church. As they stood looking at the windows, the rector appeared and invited them inside to see the stained glass windows from the perspective of the sanctuary.

He told them that recently a descendant of one of the families that had donated the stained glass windows in 1928 when the church was built expressed interest in buying his family's window back. He offered the church $10,000 for the window and agreed to pay all the expenses involved in removing it and to provide money for a replacement window. The rector presented this proposal to the congregation for a vote, and the congregation, which according to the rector numbers about forty, rejected it. The church's stained glass windows remain intact, and the whole community should rejoice and be grateful.