The final days of the Trinity Church

It’s Wednesday morning, July 13.  8 in the morning.  Normally I’m still at home, as I don’t need to arrive in downtown Albany for at least another hour – not unless there’s an important reason to do so.

Today counts as an “important reason to do so.”

A few days earlier, the Trinity Episcopal Church on Trinity Place in downtown Albany was in its final days of life.  One of the walls started to buckle.  Bricks fell from the roof.  Sadly, the centuries-old structure was just days away from total collapse.

Immediately everyone went into action.  Arrangements were made to hire a demolition crew, while other arrangements were put in place to save any religious artifacts that COULD be saved.

As for me… I was making sure that the Nikon D700 had plenty of juice in it and that I had a clean camera chip.

It’s Wednesday morning.  I walk up Madison Avenue, take a left turn, and there it is.  Trinity Episcopal Church.  The street was blocked off with white sawhorses and red plastic netting.  I walked up as close as I could.

There were already reports about the building’s imminent collapse. I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to shoot a picture like this again.

“Hey,” one of the construction workers on site said to me. “You taking pictures?”

“Yes sir,” I replied, automatically going into my “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this was a secure location, I’ll leave now” mode.

“If you go through that alley over there,” the construction worker pointed to an alleyway on the other side of the church, “You can see what the building looks like from the rear.  Just be careful and stay behind the fencing when you get back there.”

Well now that’s an offer I couldn’t refuse. I thanked him and walked through the alleyway, to the back of the building. The rear of the church had indeed collapsed to the ground, but look at what was left.

Greg and Mary at AllOverAlbany.com would love this picture for their website.  I must send it to them once I get to a computer.  Look at it.  You can still see the nave of the church, as well as the huge stained glass window in the center.  I could see that one, and I knew there were several other windows in the building – the one window I could see, the great one, was protected with a plastic sheet.

I then said to myself… “I’m not going to get a chance like this again…”

So after I took some normal photos of the back wall, I decided to combine some pictures into an HDR output.  I haven’t produced an HDR photo in a while – HDR requires a minimum of three photos, one over-exposed, one under-exposed – and then the images are combined in a software program like PhotomatixPro to bring out the details and colors of all three images.  Now the Times Union itself can’t run a picture like this on their site, due to Hearst Corporation requirements that a photograph must be a single captured image and not a composite. But that’s not going to stop little ol’ me from putting something like this together and placing it on my blog.

At around 5:30 p.m., I returned to Trinity Place to watch the continuing demolition progress.  The church’s southern tower was already in shambles, and the workers were carefully tearing down the northern tower.  The front marker over the main door, the marker that said “Trinity Episcopal Church,” had been removed and preserved by one of the demolition workers.

I struck up a conversation with the fire chief on charge – Assistant Commissioner Cox – and we talked about how delicate a procedure this is to complete.  Everybody knows what’s at stake here – if this building collapses, bricks could fly into neighboring buildings and render those buildings unsafe.  One shift in the wind and the bricks – whose mortar lost adhesion decades ago – could crumble and hurt someone on the ground.

The building’s not on fire – if you’re wondering why the firemen are spraying the building with water, it’s not to combat any sparks or anything like that.  It’s to wet down any loose dust and debris and keep it from getting airborne.

And then there were the windows.

The Church houses several stained glass windows, with some of the windows possibly manufactured by Tiffany and worth, in today’s collector’s market, hundreds of thousands of dollars per pane.  At the moment, the Tiffany connection is more hypothesis than theory, but everyone from the firemen to the demolition crew to the safety inspectors all treated those windows as if Louis Comfort Tiffany himself had nailed every pane in place.

I took some more pictures of what was left of the church Wednesday night, and I made arrangements to return the next day.

Thursday morning.  I’m up with the crack of dawn.  Camera’s ready, battery’s charged, and off we go.

As I went back behind the alleyway, I could see that more of the structure had collapsed in the past 24 hours.  The roof had collapsed, and fallen timbers were pinned against the large stained glass front window.

The demolition crew – DiTonno & Sons Demolition -told me that they were hoping to save as many of the stained glass windows as possible.  “Come back here later in the day,” they said.

So I did.

At around 11:30 a.m., I returned to the Trinity Place site. Two of the windows were already removed from one of the back walls, but I was allowed to go back through the alley to the rear of the structure.  There I met up with the team from DiTonno & Sons, who were carefully lowering the second stained glass window onto a flatbed.

“If you’re getting another stained glass window,” I said, “Let me know, I’ll get pictures of it.”

“We’re going to get that one over there,” one of of the construction workers replied.  “If you stay over here, you can get pictures of us doing it.  That would be great.”

“Yes it would,” I affirmed.

