A West Philly church’s Tiffany windows sold for $200,000. A bank says the money is theirs.
Another strange twist in the story of the salvaged stained glass.
Paul Brown, an architectural salvager based in Lancaster, hoped that a surge of publicity in the spring would help sell two rare stained-glass windows he had spent upward of $100,000 to repair.
It worked: The windows sold for $200,000 total, plus $52,000 in auction fees.
Now, months later, Brown has yet to receive any money because of an ongoing legal dispute over who had the right to sell the extraordinarily rare fixtures in the first place. Once the windows were discovered to be valuable, a range of parties sought to retroactively claim ownership over them.
“In this situation, it felt like I got the middle finger,” Brown said in an interview.
Brown bought the rose windows in November 2022 from William Brownlee Sr., the new owner of a colossal church at 50th Street and Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia. Brownlee, pastor of Emmanuel Christian Center, had purchased the building in 2022 for $1.7 million, according to deed records. He hopes to transform it into a community center.
In order to make the 15,000-square-foot space more modern, Brownlee directed contractors to remove the pews, the carved wainscoting, the wood trim, the flooring, tables, chairs, windows and light fixtures. During that process, Brown purchased the windows, bundled with other fixtures, for just $6,000.
Soon after, Brown brought the grimy leaded glass to Freeman’s, the Philadelphia-based auction house. It turned out that the windows were not throwaway items after all.
Freeman’s identified them as rare Tiffany glass, potentially commissioned by Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker in the early 1900s. The auction house estimated that each window could sell for $150,000 to $250,000. The discovery, first reported by The Inquirer in the spring, garnered national attention.
At Brown’s expense, Freeman’s brought the rose windows to a special restoration firm in upstate New York, which spent three months cleaning and restoring them. Freeman’s at the time confirmed that Brown legally owned the windows, the director of design there told The Inquirer in an interview in the spring. In May, Freeman’s sold the windows to an anonymous buyer at auction for $126,000 each.
The salvager and the pastor told The Inquirer they had agreed to share some of the profits from the sale of the two windows. But neither has received any money so far from the sale.
Brownlee and his lawyer, Michael Burns, both declined to comment for this article.
Brown signed a contract with Freeman’s stating that he would be paid 35 days after the sale, according to a copy of the contract Brown provided to The Inquirer.
But a few days after the May 18 sale, Brown and Freeman’s received a letter that froze the payout. A firm representing Fulton Bank, the owner of the mortgage for Brownlee’s church, wrote that the newly discovered Tiffany windows should in fact be considered part of the mortgage lien, and therefore belong to the bank.
“Demand is hereby made for the entire proceeds of the auction sale,” said the letter, which Brown provided to The Inquirer. Janet Gold, a partner at Eisenberg, Gold & Agrawal, which is representing Fulton bank and signed the letter, did not respond to requests for comment.
Freeman’s then wrote to Brown, informing him that it would be holding on to the profits from the windows until further notice. In a June letter, which Brown provided to The Inquirer, Freeman’s lawyer said the anonymous buyer had paid the full amount due, including $52,000 in a buyer’s premium, an additional fee based on the hammer price of the item that goes to the auction house.
It’s not clear whether the anonymous buyer has received the windows.
“We’re caught in the middle of a difficult situation,” Hanna Dougher, chief operating officer of Freeman’s, told The Inquirer, declining to comment further.
A spokeswoman for the auction house said the matter is “currently tied up in litigation,” and Freeman’s is “awaiting further instruction.”