Bedford-Stuyvesant holds the largest surviving run of nineteenth-century row houses anywhere in New York, and most of the glass we are called to on these blocks is original, or near enough that replacing it outright would be the wrong answer. Parlor-floor sash that has moved with the building for a hundred and forty years is rarely square any more, so every opening on a Bed-Stuy house is measured on its own rather than averaged across a floor. Vestibule doors and stair-hall transoms still carry etched, bevelled and leaded panels that can be taken apart, re-leaded and put back; where a single pane really is beyond saving, we match the glass itself — its thickness, its colour, the way it throws light across the hall — and not just the outline. Four historic districts cover much of the neighborhood, so anything visible from the street is specified with that review in mind and photographed before the first piece comes out of the frame.

The other half of the work here is commercial and institutional. Fulton Street, Nostrand, Marcy, Myrtle and Bedford Avenue are lined with small shopfronts, many of them one bay wide with a roll-down gate track sitting in front of the glass, where a cracked display pane has to be boarded the same day and replaced without closing the business for a week. Bed-Stuy also has an unusually dense stock of large masonry churches, whose tall arched openings and stained glass need protective exterior glazing that lets the assembly breathe instead of trapping moisture against the lead. Add the two- and three-family houses where the owner lives upstairs and the tenants stay put through the job, and the practical question on almost every project here is sequencing: which openings come out first, what gets closed up overnight, and how the building stays secure and weather-tight between visits.