Two DiTonno workers then rode a cherry-picker over to the church’s remaining far wall, while another DiTonno worker operated a large-range excavator.  The cherry-pickers nailed plywood boards to the front of the stained glass frames, to protect the glass as much as possible.

Once the protective boards were in place, the team then slowly pulled the crumbling bricks away from the sides of the window frame.  A fireman sprayed water on the bricks to wet down any airborne dust.

This takes a while. The long-range excavator has to carefully knock down as many bricks as it can, while the cherry-pickers try to keep the window from shaking or rattling or fracturing in its frame.

Once the long-range excavator cleared out enough brick from the window frame, one of the workers wrapped a large cable around the body of the window frame, and slowly lifted it out of the housing like a dentist removes a tooth.  In the picture, you can still see some of the dead “creeping ivy” on the frame of the window; that creeping ivy was probably about the only thing still holding that church together, I suspect.

The stained glass window was then carefully – and I do mean carefully – hoisted over to the flatbed, where several DiTonno workers safely lowered the stained glass window.

Presto.  Another stained glass window rescued.

“Did you get some great shots?” one of the demolition workers asked me.

“Yes I did, thank you very much for letting me be back here to do it.”

“We try to save whatever we can,” the worker said.  “When that building on Madison Avenue collapsed last year, we were able to save a lot of things.  I wasn’t there at the time, but someone told me that we saved this painting of one of the tenants – it was a nude painting of her.”

We both had a good laugh.

“You know,” he said with a wink, “You could go up in the lift if you wanted to.  You’d get some great pictures up there.”

Okay, think about this for a second. I have an opportunity to get a photograph from an angle no one else in the Capital District could ever get. I thought about the pros and cons of getting in this cherry-picker and riding up to the top of the building, camera in hand –

Dude, what “cons?” Hell yes I’m getting in that cherry picker!

One of the workers stepped out of the basket, I climbed in. The other worker slowly raised the basket up. I aimed my camera. Oh wow.

“You can see what we had to do,” he said to me. “We want to get all those windows out safely – if we didn’t care about the windows, we would have had this building on the ground in a couple of hours flat. But we want to save the windows.”

“I certainly understand that.”

“See the towers up there?” he said, pointing at what was left of the rooftop towers. “We had to take those out with sledgehammers and manual force. That’s the only way we could keep the whole building from collapsing and hurting anyone on the ground. It’s hard work, but sometimes that’s what you have to do.”

He raised the basket up higher.

“Are you getting some good photos?” he asked me.

You tell me.

After we got back on the ground – and I thanked everybody on DiTonno & Sons Demolition from the excavator operators to the ground crew to their mother – yes, four of the seven DiTonno siblings work in demolition, and their proud mother was there to watch the whole thing – I went back and snapped a few more shots of the front of the building.

“That big stained glass window in the center is going to be the tough one to remove,” I noted.

“Yeah,” said the fire captain observing the demolition progress. “I know they’re only going to work until they can be sure the remaining structure is stable; they’re not going to work past a point where they would have to continue working into the night. But they do want to save all the windows. Even the big one, if they can.”

At about 5pm Thursday evening, I returned to the Trinity Church site.  Happily, I was informed that the big stained glass window in the center was removed successfully and intact.   In fact, they were still carefully removing windows from the tower, and I arrived just in time to capture the saving of one of the tower’s last windows.

And just like that, one of the Trinity Church’s towers was gone. The demolition crew then directed their attention to the other tower, hoping to get the final tear-down completed by the end of the day. In the interests of safety, all the electricity in the neighborhood was turned off during the tear-down, and the demolition team wanted to get the tower down below the hanging power wires before the end of the day.

I watched as the long-range excavator tapped the standing tower walls, and they crumbled to the ground like a stack of pennies.  It was almost as if any mortar that was applied to those bricks a century ago was now barely crumbs and dust, and that the building was being held together by memories and creeping ivy.

As the long-range excavator carved the tower down, again the fire hose sprayed the tower to soak down any airborne parts. But as the firehose sprayed the upper part of the tower, it caught the light of the sun – and I saw a small rainbow in the hose’s spray.

I don’t want to get too metaphysical – it was a small rainbow, and it was caused by a firehose – but could one argue that this was maybe the last covenant made by the Lord to a church that served its community for over 150 years? I’d like to think so.

One thing is for sure – this isn’t just your average “building is falling apart, let’s tear it down” demolition.  Everyone – from DiTonno & Sons to Historic Albany Foundation, from the Albany County Hall of Records to the Albany Fire Department and the Building of Code Enforcement – want to make sure that this building is treated with the respect and care that it so richly deserved.  And that any and all artifacts that could be preserved – ARE safely preserved.

And the fact that they did this with a building that was such an integral part of the neighborhood – believe me, that means more than you can imagine.