Restorers taking panes at Capitol

448 dome panels part of job

Nathan Cathey (left) and Lynn Fitzgerald remove caulk from panels of stained glass in a workshop in North Little Rock as part of the restoration of the House chambers at the state Capitol.
Nathan Cathey (left) and Lynn Fitzgerald remove caulk from panels of stained glass in a workshop in North Little Rock as part of the restoration of the House chambers at the state Capitol.

In a workshop off Maumelle Boulevard in North Little Rock, Nathan Cathey and Lynn Fitzgerald spend their days meticulously chipping caulk off multicolored, stained-glass windows from the Arkansas Capitol building.

They have to be careful not to strike the panels too hard and shatter them. After they remove bigger chunks with a hammer and putty knife, they take a razor scraper to the surface of the glass to get off the thin layer of film that covers the surface of each one.

"Somebody sprayed some kind of lacquer on every one of them," Cathey said. He said the film is likely overspray from painting near the glass.

Cleaning a single panel can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on its size and the amount of caulk, dirt and grime that has collected on its surface over the years.

After it's finished, a vacuum is used to clear the work area of the chipped-off pieces.

Seventy-one down, 377 to go.

And that's just the first phase of the restoration process.

Cathey and Fitzgerald are two of a handful of people at Soos Stained Glass Inc. restoring the panels of stained glass that make up the inner dome of the Capitol building's House chamber.

Workers took out all 448 panels from the dome of the chamber and transferred them to the Soos workshop in North Little Rock, where they will be restored in the coming months.

The renovation of the dome is part of a $1 million project to restore the House chamber to closer to its original appearance. The restoration of the stained glass alone costs $105,035.

The stained-glass dome is covered by an outer dome, which was repaired three years ago to fix leaks that caused water damage.

Though the stained glass in the dome is not original to the building, it has become an iconic feature of the chamber, said Cecillea Pond-Mayo, spokesman for the House of Representatives.

"Originally, it did not have stained glass when we started here in 1911," Pond-Mayo said. "My understanding is that, through history, it became so hot the sun was shining straight down in through the skylight, and in a couple of years they decided they needed to do something."

Other stained glass in the Capitol building can easily be popped out to be repaired, but the panels in the House chamber presented a different problem.

"They were puttied and painted in there," Cathey said. "They made it harder for us."

Now that they're out and in the Soos workshop, each one will be cleaned and restored.

"We're going to be replacing a lot of glass that was not very well matched in some early repairs back in the early 1960s," said David Soos, founder and owner of Soos Stained Glass. "You can look at it and see that the glass is not the original glass."

Soos traveled to Kokomo Opalescent Glass in Indiana to look for shades of glass that are true to the original colors.

"More than likely the glass that's in there was made by them originally," Soos said.

But the glass isn't the only thing in the chamber that's being refurbished.

To restore the chamber to its original color scheme, the secretary of state's office, which is responsible for the maintenance of the Capitol building, hired EverGreene Architectural Arts of Illinois to conduct a historic paint analysis on a portion of the wall.

The company found that the original color scheme of the room was much more complex than its current one.

"The colors now are just a couple colors, but the original colors had a lot of base paints and a lot of glazes," said Gary Clements, president of North Little Rock-based Clements and Associates Architecture Inc., the architect for the renovation.

Other aspects of the chamber have been changed over the years to accommodate technological advancements.

The curtains draping from the dome were installed for acoustical purposes. They are being replaced with new curtains as part of the renovation.

An acoustical consultant hired by the secretary of state's office is addressing noise from computers, air conditioners and other machinery.

"Those are very subtle things, but you collect all those things together and you collect a lot of white noise," Clements said.

The chamber will get rid of its outdated technology, like the four bulky speakers that cover up the medallion design at the tip of the dome.

The speakers have long been out of use, replaced by smaller ones on each legislator's desk.

The lighting in the chamber also has evolved over the years to accommodate media cameras. But even those updates have become outdated.

"Television cameras have changed so much," Pond-Mayo said. "The lighting was more for that purpose and not so much for the work-space area. So this will accommodate both."

Barrett Austin, the construction manager for the House restoration project, said the new lighting system will improve the experience of watching live streams of sessions, too.

"We had a lot of hot spots, light and dark in areas," he said. "It will be more clean."

The secretary of state's office hired Randy Burkett Lighting Design in St. Louis to design the lighting in the space.

Ron Kurtz, an associate and senior designer for the company, said the room was originally lit by just the chandelier and sconces along the walls. Those lights probably weren't very bright, and most of the room's light came from the dome's skylight, Kurtz said.

In the 1960s or 1970s, the sconces were replaced with modern light fixtures and more light sources were added to the room.

"There was a modification made to that space where more efficient lighting sources were cut into the ceiling fabric," Kurtz said. "They're big, industrial lighting fixtures. That was probably in response to people saying we don't have enough light in which to work."

The chandelier will be cleaned and its light bulbs will be replaced with LED light sources, which will be more long-lasting and energy-efficient, Kurtz said.

The company will build replicas of the original sconces, which also will include LED lights. The replicas will be re-created using historic photos of the space, because the sconces themselves couldn't be found.

"Nobody knows where they are," Kurtz said.

The big, industrial lights will be replaced with a smaller LED lighting system, which will only be used when needed.

"During the daytime hours, say when the House of Representatives is not in session, those fixtures can be turned off and they will disappear into the ceiling fabric," Kurtz said.

All of the lights will have the ability to be dimmed to give the room a more historic feel.

"If you have it on a dimmer, for instance, and you turn that lamp on and turn it down, that dimmed-down orange appearance would have been what the actual lamp would have been," Kurtz said.

This phase of the chamber renovations is scheduled to be finished by Oct. 31, in time for newly elected legislators to attend their seat assignment session in November.

A second, smaller phase of renovation will occur after the next legislative session is over, Pond-Mayo said. The second phase will include replacing the carpet and making modifications to the legislators' desks.

Next on the Capitol's list is restoring skylights in the House and Senate sides of the building.

A section on 07/06/2014

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