There’s A Place Called Kokomo (Opalescent Glass)

According to Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, glassmaking began when a group of shipwrecked Phoenician sailors set their beachside cooking pots on a naturally occurring type of soda ash, and then built a fire underneath it. The sailors left the fire burning overnight, and when they awoke, they found that the heat from the fire had fused the sand with the soda ash, causing it to harden into glass. While glass is legitimately produced by heating soda ash and sand together, Pliny’s description of this accidental find by a group of sailors can be disproven by the existence of glass produced in places like ancient Egypt.

Pliny’s story—the beach, the fire, the shipwrecked sailors—isn’t the real origin story of glassmaking. Yet history, like glass, can be manipulated, it can be colorful and expressive, and it can be fantasy. In art glass, or “stained glass” panels, windows, and domes, such as the kind designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Frank Lloyd Wright, glass is rippled to articulate fish scales, or to transform straight lines and geometric shapes into abstracted prairie grasses. Historically, few designers and artisans of these works signed or dated their compositions, making attributions difficult or virtually impossible beyond the exemplary. Yet the manufactured material—the colorful, often rippled, shimmery plate glass that fills cathedrals, temples, homes, and public libraries—can be traced to a tangible place on a map, and a prolific 136-year-old maker. To explore the origins of the material that makes art glass so expressive and so fantastical, there is a place called Kokomo Opalescent Glass, in Kokomo, Indiana.

Since 1888, Kokomo Opalescent Glass has been producing much of the country’s—if not the world’s—sheet glass. The type of sheet glass produced by Kokomo Opalescent Glass is most often cut into shapes and set within channels of metal came, which hold the glass in place. Art glass fabricators lay out a design or restoration on a template called a cartoon, which dictates the placement, size, and type of each piece of glass within a framework of supportive metal. Sections of glass are cut and set into the came, which is then soldered by hand. Historically, lead came was used, but for repairs or new works of art glass, zinc is the preferred metal. While the process of manufacturing the glass and the craftsmanship required to turn glass and came into a piece of decorative art glass are independent, they both have become increasingly rare over time as studios and manufacturers have closed, and the craft has become less common. Kokomo Opalescent Glass is the country’s oldest manufacturer of colorful sheet glass, and one of only four that exist in the United States.

Windows of colorful, transparent glass were first deployed in the villas and palaces of wealthy Romans in the first century AD.¹ Early Christians filled the windows of Romanesque churches with vibrant pictorial scenes, providing a form of communication through image during a time when literacy was not widespread. As architecture advanced, relying on new technologies in engineering, buildings would be able to accommodate larger spaces for glass domes and windows. Religious reform movements and class warfare led to the destruction of much of this early art glass, but when the craft was revived in the late nineteenth century, the materials, process, and methods remained the same as they did in the first century. As aesthetics eclipsed function during the Victorian era, art glass would punch up the design of buildings with flamboyant detail.

Art glass grabs the attention of the viewer and holds on to it. Its complicated, handmade nature creates what could be the only true moment when art and architecture fuse. Repairing or newly fabricating art glass is a specialized skill that requires material knowledge and craftsmanship.

You may be familiar with another Kokomo, one that sounds more like what the tropical locale Pliny described than a place in north central Indiana. “Kokomo,” a calypso scented easy going ballad about a fantastical romantic port of call visited by two passionate lovers, was written and recorded by The Beach Boys in 1988 for the film Cocktail. In the film, Tom Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, a youthful New York businessman who drops out of the capitalist rat race to become a cocktail shaker tossing flairtending bartender at a bar called Cocktails & Dreams. A failed relationship leads Brian Flanagan to abscond to Jamaica, where he finds himself behind a beachside bar in an Aloha shirt, and begins a passionate love affair with photographer Jordan Mooney, played by Elizabeth Shue.

The music video produced for “Kokomo” begins with sweeping scenes of tropical beaches before it lands on a wide scene of a fireside concert by The Beach Boys, supported on the steel drum by John Stamos (as “Kokomo” climbed the charts, The Beach Boys guest starred in an episode of Full House titled “Beach Boy Bingo”) and performing stiffly in front of a crowd of bikini-clad young women. The video is bespattered with images from Cocktail of lovers Brian and Jordan embracing and then kissing in an open-air market, a topless Jeep, barefoot on a jungle path, and in a crowded club. A moment of vicarious embarrassment within the song’s lyrics is delivered with a smirk by Beach Boy Mike Love: “we’ll go out to sea, and perfect our chemistry, by and by we’ll defy a little bit of gravity.” This line is synced in the video with scenes of Brian tossing cocktail shakers high in the air back at Cocktails & Dreams.

In Cocktail, Jordan and Brian “perfect” their chemistry under a waterfall, and then later in front of a roaring beachside fire, while Jimmy Cliff’s “Shelter of your Love” frolics in the background. Illuminated by the fire, Brian is the first to speak during the post coital snuggling session, inquiring to Jordan, draped across his body, “should we stay here forever?” Ensconced in paradise, where the air and water temperature matching your skin, in a fantasy where time is suspended like a flairtended cocktail shaker, what lover has not considered asking this very same question to their beloved?

