JFK stained-glass work is too large for museums

NEW YORK - It was called the longest window in the world when its red, sapphire and purple panels were unveiled to airport travelers in 1960. Artists called the window - longer than a football field and more than 20 feet high - one of the most important stained-glass works in the country.

But American Airlines quietly began dismantling the window's 900 panels last week at its old John F. Kennedy International Airport terminal, after years of debate and pleas by employees and artists to find a way to keep the abstract, multicolored piece intact.

Many museums that were asked to display the window - more than 300 feet long and 23 feet high - said it was too large. And the airline said that removing it in one piece, moving it, and storing it would cost many millions.

"It's not necessarily the outcome that everyone might have hoped for," airline spokesman Tim Smith said yesterday. "But any solutions were extraordinarily expensive. And no one would be able to do that."

Smith said that small pieces of the window would become floor displays at Kennedy airport; at the airline's Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters; and at a Long Island museum. The rest is being given to an antique-salvage company that is taking down the glass for free.

Kenneth vonRoenn, who said he studied with the window's designer, said the airline was too cheap to properly restore a priceless work of art. "That was American Airlines' visual identity at Kennedy for 50 years," said vonRoenn, an architect and glass artist in Louisville, Ky. "To just throw it in a trash heap is incredibly disrespectful."

Artist Robert Sowers created the modern glass facade for American's terminal when it opened in 1960 at Kennedy, then known as Idlewild Airport. It was believed to be the world's largest stained-glass window at the time, and the first to be featured so prominently in a U.S. building.

The airline announced plans more than a decade ago to build a larger terminal at Kennedy, and the $1.3 billion facility opened last summer. For years before that, discussions circulated about options for the window. An earlier proposal, to scrap the glass and convert pieces of it into employee key chains, was instantly derided and fell through.

Eileen Clifford, a 29-year American flight attendant, said the window was a beacon for her home base, and created an organization to save it. She called dozens of conservation groups, asking museums like the Smithsonian to preserve and display it. "It's too big," she said they told her.

She said the Cradle of Aviation museum in Garden City had agreed to take it, but a museum official said it might be able to use only a small part of the window.

Smith, the airline spokesman, said no group came forward with an offer to display the window in its entirety. American Airlines also must work fast to take down the building the facade is attached to, and use the empty space to store ground equipment such as snowplows.

The company removing the glass panels, Olde Good Things, has taken down about 10 percent of the panels so far, and hopes to have the entire window dismantled in three weeks, Smith said.