I've had the good fortune to have spent much of my professional career working in historic restoration on private homes and museum houses, and besides the enjoyable nature of the work itself, it's satisfying to feel that your work will continue to be preserved, having become part of the historic fabric of the building.
.
But my favorite benefit of doing this type of work is the sense of communication with earlier carpenters across time. There's a lot of investigation, sometimes formal and sometimes casual, that is always a feature of historic restoration. You can observe the processes of earlier workmen through the marks on the wood, signatures behind trim, and other evidence that they have left of problems that needed to be addressed and the solutions they came up with, and with that growing familiarity comes a sense of being there with them.
,
On one occasion, which was not even an historic job, I removed some trim in a house on Delancey St., and found the carpenter's name and the date; Nov 19, 1963. I wished I could talk to him to warn him that in three days, JFK would be assassinated, but if he could get the authorities to detain Jack Ruby for a week, he could possibly prevent 50 years of conspiracy theory.
,
We like to feel that there's a sense of permanence to the things we build, but the earlier carpenters seemed to know that someone would be along later to tear down or take apart their work. In several circa 1900 homes in the Philadelphia area, for instance, I've found a brand new Indian head penny under a leg of trim, that was surely the last piece put up on the house, and must have been a tradition, just as I'm sure that only carpenters, then and now, were aware of the practice.
.
On an c.1840 house at 15th and Pine, I took down a damaged plaster ceiling, and a stack of religious leaflets and magazines came down on my head, My apologies to the well meaning tradesman who left them there 150 years earlier for the purpose of my salvation, but even that didn't give me religion.
,
A few blocks away, I opened another ceiling to put in a skylight, and something caught my eye when I stuck my head up above the plaster. It was a small parcel, exactly the shape and size of a stack of bills, wrapped in newspaper, and tied up neatly with a string. Well, everyone who works on old houses has thought about, and heard stories about, finding a stash of money, and that's what was going through my head as I carefully and painstakingly untied and unwrapped the fragile parcel. Several minutes later, somewhere, there was a headstone shaking from the laughter of a long buried plasterer, because what I learned about his day was that there were no bathroom facilities available to him on the job, so he did his business on a newspaper, wrapped it up and tied it with string, and tossed it up where no one would find it, at least for a long, long time.
.
When I was working on the old bank in Salem that I wrote about, I removed a piece of baseboard behind where the teller counters had been, and found a quarter from 1869. I couldn’t help but imagine how frantically the teller who dropped it had searched for it, possibly staying late, looking everywhere on his hands and knees. It was probably a half day’s pay back then, and if he managed to keep his job, he probably looked for it every day. Maybe after a couple of years he would still find his eyes roaming around the perimeter of the room when business was slow at the counter. I validated his honesty about a hundred years too late to benefit him.
.
So I always try to sign my work somewhere where only a carpenter of the future will find it. Something like :
.
Nevin Fahs
Installed this door and trim Aug 4, 2009
Weather was warm and clear
Do you know who Sarah Palin was?
No comments:
Post a Comment