By 1988, The Beach Boys are no longer the young avant-garde surfer California band that brought the world Pet Sounds; they look like The Beach Geezers, a touring oldies group with white beards and aggressively pleated pants. Despite every member being in their late 40s, they look noticeably older and decidedly unhip. In the realm of the tropical vacation, Brian, Jordan, John Stamos, and the throngs of bikini-clad young women look like spring breakers, while The Beach Boys look like Snowbirds swapping the cold northern winters for Florida sunshine. “Kokomo” reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July, a full twenty-two years after “Good Vibrations,” the group’s last number one hit.

“Kokomo” shouts out a number of real vacation destinations: Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama, Key Largo, Montego, Martinique, and “that Montserrat mystique.” Yet Kokomo, in all its shimmering, crystalline magic, is a completely fictional destination in the song. The real Kokomos—in Colorado (a ghost town), Arkansas (near a body of water called Mud Lake), Texas (home of the Kokomo Baptist Church), Hawai’i (where Kokomo is upcountry Maui cowboy territory), and in Indiana (where, according to Kokomo oral tradition, an estimated 75% of the country’s art glass is manufactured)—are as unique as each run of rippled Tiffany catspaw sheet glass, emerging hot from the annealing oven.

A hundred years before “Kokomo” was released, Kokomo Opalescent Glass was founded by French immigrant Charles Henry. The owner of a small glass manufacturing company in New York, Henry had heard of the development of the natural gas industry in East Central Indiana. Eager to entice businesses to Kokomo, the city offered Henry free land and free natural gas to relocate. While in New York, Henry had forged a relationship with Louis Comfort Tiffany, who became Kokomo Opalescent Glass’s first customer, receiving a shipment of six hundred pounds of blue and white opalescent glass by rail a week after the factory opened. In 1889, Kokomo Opalescent Glass won first place at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the international exposition where the Eiffel Tower made its debut. The award was covered by the Monticello Herald Journal in an article on October 17 of that year, stating that “the Hoosiers are ‘getting there.’”²

In 1897, The Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company embarked on its largest undertaking, the design of a 38-foot glass dome for the new Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge-designed Chicago Public Library’s Central Library’s Book Delivery Room. The room would be clad in white Italian marble, inlaid with green, pearl, and blue mosaics designed by J.A. Holzer of the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, and topped with an expansive art glass dome. The dome would have two hundred and forty-three glass panels featuring a shimmering fish scale pattern. Each panel would feature roughly cut turtleback jewels. At the top, an oculus depicting signs of the zodiac would match the interior finishes of the room. These panels would be fabricated at the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in New York, but the sheet glass and turtleback jewels would be manufactured at Kokomo Opalescent Glass. The Chicago Tribune described the opening of the building in September 1897 thusly, “possessing the immense proportions of 136 by 1,438 feet, the delivery room has ample space for a vast rotunda, over which is a magnificent dome of many-colored glass. In the center there are signs of the Zodiac.”³

After being threatened with demolition, the library was adaptively reused into an arts and cultural center in 1978, and the book delivery room was renamed Preston Bradley Hall, after community activist Preston Bradley, a member of the Chicago Public Library Board. In 2008, the City of Chicago restored the dome, returning daylight to the space by removing concrete panels that had been installed on the exterior of the dome, and repairing and replacing the glass.

During an early evaluation of the condition of the glass, the restoration team determined that the individual panels had, at one point in time, been flipped around to correct sagging, causing the turtleback jewels to be viewed as flat rounds of glass from the floor of the room, their chunky, faceted sides facing the interstitial space between the dome and the concrete panels. To replace the pieces of glass that were damaged or missing, the team turned to Kokomo Opalescent Glass, who worked to formulate an exact match to the 1897 glass. Using some of the same equipment used during the manufacturing process, including the annealing tables used in the 1890s to create the rippled “catspaw” opalescent glass that became a Tiffany signature, Kokomo Opalescent Glass delivered the glass to Botti Studio of Architectural Arts in Evanston, Illinois, where the panels would be restored.

When Preston Bradley Hall reopened to the public, the results were nothing short of resplendent. Years of grime had obscured the brilliance of the glass, which now cleaned, produced an ombre rainbow. The brilliant greens and creamy opals had been set in rows of careful color gradation. The corrected turtleback jewels looked like giant diamonds, snatching the light from the freshly gold leafed cast iron frame that supported the dome.

Preston Bradley Hall is a fantastical, euphoric space. It is also a public space, providing anyone that finds themselves in downtown Chicago with an opportunity to see one of the world’s greatest Tiffany Studios-designed interiors for free, in a former public library. There are a million individual elements to look at and to study within this room that provides a welcome escape from the city. Perhaps you’ll ask yourself, rhetorically, amongst this decorative fantasy, “should we stay here forever?”

