Douglas Farrand calls the stained-glass window inside the Faith + Works Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Orange the building’s “spiritual center.” He describes the morning sunlight streaming through the panes as almost a religious experience.
“If you come here at certain times of the day, it really blows your mind,” Farrand said.
Last August, Farrand, the buildings and grounds manager at one of the charitable organizations housed in the church, the HUUB, discovered that their prized possession was shattered.
“We’re not exactly sure what happened to it,” he said.
The consensus among those who work in the building at 35 Cleveland Street was that it was less important to hunt down the culprit than to restore the panes. But fixing it would run up a cost of nearly $10,000. For a charitable organization, that price tag was steep. But it was worth every penny, Farrand said, and not just because the window — made by one of the most famous glassmakers, Louis Comfort Tiffany — can fetch thousands of dollars.
“Fixing the window was a sign of our intention to keep our space open to the public for gathering,” Farrand said. “We have a lot of expensive repairs we’ll be doing in the next five years – but we’re here, we’re planning to stay, and we want our neighbors to stay as well.”
The window was commissioned in 1910 by a parishioner named Martha Pierce Handy in memory of her late husband Nathan Louis Handy, a wool merchant who came to Orange around 1880. At the time, unitarianism was thriving and local membership boasted a number of bigwigs including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s uncle, business leaders, and prominent suffragettes.
“Unitarianism truly is an American denomination,” said Frank Barszcz, the HUUB’s board president.
Thomas Jefferson once predicted Unitarianism would become the most widely practiced religion in the United States. It seemed that way until the mid-20th century when it began to see a dip in membership. Unitarianism managed to hold on after merging with Universalists in 1961.
But the Cleveland Street parish was at its last gasp about a decade ago, counting only 30 congregants who were faced with a few grim options, including merging with another congregation or selling the building.
Farrand believes the existential crisis at the church is a microcosm of what is happening throughout Orange — an aging town that is growing costlier by the year. A place with a rich history that is slowly being lost to corporate developers who only value things in terms of a real estate appraisal.
In the end, the churchgoers, led by local author and urbanism professor Mindy Fullilove and educator Becky Doggett, opted for a third option – to stay put and instead turn the building, constructed in 1893, into a community center. “We decided to see our building as an asset rather than a liability,” Farrand continued. “If we filled the building with life, the resources to maintain it would follow.”
That is the origin story of the HUUB, which uses the Unitarian Universalist facilities as the headquarters of its mission and activism. Today, other nonprofits like the University of Orange and Lanbi Center for Civics and Humanities call the campus, which includes the neighboring residence, home. The church still has a monthly Unitarian Universalist service called Faith + Works.
Repairing the window signifies a pact with the surrounding neighborhood of historic buildings and longtime business owners to remain in the city at a time of rapid construction and rising costs of living, Farrand said.
These issues are especially relevant on the 20th anniversary of Fullilove’s book “Root Shock,” a sociological treatise that warns readers about the toll gentrification can have on residents and those displaced by these changes.
Even Cleveland Street, where the church is located, is seeing the incursion of development that some may call out of scale. Across the street, at 76 Cleveland Street, a new market-rate apartment complex will soon break ground. Farrand already fears the high monthly rents could cause a ripple effect.
“We’re already seeing a displacement of small local businesses as commercial real estate becomes affordable,” Farrand said. “Landlords feel emboldened to kick people out so they can raise rents and homeowners, whose taxes are through the roof, can’t afford to stay where they are.”
In the eye of this gentrification storm is the Cleveland Street church, and its newly restored stained-glass window with the appropriate epitaph, “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” a Bible verse that honors those who work to solve a community’s ills. The window is worth seeing in person and Farrand and his colleagues invite strangers into the parish hall where it is located.
One of the reasons Tiffany’s stained glass became so popular is because of his patented opalescent glass where several hues swirl in a single pane, according to David Bleckman, president of J & R Lamb Studios, the firm that restored the window.
“By doing so, you get different densities and layers when the light strikes it,” he said.
Tiffany’s windows don’t require a direct light source to illuminate the colors, Bleckman said. “Even at nighttime, when you’re inside, you can still see the beauty of the window,” Bleckman said.
