Mark Reinhart, president of Award Window Cleaning Services, is a 14-year veteran of high-rise window washing. His is the only firm to have cleaned the windows of many of the region’s marquee structures, and from its perch atop and outside of Grand Rapids’ skyline, has seen everything from giant spiders to topless sorority slumber parties.

They Do Windows

By Daniel Schoonmaker

GRAND RAPIDS — Mark Reinhart is likely one of the only West Michigan employers who wants workers to be afraid of the job.

“I try to hire people with a fear,” Reinhart said. “Fear is what is going to keep them safe.”

Reinhart’s 14-year-old company, Award Window Cleaning Services, specializes in cleaning windows in hard-to-reach places — namely, 35 stories above the street.

“I’ve gotten out there before and had people freeze up on me,” he said. “They don’t want to move at all because they’re afraid if they move an inch that something is going to happen.”

Fear is one thing, but terror is another.

“Those are the guys you don’t want out there,” he said.

Reinhart’s office is decorated with pictures of men hanging from lines on the sides of buildings, some posing for the camera with wide smiles and thumbs in the air, others working diligently to give the building a mirrored shine.

He has an album full of these pictures, and shows them to every prospective employee who walks in the door. Often, they ask for the application back and walk right back out.

Others are giddy.

“They say, ‘I’ll hang off of there, I’ll even bungee jump off it.’ And that guy we don’t want,” he said. “The bungee-jumping guy is a risk taker, a thrill seeker, so to say, and we don’t want thrill seekers. We want a guy who wants to go home to his family at night.

“Before he goes over the edge of that building, he’s going to double check and triple check.”

One of his longest-term employees wouldn’t go above three stories for the first six months, Reinhart said. Luckily, Award has traditional height clients as well, offering the luxury of gradually acclimating employees to higher-level tasks, in the most literal sense.

Regardless of experience, all new hires participate in a lengthy safety training program, beginning with 10 hours of video from the International Window Cleaning Association.

“Before he spends an hour doing anything else, he learns to focus on his safety and the people he is going to be working with and over.”

Also, Reinhart noted, employees are responsible for the well-being of the bystanders below, and must be careful to prevent everything from mild annoyances, like dirty water, to potentially fatal falling debris.

As such, Award Window Cleaning has found itself to be an important and easily overlooked piece of downtown Grand Rapids’ revitalization.

Approximately 60 percent of his firm’s business comes from the downtown skyline, including the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, DeVos Place, Van Andel Arena, Kent County Courthouse, Spectrum Health and Bridgewater Place, to name a few.

In 1991, he launched the company with that goal: to clean the windows it took “a lot of know-how and effort to access.”

Reinhart learned the trade at the Amway a decade earlier. Hired as a maintenance supervisor to manage several parts of the hotel’s upkeep, he was surprised to find its 29 stories of windows under his jurisdiction.

“I said that if I was going to manage them, I needed to know what they do and how they do it,” he recalled. “Two weeks later, I was 30 floors up, finding out how they do it and what they do — and I loved it.”

Award’s growth has paralleled that of the downtown skyline. In the past five years, it has tripled in size, from five employees in 2000 to 16 today, including Reinhart’s 25-year-old son, Mark II.

Reinhart has focused on controlled growth, and seldom loses a customer. Award has held many of its high-profile accounts since construction cleanup, when the firm clears away the paint, silicon and other debris the builder leaves behind.

Oddly, Reinhart often finds himself turning down work. Building owners and property managers often request washing windows on weekly or monthly schedules, and he tries to explain why that isn’t necessary.

“Cleaning clean windows doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why spend good money on that?”

On average, Award cleans a building two times a year. It does clean the windows of lower floors more often. The ground level floors of the Amway, for instance, are cleaned monthly, as are many of Award’s traditional-height clients.

Besides the high-rise work, Award has a number of clients with difficult windows that can’t be reached by hanging off a building. To accomplish this, it employs 120-foot boom trucks and cranes.

“It’s not like any other job you could imagine,” Reinhart said. “We shouldn’t be called window cleaners; it’s more like access technicians. Cleaning windows is the easy part; it’s getting to the window that makes it difficult.”

Obviously, this work isn’t for everyone. Afraid of the high-risk insurance and sophisticated training, 18 different janitorial firms subcontract work to Award Windows.

Even workers experienced with heights, like those with roofing and forestry backgrounds, often find the difference between a four-story-roof and a 30-story building incapacitating.

The rappelling descent is a precision exercise: A foot or so too far and a worker will find himself taking the elevator or stairs and starting over from the top. It’s a one-way ride, Reinhart explained; the only time a worker will ever ascend via the ropes is if a rescue situation merits it — and in 14 years, he’s proud to say, Award has not had a rescue situation of any sort.

On many buildings, workers find their skill and training potentially negated by mechanical systems built into the roof that lower the window washer. But Reinhart’s workers prefer to use the rappel line and bosun’s chair, rather than mechanical and electrical parts.

He isn’t as skeptical of the machines himself, but understands the concern. He can’t tell when a gear is worn or a wire short, he admits, and can only hope that whoever inspected it last wasn’t having an off day.

Then there is the weather. Award schedules 10-hour days, six days a week, with certainty that it will be grounded on at least two of those. The slightest rain or a 30-mile-per-hour wind will make a very bad day for someone on the side of a building a quarter-mile up.

And there are spiders. On a hot summer’s day, many workers will bundle themselves in long sleeves and pants, tying them off at the wrists and ankles with rubber bands. On the riverfront buildings especially, the spiders are constant. On these, they apply insecticide as they clean.

“Webs are really hard to get off, and the dung, you really have to scrub spider poop.”

Yet another concern is what lies on the other side of the window. In the weeks prior to a cleaning, memos and notices are posted to close blinds and practice modesty. But on the sides of hospitals, hotels and an ever-growing number of residential units, Award workers are often forced to avert their eyes.     BJX