In the winter of 1893, a woman named Clara sat at a long oak table in a workshop on Bleecker Street, sorting shards of iridescent glass by hue and thickness. Each piece had been pulled molten from the furnace in Corona and cooled into something that caught light the way a pond catches rain. She arranged them on a cartoon — a full-size drawing of a wisteria lamp — and began fitting them together like a puzzle whose solution you had to invent as you went.
A Workshop of Women, a Cathedral of Color
The studio employed over thirty women at its peak, each trained to cut glass with a precision that rivalled any jeweller. They worked with copper foil and lead came, bending thin strips of metal around each shard and soldering them into place. The most ambitious commissions — landscape windows for Episcopal churches and Gilded Age parlours — took months to complete, every panel a mosaic of hundreds of pieces selected for how each would interact with the glass beside it.