Overview:
One of our most popular stories last year was about where to find the famed Tiffany glass in Cleveland. But Tiffany wasn’t the only stained glass game in town at the turn of the last century. We don’t get a lot of sunlight during the winter, but when we do, it’s worth checking out these stained glass windows. Follow along with our weekly series this winter highlighting stained glass in Cleveland.
Some of Cleveland’s prettiest stained glass graces a church on West 54th Street.
The windows at St. Stephen Catholic Church were designed by Franz Mayer of Munich and owe their brilliance to the Munich style of stained glass, where artists paint relatively large panels of glass. This is compared with the medieval style Louis Comfort Tiffany adapted that involved placing smaller, colored pieces of glass in a leaded framework.
Parishioner Russell Neiling said the German immigrants who built St. Stephen “wanted the best of everything and paid extra for the windows.”
Construction on the church began in 1873, said Neiling, a Cleveland resident and unofficial historian of St. Stephen Church. The church had no decorative elements when the first Mass was held in 1876. The building was “as naked as a pole barn,” he said. The church saved up for the stained glass windows, spending $10,500 for them in 1906 (that amount was about three times the annual collection, he said).
‘Insurance probably saved the parish’
Half a century later, the windows showed parishioners the power of insurance.
Here’s why: In the early 1950s, a parishioner talked to the pastor about buying insurance for the church. Conveniently, her husband was an insurance agent. The pastor decided to purchase coverage.
”That insurance probably saved the parish,” Neiling said. In 1953, an F4 tornado ripped through the West Side. It shifted the roof on St. Stephen and shattered most of the stained glass windows.
In this audio clip, the Rev. Michael Franz, a former pastor of St. Stephen, says the church contacted Franz Mayer Studios, which still had the plans for the windows. A man who had helped install the windows 50 years earlier came from Germany to supervise the reconstruction.
“They restored them beautifully, except for two windows behind the altar that they boarded over and painted,” Franz said.
St. Joseph Church on Woodland Avenue was designed by the same architect as St. Stephen – Cleveland’s Cudell & Richardson – and its windows were made by Franz Mayer. When St. Joseph Church closed in 1986 (it burned down in 1993), St. Stephen Church got permission to take some of its stained glass.
“Today we have beautiful windows behind the altar,” Franz said in his interview for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection.
Franz Mayer continues to create, run by the fifth generation of the Mayer family in Munich.
When to visit
St. Stephen Church, 1930 W. 54th St., Cleveland, is open and the lights are on during weekend Masses. The Masses are at 5 p.m. on Saturdays and 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Sundays. On the first Sunday of the month, the 11 a.m. Mass is in German.
