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BRADLEY – The huge Ellis Island woodwork restoration project has begun at the Restoration Works Inc., site in Bradley.
The company will be charged with the restoration of more than 750 windows found on the Main Immigration Building on Ellis Island – one of the nation’s most significant historical sites.
The windows are being trucked to Restoration Works where the employees at the South Forest Avenue site will take the windows through a restoration process as specified by the New York Architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle and the National Park Service.
Gail Wallace, president of Restoration Works, has been working for at least two years to procure this project.
Wallace was tracking East Coast window restoration projects for several years after her company’s success in restoring windows for Yale University’s 559 windows at Silliman College and 259 windows on their art gallery.
“Restoration Works is passionate about saving historic windows. The old original forest wood is amazing,” said Byron Wallace, Restoration Works technical director. “The slow growth that took place produced very tight growth rings that make old-growth wood much more dense at the cellular level.”
Byron said the old growth is full of natural resin, which is the preservative that allows old historic windows to last 100 years or more.
“These tight growth rings filled with resin form the heart wood in old growth trees,” he said. “That is what makes this wood superior to today’s wood which can rot in five or 10 years.”
“The Ellis Island windows are special,” Gail Wallace said.
“It is a sacred place,” she said, “a symbol of all that is right about America. When I think of all of the millions of people who pass through that building with their hopes and dreams, it brings tears to my eyes. Some of them were my family members. It is truly an honor to be able to work on these windows and preserve them for posterity.”
Max Wallace, Restoration Works estimator and project manager, noted Ellis Island is National Park Service’s most popular and visited site.
He said about 10,000 people a day visit the Main Immigration Building.
“They have not closed the building down for this remodeling of the building. It is quite an ordeal to have to plan around all of this activity,” Max said.
He has visited the site to photo document all the windows. He continues to document and photograph each window part multiple times in Restoration’s facility.
Photos are taken when the windows arrive and are taken off the truck, when epoxy work and glazing is completed, after glazing and after painting.
Each trim and window part is photographed on all 756 windows for a total of more than 20,000 individual pictures. Each major repair on every part of every piece is documented.
Restoration Works will be a part of WGN-TV’s April 22 Morning News Show Around the Town segment, which is also Earth Day.
Gail Wallace said the company’s restoration process has been environmentally friendly since they opened their doors in 1986.
“We not only are being a ‘green’ activity restoring good existing material, but we are doing it in a green manner,” she said. “We have taken many steps to be green, but the outstanding one is the way we strip old coatings off the wood and metal.”
The company does not use chemicals. They use the Light Wave Stripper to remove lead-based paint from wood, blast cabinets that recycle the blast media for cleaning hardware and its Sponge Jet System to remove old coatings and rust off of steel windows.
Both systems produce very little toxic residue.