I was down by the Jersey Shore at a favorite antiques store, and as I was browsing around, I happened upon this stack of antique leaded stained glass on the floor, just leaned up against a cabinet. It intrigued me, so I asked the proprietor about it. He mentioned that he bought these as part of a large collection that were in a storage facility in Belleville, NJ. He said there was no documentation about this glass, as far as the source or the age of it. It was all stored in wooden crates and he decided to buy the whole lot. He felt that he had something good here, but since there was so much, most of it was still in the crates, and he only had this small selection in the store. He made another comment, suggesting that if I knew anyone who would be interested in having this large inventory, that it could be interesting to go through it all and do something with it.
I looked at it a little longer, and then decided I wasn’t ready to buy any, and started to leave the store. As I was outside going to my car, the proprietor called me over, and took me to the side of the building. He pulled back the top of a large tarp, revealing some of the many crates that contained his whole collection of glass – it was a huge amount!
Even though I left without buying any, I kept thinking about this glass. A warehouse in Belleville, hmmm … that wouldn’t be far from the old Tiffany & Co. factory in Newark, could this possibly be Tiffany’s glass?
A note on the Tiffany’s factory, which probably deserves its own blog post – a couple years ago I was on a long bike ride, and happened upon an apartment complex in a beautiful brick building in Newark. It was pretty dramatic, because the 4 corners each had these tall towers, with long stretches of the brick structure between them. As I got off my bike and looked closer, I noticed the faint white lettering that says “Tiffany & Co,” which you can see better in the bottom strip of this composite image.
Of course the treasure-seeker in me has the idea: wouldn’t it be amazing if this stash of stained glass, previously collecting dust in some Belleville warehouse, is something that was once produced at Tiffany’s and was forgotten about, and is now available unidentified as such in some antique store? I know it’s far-fetched, but the Tiffany’s factory shut down in the 1980s, and later was converted into luxury apartments and is now known as Tiffany Manor. It’s not a stretch to think that whatever was still at the factory in the 1980s had to get moved out or stored for future considerations as they shut it down, and Belleville is the next town over.
So, I’m wondering, how do I research this? How do I come up with some sort of conclusion? Truth be told, even if it’s not Tiffany’s and it’s something not valuable at all, I still find these panels to be beautiful. I leave the antiques store, but I’m thinking hard about these things … knowing me, I’ll probably go back and buy some. In the meantime, here’s a look at some of the other panels that were there.
