ST. LOUIS – Mosaic pieces are getting a cleaning for the first time in nearly a century on Tuesday.
“This place. It’s all stone. You have to hand clean almost every little spot. There is a lot of work to it,” said William Connors, a machine operator for John Tiedemann Incorporated.
Connors and his crew are out of New Jersey and specialize in restoring churches.
“You can see the clean side, and you can see the kind of dirty side. They’re going to realize that, oh, that wasn’t grey marble; that’s really white marble,” said Monsignor Henry Breier with the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
He said the challenge with the project is the height.
“That baldachino it sits at about 60 feet tall. The challenge had been finding a piece of equipment that wouldn’t damage the floors,” Breier said.
There are several types of stones. The first step in cleaning the marble is vacuuming, then scrubbing with soap and polishing.
“It’s somewhat a trial and error, but we start out in the beginning and find little spots, and you work on it,” Connors said. “Then you go off judgment. Something is similar to the next stone. No stone is ever going to be the same.”
Breier said since its completion in 1914, the Cathedral has brought in visitors from across the world, and the main draw is the mosaic tile.
“Once the outside structure was almost complete, that’s when they started doing the work on the inside,” he said. “Truth is it took from then 1907 till about 1988 for the last mosaic to be installed.”
Breier said the cleaning won’t interrupt mass, and they aren’t doing the entire Cathedral but said it will be a noticeable difference.
“For us, it really is a jewel to be preserved, and when you see this cleaned, you’re going to see colors and things you hadn’t seen before for many years,” Breier said.