Like the search for the authentic Kokomo, searching for Tiffany—be it a window, a lamp, or a thirty-eight-foot-wide dome—is convoluted. There is Louis Comfort Tiffany, the artist and designer, and the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company, the decorative arts company he founded that was eponymously named after his father’s jewelry company, Tiffany & Co. Then there are other so-called Tiffany’s, Tiffany Style, or Tiffany Glass, ranging from the window hung within a booth at The Old Spaghetti Factory or a bedside lamp on Amazon with chunky plastic jewels. Even within seemingly well-documented historic churches and Gilded Age mansions, the work of other art glass studios is wrongly identified as Tiffany, either due to the use of Tiffany as a blanket name to describe a type of art glass, a lack of research, or a deliberate misclassification. This inclination has obfuscated the work of local art glass designers and fabricators who worked in the same era as the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company. In the 1930s, The Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company closed, leaving little primary source material or records. A resurgence of interest in Tiffany in the 1970s brought hobbyists to glassmaking, much like the cocktail tossing flairtending on display in the movie Cocktail caused wannabe Brian Flanagans to flock to bartending school, nursing fantasies of finding their own beachside bar in Kokomo.

Like the subtleties in taste and texture in pasta that is homemade or store bought, there is something unmistakable in the characteristics of the material that Kokomo Opalescent Glass produces that manages to weather the identification of a specific fabricator like Tiffany. It is in the texture, the color, the feeling, and of course, the distinct finish of the catspaw glass.

Way down in Kokomo, Indiana, in the shadow of the municipal water tower, is the Kokomo Opalescent Glass factory. Aside from a brick administration building, the complex is nondescript, like an out of the way tiki bar. Inside the factory, the process to produce the first runs of sheet glass for Tiffany, as well as other artisans, has remained the same at Kokomo Opalescent Glass since the late nineteenth century.

Silica sand, soda ash, and lime are used in varying quantities, and depending on the color, opacity, and opalescence desired, pigments are added, along with magnesium and gold dust. The formulas for each color combination and opacity, from Wedgewood Blue to Skim Milk Opal to Cerise Ruby, remain closely guarded. This mix is heated in kilns until it is molten hot. Using long handled metal ladles, the liquid is scooped up in precise quantities for the glass being manufactured. Like the mixing of pigments and sand, this too is a recipe. The syrupy liquid is carried by workers from the kiln who carefully agitate the ladles of molten glass before it is poured onto the rolling table. This process is repeated until the precise amounts of molten glass are delivered to the table, where the mixture is kneaded by a worker as it cools and rests, another act of measured precision. The glass is rolled to an eighth of an inch in thickness before it is moved to an annealing oven, where it cools before it is moved on to be checked for imperfections and sized before it is shipped across the world. The term “stained glass” for this material is misleading, as the glass is not stained, but saturated with color by way of pigments and other ingredients. If not for the workers in Harley Davidson tees and curved baseball caps, or the alternative rock playing softly in the background, this could be the 1880s. On the walls, posts and ceiling joists are the names of former workers of Kokomo Opalescent Glass, some dating as far back as the 1890s. Kokomo Opalescent Glass has not kept archives or records; the history is in these names, and the art glass existing in the world, made in Kokomo.

Stored within the original section of the factory are rows upon rows of glass sheets, organized by size, by color, or by job in tall open wooden crates. Seeing this much rainbow glass is beautiful but menacing, as the looming threat of a cut or a glass splinter is ever-present, even for a visitor. Colorful glass shards and pieces are everywhere—on the floor, on tables, in metal bins, and piled outside—like pieces of discarded hard candy. While Kokomo Opalescent Glass is known for sheet glass, other glass products are manufactured here as well, including dalle de verre (French for “slab of glass”) a chunky, faceted glass developed in Paris in the 1930s that is used in midcentury modern and contemporary houses of worship. This glass appears in storage rooms as big, unwrapped Jolly Ranchers. Also manufactured here are the chunky glass roundels used within the platforms of the Harry Weese-designed metro stations in Washington, DC. These roundels are illuminated as the train approaches the platform.

Returning to The Beach Boys “Kokomo,” the song is broadly considered to be the worst within The Beach Boys catalog: a cheesy, low brow Aloha, a late-career sellout by an otherwise brilliant band. In the course of this discussion of art glass, it has likely been an unwelcome earworm—a catchy song lodged into a person’s mind on repeat. Regarding criticism of design or architecture, there are ways in which hating on “Kokomo” resembles the ways in which expressing dislike can serve as a way to gloss over deeper introspection.

The best element of “Kokomo” is the space the song gives you to weave your own imagination, daydream, or nostalgia into a “Choose Your Adventure” story called Kokomo. It allows you to take it wherever you want to take it. Like the colorful sheet glass made in Kokomo, fantasies are pliable and limited only to the material of desire.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Kokomo Opalescent Glass for the factory tour.

Note about the author

Elizabeth Blasius wrote her thesis on art glass fabricators in Chicago, which provided the needed research and information presented in this piece. She also worked as a researcher and photographer on the restoration of the Tiffany dome in the Chicago Cultural Center in 2008. The photographs and information are from that project. Members of the project team, including the author, went to Kokomo Opalescent Glass to watch the glass for the project being manufactured.