Every weekday morning, Mel Greenland buys a subway token in New York, boards an express train and heads exultantly into the 12th Century.
His destination is a 3rd floor studio at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights. There, the master stained glass conservator, 67, performs major and minor miracles on gossamer glass paintings brought to life by light.
The fact that a Brooklyn-born Orthodox Jew has become one of the world`s foremost technical authorities on stained glass, an art form historically associated with ancient European cathedrals, seems odd to some of his family members. It doesn`t seem at all odd to Greenland.
''Mkadesh Shem Shama`yim,'' he said softly in Hebrew one recent afternoon as the music of Haydn filled the studio along with the dappled auburn hues of a late afternoon autumn light.
''The glorification of God`s name,'' he said in translation, ''is the rationale, the rubric under which I work. I live in the aura of a universal beauty-the effect of light through color.''
The aura is the creation of William Jay Bolton, whose figural windows at St. Ann`s, designed between 1844 and 1848, are considered by art historians to be a national treasure.
City of Churches
The Episcopal church, a gem of 19th Century Gothic Revival architecture, suffered from years of neglect, weather, pollution and the jittery subway system beneath it.
Its stained glass windows, some 60 dazzling tiers of light representing about 7,000 square feet of glass, were riddled with stress fractures and
''literally shaken loose by the subway,'' Greenland said.
The glazing designed to shield the chancel window from the elements had rusted, and the small grooved lead bars, or cames, that held the windows together no longer had the strength to support their weight.
Like his medieval predecessors, Greenland learned his craft through apprenticeships. Most were in the New York area, with many of them ill paid.
''Entre nous,'' he said, surrounded by putty knives, a high-efficiency particulate air vacuum cleaner used to filter toxic dust and other tools of his trade, ''what did a Jewish boy know about stained glass?''
He is considered a pioneer in a field that has grown increasingly sophisticated, said Jane Hayward, curator of medieval art at the Cloisters, for whom Greenland has restored ''goodness knows how many'' medieval windows. In addition to restoring most of the windows on display in the medieval department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Greenland was also the first American to work on the windows of Chartres Cathedral in France.
Whistle-blower at Chartres
There, in the 1970s, he wound up being a whistle-blower when he became alarmed by the harsh cleansing agents being used for the restoration.
''There are not very many Mels out there,'' Hayward said. ''In this country you can count them on the fingers of one hand and have some fingers left over.''
Greenland grew up in Brownsville in central Brooklyn. During the Depression his mother was a building superintendent, and even as an 8- or 9-year-old Greenland could fix things.
The first stained glass windows he ever saw were in Manhattan, at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on the East Side of Manhattan, while he was working in his father-in-law`s glazing business.
Entranced by the handiwork, Greenland, then in his 20s, decided to enroll in a stained glass course at City College taught by an art historian from Latvia.
He then apprenticed himself to a Brooklyn glazier who ran a one-man storefront operation on 7th Avenue, a craftsman who ''was a very gruff, macho kind of character, but who absolutely knew the work,'' he said.
During the 1950s, Greenland tried to strike out on his own, but encountered what he interpreted to be anti-Semitism among delegates of the New York glaziers` union.
''They told me they didn`t think they could find me any work,'' he recalled. ''It was a flat statement. I didn`t question it.''
Tenacity a prerequisite
But tenacity is a prerequisite for putting priceless glazed jigsaw puzzles back together. And Greenland became all the more determined to reach the pinnacle of his craft, supplementing stained glass work at a New Jersey studio by driving a cab on weekends.
But his fateful but accidental invitation to a slide show given by Rowan LeCompte, a man he considers a genius, opened up his world. ''That was really the beginning,'' Greenland said. LeCompte became his mentor.
LeCompte invited his protege to collaborate on windows for the National Cathedral in Washington, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and other commissions. Poetically, Greenland`s 40-odd years as a stained glass craftsman have paralleled a broader public appreciation of stained glass.
The postwar suburban church- and synagogue-building boom was coupled with the historic preservation movement and the craft revival of the 1960s and
''People even started to put leaded glass shades in their houses,''
Greenland said, marveling. ''That had gone into complete remission after Tiffany.''
These days, Greenland`s reputation as an international stained-glass trouble shooter often precedes him. At a recent conference in Spain on the restoration of the stained glass at Leon Cathedral, ''Mel`s name kept coming up,'' said Robert H. Brill, a research scientist at the Corning (N.Y.) Museum of Glass, who has known Greenland for more than 20 years.
At conferences sponsored by the Corpus Vitrearum and other august stained glass organizations, Greenland often can be found embroiled with European colleagues in deep philosophical questions about microclimates, the space between the window and its outside protective glazing that is the focus of a scientific debate. (''Deterioration is a big deal,'' he said.)
Master glass conservator
After several years as an independent consultant to the non-profit St. Ann Center for Restoration and the Arts Inc., Greenland was appointed the in- house master glass conservator in 1988. Assisted by the World Monuments Fund, the St. Ann`s project has received money from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; the Getty Grant Program; the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; and the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
Since 1980, about 25 windows have been restored for $855,000, but $1.4 million more is needed to complete the work, said Susan Feldman, the center`s artistic director.
Part of what makes Greenland so widely admired, Brill said, are his novel solutions, such as a drill that Greenland borrowed from his dentist.
That which is normally used for root canal has been applied to its ecclesiastical architectural equivalent: fastening windows to bronze frames and drilling tiny holes in the pointed areas in the tracery where the windows terminate in tear-drop shapes.
He also devised a system in which detachable brass clips let the windows
''float'' in their frames so that pressure from the frames and subway are alleviated.
Windows are his patients
His studio is an operating room in which windows are patients. His modus operandi usually involves documenting the condition of a window and then taking it apart piece by piece under water to avoid exposure to toxic lead dust.
The pieces then are laid out on the light box, where cracks are repaired with copper foil (Tiffany`s method) or a more subtle silicone cement if the window is close to the eye.
Sometimes it is necessary to improvise. For the third lancet on the chancel window, a scene that probably involves St. Paul, Greenland said, a portion of the figure was missing.
David Fraser, Greenland`s assistant, repainted it, using Greenland`s left leg as the model.
When the first three restored windows were unveiled, parishioners at St. Ann`s burst into applause.
Greenland tends to apply the same exacting standards to other facets of his life, whether it is playing the oboe in his Upper West Side home, where he lives with his wife, Gertrude, a teacher, or caulking a friend`s broken window before a dinner party.
Like music, the beauty of the Bolton windows is ''very much a part of my emotional being,'' Greenland said. He goes to work each day buoyed by their brilliance, a brilliance ignited by light and the human spirit.
But most of all, he said, ''I come here with hands.'' -