Stained glass artist keeps Dot homes in fine form

Stained Glass

Over the decades whenever Meetinghouse Hill resident Peter Ureneck has mentioned his business, Dorchester Stained Glass, people have typically commented, “I didn’t know people still did that. I thought that was a dying art.”

These days he retorts, “Stained glass has gone from critical to stable.”

The popular appreciation and patronage of this art form has declined dramatically from past centuries, but even in the 40 years that Ureneck has been working, the profession has had its ups and downs.

The very first repair job he did was on the Barry Street home where he was born and still maintains his studio when a Flexible Flyer flew through one of the sidelights that flanked the front door. He restored the mixture of colored cathedral (translucent) and opalescent glass, but it was actually another venture that nudged him into this ancient profession.

Back in the 70s he got into taking photographic images he had taken of New England country farm scenes and seascapes and silk-screening them on opalescent glass.

“It created a sort of silhouette on a luminescent background that was theoretically always changing,” Ureneck said.

Ureneck sold thousands of these sun catchers across the country, but he eventually moved into the traditional window repair and restoration, which today accounts for 80 percent of his business.

He learned the various aspects of the craft by hanging around the prestigious studios in the St. Botolph Street area, once known as “Stained Glass Row.” There he informally apprenticed at what he calls the “studios of the old masters,” including that of “the O’Duggan Brothers who used to let me use their painting facility and give me pointers now and then.”

One of his first big jobs was restoring windows at Dot’s First Parish Church; subsequently he has done repairs at other local houses of worship like St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s. He notes, “Churches are much more subject to vandalism than residences, particularly the lower, louvered windows which are closest to the street.”

“I have salvaged hundreds of pieces of period colored glass as well as the clear, subtly wavy kind with an occasional air bubble, far superior to the imitation ‘antique glass,’ made in China these days.”

Among the piano windows he reclaimed from a Savin Hill home was one with the penciled inscription, “Union Stained Glass, Dorchester, Mass.,” a studio that used to operate on Columbia Road near Everett Square.

“It’s likely that many of the windows that you still can find in Dorchester’s triple-deckers and Victorian homes were made right here in Dorchester by studios like Union.”

Some of the windows Ureneck has restored with period glass are available for sale at Dark Horse Antiques in Lower Mills.

Ureneck has a patent pending on what he calls an “in situ de-bower,” a tool that flattens a window that has bulged out back to the point where it can be fixed. This invention has proved invaluable in his repair work, which has largely been done in Dorchester, but which has also taken him to Beacon, Newton and beyond.

His greatest achievement?

“I’m happy just to have been able to save so many beautiful windows, particularly here in Dorchester. I get tremendous satisfaction when customers say, “I can’t even find where the damage was!”