See Arlington’s Hidden Tiffany Windows — A Rescued Treasure Hiding in Plain Sight
One of Arlington’s most extraordinary and least-heralded cultural treasures is hiding in plain sight inside the Westover Branch Library at 1644 N. McKinley Road — and most residents walk right past it without knowing what they’re looking at. Four stained glass windows created by the Tiffany Studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany are permanently installed here, rescued from one of the stranger chapters in Arlington’s history. The Abbey Mausoleum — a grand Romanesque granite and marble structure built between 1924 and 1926 on a hillside overlooking Arlington National Cemetery and the Potomac River — was once one of the most prestigious burial grounds in the Washington DC area, housing more than 650 crypts and 13 Tiffany-designed stained glass windows. By the 1950s it had fallen into financial ruin, then decades of neglect, vandalism, and eventually abandonment. When the U.S. Navy acquired the site in 2000 and decided to demolish it, Arlington County was granted the extraordinary opportunity to salvage what remained — including the windows, which had been boarded over and largely forgotten.
Of the original 13 windows, six were damaged beyond repair and were carefully dismantled to provide matching glass fragments for restoring the other seven. Four of those restored windows — each featuring a geometric border with a central floral composition in the warm, jewel-toned palette characteristic of Tiffany’s studio work — were permanently installed at Westover Library in 2010, where natural light filters through them during library hours. The effect is quiet and genuinely beautiful: the kind of detail that stops you mid-step once you notice it. The installation also includes an original granite finial salvaged from the Abbey Mausoleum’s exterior, mounted outside the building. Admission is free and the library is open seven days a week; find current hours at library.arlingtonva.us.
The rescued Tiffany windows didn’t all end up in Westover. Three additional geometric windows were restored and installed at MoCA Arlington — the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington at 3550 Wilson Boulevard — where they are displayed in a dedicated Tiffany Gallery, with natural light creating what the museum describes as a timeless and mystical ambiance around the contemporary art exhibited beneath them.
And the most significant window of all — “Christ in Blessing,” the largest at nine feet tall by six feet wide, the only one bearing the inscription “Louis C. Tiffany N.Y.” in its lower right corner and the only one with confirmed Tiffany authorship — spent nearly two decades in county storage awaiting the right home. After a meticulous restoration by Washington Art Glass Studio that addressed damage to approximately 35 percent of its original glass, it was finally installed in February 2024 at the newly rebuilt Central United Methodist Church at Ballston Station on N. Glebe Road, where it now stands in the church entrance overlooking the protected Robert Ball Sr. Family Burial Ground. Together these locations — Westover Library, MoCA Arlington, Central United Methodist Church and a Tiffany skylight at Fairlington Community Center— form an unofficial Tiffany trail through Arlington, one of the most unexpected and rewarding ways to spend an afternoon in the county.
