Taking pains with windows Lee BEY Architecture Critic Find an old building under restoration, then check out the growing trash heap somewhere behind it. Scores of old discarded wood frame windows are often found amid the jetsam of worn, broken and unwanted things. Indeed, the old windows are often the first to go, replaced by modern, draft-proof, noise-proof and rattle-resistant stuff, often fashioned of vinyl or aluminum. Gail Wallace doesn't like this. "You just say,'Gosh-people just throw this stuff away,'"Wallace said. "But some of these windows, the special shapes, you can't find them anymore. They have things that set them off as something of architectural interest. You just get to the point where you say, "Gee, nobody's focusing on this.'" Wallace owns Restoration Works, Inc., a Kankakee company that restores old windows. And not just simple scraping and repainting. Simply put, aged windows come into the shop looking like driftwood, but go out looking like- and functioning- as well as new ones. Wallace's business is probably the only outfit of its kind in the nation, according to local restoration architects. The company handles jobs of 50 windows and larger. Locally, Restoration Works has worked its window magic on such restoration and renovation projects as Chicago's Symphony Center and the Rookery. The company restored 1,000 windows at Schurz High School. The Chicago-born Wallace started the business in 1982 as a general wood restoration enterprise. Her son, Byron, organized the shop. Partners Howard Sutker and Tom Panoplos of Vision Capital LLC keep the books.
"Originally, I was a planner," she said. "That's my degree. I was going to save the city. "Now" -she laughs here -"I'm going to save windows." 
The stylish old windows -the marriage of dense, lustrous wood and supreme craftsmanship -were designed to dress up a building. They were a finishing touch made to contribute to the building's character. The area is loaded with unique windows, ranging from the fabled Chicago window on most turn-of-the-century skyscrapers, to palladiums and wagon wheels found on churches, schools and Park District buildings. "The design of the window was just as important as the design of the wall adjacent to it," said Skidmore Owings & Merrill architect Nancy Carreon, who worked with Wallace on the restoration of the Chicago Symphony Center. "Today, it's more like, 'Open up a catalog and see what's available.' It's just not the same."  Carreon said the price of restoring huge ranks of uniquely styled wood windows is similar to the cost of getting them remade. And some details of older windows are impossible to replicate, Carreon said. But the old windows get tossed because they are cranky and hard to open. They get drafty. They rot. "Window replacement has a validity," Wallace said. "But the technology is there to restore old windows. And all of the energy-saving measures that are done on a new window can be done on an existing window. We convert to insulating glass, we weatherstrip. Wood is a good insulator." Shop boss Billie Galley oversees a noisy symphony of sawing, hammering, sanding and Tejano music in the bright open shop of Restoration Works. There are about 20 workers -most seem to be in their 20s -who are handling windows from some of the area's most visible buildings. The Gothic wood doors of the Water Tower stacked on the floor are restored and look like new. A worker steps around them as he returns to finish painting a steel window from the Jones National Guard Armory on South Cottage Grove. Freshly epoxied windows from the palatial Douglas Park field house hang nearby. The window comes in, the paint is really old, the glass is really old, everything's falling apart, the paint's chipping off," Galley said. "We get them in that kind of condition, we remove the glass here and we take {the frame} to a stripper who does all the paint removal. Then it goes through a series of epoxyings and sandings. The wood gets treated. And from there we get it glazed ...a finished product." Wallace said the old wood is fit for the battle. "Most windows before 1930 came from wood that came from original or virgin forests," she said. "And it is very nice wood. Yeah, there are flaws on an old window, but in fact they are as solid as the rock of Gibraltar." The restoration process eats up about 40 man-hours per window, including the time it takes to remove the window from the building and put it back in. But the results are startling. Windows are raised from the dead. We have a bunch of believers out there who say, 'Oh my god, that is beautiful,'"Wallace said. 
ABOVE: Gail Wallace, owner of Restoration Works., peers through a window of the Douglas Park field house that was restored by her company. Wallace founded the business in 1982. RIGHT: Jeff Brousee examines a steel window frame from the Jones Armory that needs restoration. Stacked at left are repainted frames from the same building.
