The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

    The windows in your century-old Frank Lloyd Wright are sagging. Fixing them is a bit more complex than running down to the corner hardware store and asking if they can be ready in an hour, after you finish your grocery shopping.  Enter Don Hay, who was contacted by the owners of the Thomas P. Hardy House in Racine (1905) after The Journal Times published photos of his masterful restoration of the leaded glass windows in a downtown flower shop.

    Hay was asked to remove and fix three casement windows in the bathroom, on the second floor of the Main Street side of the house.  They have protective plastic covers over them, as do most of the windows in the house, since vandals were caught breaking a window years ago.


Don Hay, right, and his assistant, Jim Kairis remove the windows.



 


 

Kairis prepares the plastic sheets that will cover the window openings during repairs, after the windows have been taken to the van.


    Hay's workshop is in a former chicken coop, at his rural home a half hour west of Racine. Hay, who is retired from the building trades, has about 30 years’ experience working with windows.  “I started when I saw windows that were beautiful, and needed somebody to restore them, in flea markets in St. Charles (Illinois). I used to go down there and buy windows, and restore them, and I’d sell them.”



 
   He knew the Wright windows are special. “I was ecstatic to be given the privilege to do it.”  Still, he is not ga-ga over Wright’s work. “I’m not overly fond of that design work because all it takes is rectangles and squares. Where is the artistry in them?  It’s a design I’ve never been overly fond of, because it looks like you could make the whole thing out of scrap glass. The only thing involved is the design. People like that, that’s fine. To me, there is not enough artistry involved in that.

    “You can’t compare it to Tiffany. Those are magnificent things. Take a look at the designs and patterns. For me there is no comparison. The small pieces all leaded or foiled, for me that’s the way to go.”

    Hay and his assistant, Jim Kairis, struggled to remove the oak frame windows from the house. They alternated working from inside the bathroom, and from an aluminum ladder propped up against the house. The weather had taken its toll on some of the hardware, which made their work more difficult.  Each frame is 32” wide by 34 1/4” tall, and weighs 30 pounds. 

    The came all had to be re-soldered after the windows were carefully disassembled. Therein lay part of the challenge Hay faced in his shop.

    “The materials they used in those days isn’t duplicated now. That’s part of the problem. It isn’t that it cannot be done.  There is a fine line between restoration and repair. If somebody wanted 100% restoration, they wouldn’t afford to it because you’d have to take every speck apart and clean every caim. They don’t make that (zinc came) anymore.

    “In comparison to the way we do things now, they could have been built a little different, but we have different materials today, different cement, different all kinds of things. The design was fine. Everything looked pretty, but there were stress points in there that should have been different and we wouldn’t have had the sagging problem we had in a few places.

    “I could do those windows with new stuff.”  Today’s cements are faster he says. “And you can do it in brass, you can do it in copper, but this was done in zinc. Everything we have today is better than it ever was 100 years ago.”

    Hay and Kairis worked on the windows for about three months. Then it was back to the balancing act on the ladder to reinstall them. The homeowner visited Hay’s studio midway, to see how and where he works.

    Although Hay does not idolize Wright as others do, he enjoyed the job. “I thought it was a wonderful thing that I could do something like this. It’s a privilege. I enjoy what I do.”  Now he is on to his next commission, the repair of the windows in a hundred-year old former hotel that abuts a nearby railway station. “I love what I do.”

    Kairis is newer to the art of repairing leaded and art glass windows. “I was really excited when he (Hay) talked about it.  I’m just starting to learn what he’s doing. I thought it was a really neat thing to get started on something like that (a Wright window).” He concentrated on the wood window frames. “I stripped them down and put them back in the shape they’re in now. I helped him with the glass a bit, but not much, and then we put them back in together.”

The windows are returned to the house after three months.