There is a short interior passage connecting the parish house to the sacristy that we call the Cloister (not to be confused with the other cloister that connects the parish house to the rectory).
The Cloister is a carpeted, white oak-wainscotted passage with three steps down from the parish house into the church. (There's a city easement that allows East and West Buchanan Streets to connect under the cloister.) There is a wheelchair lift on the right side of the passage at the steps, and there are twelve small windows (six on each side) of the passage, one for each Apostle.
 |
| Standing in the doorway to the sacristy, looking south towards the parish house. St. Peter's window is in the left foreground, St. Mathias' is on the right. Photographs of our past rectors hang between each window. |
Each Apostle's window is recessed into the wall aproximately 13 inches (to account for the thickness of the exterior stone wall and interior wall). There's an interior ledge or window sill made up of the same wood as the wainscotting, and a small brass plaque affixed to each window describing the dedication.
There's a shield in the center of each window surrounded by a diamond-shaped pattern of leaded glass. The outside edge of each window has a two-inch strip of multi-colored glass, all fixed within a wooden window frame.
Each apostle window has an individual icon representing the apostle for that window:
All of the windows in the cloister were built by Thomas W. Harland, a local real estate expert who took up glassmaking as a hobby. Mr. Harland also created the eight "Boody Babies" in the tower and the windows in the narthex and the north portico.
With the exception of the eight tower windows, Mr. Harland's windows are all of tinted glass with a diamond-patterned background and either figured shields or (as in the case of the sacristy windows) an oval design in the center. The pictures on all of these windows are painted on the glass and then fired in an oven to "fix" the image permanently to the glass surface. |
