GREENSAW Blog: Rebuilding J.P. Morgan’s Shelves, with a Little Help from the Past

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Rebuilding J.P. Morgan’s Shelves, with a Little Help from the Past

The call came as any monumental call seems to: in the middle of hanging upper cabinets.
“My name is D—, and I need you to build me two walk-in closets from J.P. Morgan’s Library.”
I sent a tack into the cabinet, stepped onto the porch, and asked D— to please repeat herself.
“I’m purchasing about twenty pieces of J.P. Morgan’s Library – the financier, who lived at 36th and Madison in New York? The shelving is warehoused in West Philadelphia. I need you to look at it, take it apart, and rebuild it into closets.”

One day later, MagLite in hand, on an August day that makes you remember how close Philadelphia is to the Mason-Dixon Line, I cast eye on the shelves. They were being stored in a church warehouse near the city limits that had no lights but did have water – on the ground, in huge foul-smelling puddles threatening to overtake the palettes on which the shelves sat.
And, as the beam of light revealed, shelves they were, almost ten feet high, built in cells of three or four, each measuring about three feet across. I clattered over a pile of tarnished brass railings to get a better look. The backs and uprights were made from walnut veneer with an oak core. The crown was huge, built up from solid walnut. Instead of fascia board there were inset panels with proper rails and stiles, a raised medallion in the middle with a copper number affixed – the metal long-since oxidized to a chalky green. Pediments separated individual runs; dadoed dentils were affixed with horsehair glue, with handcarved teeth beneath the cove at the top of the molding. Half-inch cut glass made up the actual shelves. Brass registers fit neatly into the bottom panels. On the back side of each cell was a scrawl of yellow chalk in a looping, seemingly foreign hand.

A week later, after working out a number with D— that I will regret for the rest of my life, I rented a box truck and, a couple slipped discs and hernias later, we had the oak beasts tamed and strapped down in the back. As I rolled down Interstate 95 the absurdity struck: I’ve got J.P. Morgan’s shelves in the back here, covered with a patina of his cigar smoke, repository of Leondardos, Rubens, Degas - what was America’s most esteemed private collections of books and art.
Now it was our job to take them apart.

Designed by Charles McKim of the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, the shelves were meant to embody and define the uniquely American “Age of Elegance.” Drawn up by McKim himself, built between 1902 and 1906 next to Morgan’s residence at 36th and Madison, the library housed thousands of autographs, including those of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. In 2005, architect Renzo Piano undertook the renovation of the library, replacing walnut, brass and copper with steel and glass.
All well and good, I thought, but who actually built the shelves?

A German cabinetmaker, I was told by the sellers, hired by Charles McKim. I could not verify this from another source. Nevertheless, I imagined him, newly emigrated from Germany, dressed in suspenders and a clean white shirt, riding the ferry from Queens, nervous about his broken English, swallowing repeatedly as he prepared for his meeting with J.P. Morgan himself. “I want a gem,” Morgan apparently told McKim. Surely the selection of the builder of the shelves would not be a decision taken lightly.

And when he finally did finish the shelves, wrapping them neatly in cotton blankets, covering them in canvas and carting them by horse cart from his woodshop across the east river, did he know he had blown this job out of the water? As he unloaded and installed as J.P. Morgan himself looked on, the pocked nostrils of the businessman flaring, the perpetual cigar like an oversized toothpick in the big man’s mouth, did the cabinetmaker know he had done good?

Whether he existed in real life or not, the German artisan took on a life of his own in our shop, shuffling here and there in his leather apron, making inappropriate comments to the dog, twirling his yellow chalk in his fingers, and peering over our shoulders.
Oh, he says, in a raspy, thick Bavarian accent, as we set up the crown on the chopsaw for a compound miter.
“Zees wheel neva verk… and zee dentils? Zee order veel be all wrong…”

We learned to pick words out of his thick accent, and took his advice for constructing a plywood jig for cutting miters, dusting off the 24” pullsaw, and muscling that crown into shape with arms atrophied from our dependence on power tools. It was like anatomy, understanding the vivisection of the crown, how each individual piece fit together. Seeing small numbers of yellow chalk on the backs, hearing his yavol and neins in our heads, doing our best to be attentive to the lessons of the old-timer.
As the shelves began to take shape we moved on to the details of the millwork, creating the drawer fronts by using the back from one cell, laying out a continuous grain with minimal walnut trim around the perimeter. We made low-angle shoe shelves from another pilfered backing, and did the same for individual cabinets. Schun, I imagined him saying, nodding his head. At other times he felt conflicted, yanking out his last remaining strands of gray hair as we dismantled and reconstituted his babies.

When we finally did the install we were put up in a bed & breakfast on Fifth Avenue. Niko, an Albanian on our crew, and ingenious craftsman, had not spent much time New York City, and came armed with his deep fryer. Beneath a huge oil painting of a white-wigged man he peeled potatoes, arranging the skins on the marble hearth, and made French fries. We ate heartily, and our German friend approved but did not partake.
The following day, as we reconstructed the shelving, each piece nestling into its rabbet, we realized we hadn’t paid close attention to the solid brass standards – and the brass pins for the glass shelves would not line up. But this was a fix we could take care of.

We finished the shelves with Waterlox, unsure whether the fumes or just the high of accomplishment created the vision of our German disappearing back into the grain of the walnut, looking back at us as if in a mirror. And if we looked very closely, as he receded from view, we all swore we could see him wink.

posted by Brendan Jones @ 7:59 AM

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A blog addressing the importance of re-using material, and building with existing structures. A strong emphasis on architectural salvage, as well as the people that make the difficult work possible.

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Name: Brendan Jones
Home: Philadelphia, PA, United States
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