The Sunday Journal, May 31, 1998 Peering through windows of Chicagoland's past By Heather Kinzinger Journal writer Gail Wallace of Kankakee wants the chance to preserve history before it's tossed in the trash. And many of Chicago's architectural wonders just wouldn't be the same without her touch. "You'd be surprised what I've done in downtown Chicago," she said with a smile. They're often forgotten, often cast aside for new ones, but Gail Wallace of Restoration Works, Inc., in Kankakee aims to restore historic wood windows. "I've always enjoyed good, old wood," Ms. Wallace said. "I guess nobody was doing it; nobody was focusing on it.""The more I learned about it, the more aghast I was that it didn't matter," she said. "We have to preserve our heritage. We can't be such a wasteful country." She said no other business in the state -and probably the country, for that matter -takes old wood windows and restores them as closely as possible to its original form. "Repair is not restoration. We do not repair here. We will not do one little thing on a window," she said. Her company specializes only in mass restorations. "What we do literally is an architectural remanufacturing. We take a historic object off a historic building and we maximize the life of that object so that it will be with us for another 100 to 200 years. That's our goal." Among the 16-year-old Restoration Works' Chicago customers have been Chicago's historic Water Tower; Northwestern University's University Hall in Evanston; the Playboy Mansion; 1,000 windows from the oldest highschool in Chicago, Carl Schurz High School, built in 1863; Orchestra Hall; Symphony Center; the Douglas Park field house; the Glessner House, built in 1887; buildings on State Street, including one next to the Chicago Theater; and Burnham & Root's the Rookery, built in 1888 and called the "jewel" of historic office buildings. 
"She is perceived as the premier window restorer, certainly at least in the Midwest," said Janice Heck, senior curator for Chicago's Glessner House Museum. "She follows the premier standards.""What she really does is window conservation. We feel there's a real need." Because of the need, Ms. Heck said, an intern from the Art Institute's preservation program will be working along side Restoration Works employees to learn Ms. Wallace's craft. The Kankakee business, with 28 full-time employees, has restored windows statewide and in other parts of the country, including those from Purdue University's Memorial Hall; a building on the former Scott Air Force Base in St. Louis, Mo.; the Journal Register Building in Springfield, Ill.; and a building in New Jersey. Future projects may included a historic hotel in Oklahoma and Princeton University's Blair Hall in New Jersey. It was the 1988 restoration of the Rookery's 835 windows, Ms Wallace said, that gave Restoration Works its exposure. The company worked with architects and the preservation program at New York's Columbia. "We got lots and lots of recognition for the work," Ms Wallace said. "We did all kinds of restoration work before then, but nobody cared. Nobody noticed. When we did the Rookery, we brought to even a higher stage of development the techniques that we used." One window will go through as many as ten steps at the Kankakee company before it's shipped back. On average, the company can complete 30 windows a week. But during the summer, Ms. Wallace said, that average will reach 60. Steps include stripping to bare wood, epoxy restoration, glazing, three-step sanding, and painting or staining. The company also custom mills wood and replaces glass, joints, and balance systems. The company's epoxy techniques are the real draw for customers, according to Ms. Wallace, whose businessincludes son Byron and partners Howard Sutker and Tom Panoplos of Vision Capital LLC. While other epoxies come pre- mixed , she said , her company mixes colors to match the original tone of the window. Three rounds of the substance are applied to fill gaps in the wood and correct holes and splinters. Windows can be modernized and still have history's quality, the business owner claims. "You can have it all," she said. "You can have that quality -the outstanding quality of an early, turn-of-the-century window -with all the latest technology." They just don't make windows like they used to, she insists. Wood from existing forests was once used for windows, but now, forests are grown specifically for wood products. And the result today, Ms. Wallace explains, is a window that doesn't last as long. Twenty years without repair is optimistic for modern windows, she said. A 100-year-life span for a modern window is unthinkable. "It's the old wood from original forests that made all of the things on houses before the 1930s, probably," she said. "You use up the forest, and then go to the next one ." "We've used them all up." Now trees are grown on tree farms and fed hormones, resulting in smaller trees, she said. "You don't get big, thick boards or big, long boards. (Now) we laminate. We don't have beams anymore, because our trees don't grow that big. So... the wood warps easier. It's not a dense cell structure." Windows used to be built into buildings; now they're built separately and installed, she added. Ms. Wallace began in the retail window business. Her first historic project came in 1982, when she restored 250 windows from the St. Nicholas Hotel in Springfield. Between 1983-86, her company worked on just four more projects -all of which are on the national or state historic register. Restoring historic windows wasn't a demand then, Ms. Wallace said. "The market wasn't ready for this ," she explained. "You couldn't get steady work restoring windows or restoring anything." The market to sell new windows (was so overwhelmingly in place that the thought of saving a window was too foreign a thing to think about. No one probably even knew how to restore a window correctly." Today, if a building is on the national register, the windows can't be replaced. The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Chicago Landmark Development have the same restrictions. And that's the way it should be, Ms. Wallace said. "In Europe, things can last 400 and 500 years. That's part of the culture there. We (Americans) just think that we have to have new every 20 years," she said. She's written articles for architectural publications and her company has been featured in The Chicago SunTimes. But the Kankakee resident takes the most satisfaction from saving history. "It interests me because I love beautiful wood," she said, "but I have a very, very deep sense of not wasting things." "I just feel we are so wasteful in America, that it's a tragedy." 
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