GREENSAW Blog

Greensaw Co-op Inauguration

2011-05-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

I think my favorite description of the event was, "It was like a business was getting married" (read Mara Zepeda's wonderful blog at: http://neithersnow.squarespace.com/).

Indeed it felt that way. Presided over by Sustainable Business Network Executive Director Leanne Kreuger-Braneky, Philadelphia visionary Judy Wicks, and author of "The Companies We Keep" John Abrams, we indeed tied the knot April 29th, 2011.

To say there was no drama would be a lie - last minute negotiations regarding who would be included in the cooperative, discussions over who would sign governing principles, who would be recognized and how. And the weather - under serious historical skies, as Sharon Olds would say, clouds gray and moving at fast clips above us - made no promises to anyone.

Niko mortise

But, as always, we persevered. We built up the timber frame that Samir and others had fashioned for the Kensington Compost Co-op, and threw together a stage made of railroad ties and bowling alley. City Planter was kind enough to let us borrow two plants, and Caleb slammed together a planter in two hours, and scrounged up two baby tomato plants.

And when people arrived, we had local venison carbonade stew from a deer my cousin and I got onhand, an IPA I had brewed with surprising success, along with Niko's mother's Albanian delicacies, Jon's cookies, Dan and Lindsey's goat cheese and strawberry and baguette slices, sausage Dave provided from DiBruno's, spicy cod stew from Otolith - I swear we should drop this whole carpentry facade and just go into sustainable party planning.

John Abrams had flown in under his own steam from Martha's Vineyard, leaving early that morning. He rented a car from the airport, and suddenly, there he was, on Fourth Street, in front of Greenable. The whole thing had a dreamlike quality. I gave him a quick tour around, and he immediately ingratiated himself with the guys and was off and running. I changed from carpentry clothes into a nice white shirt, and promptly got beet juice on it. Awesome. The show must go on.

With the gate open, people situated on makeshift benches, ivy thick over the brick wall and the cobblestones of dead-end Lawrence street making it difficult for chairs to get firm footing, we began.

Leanne - looking stunning in her tall boots - spoke beautifully and persuasively about the importance of cooperatives, and the role an organization such as SBN plays in their formation. She spoke of the breakfast she and Kate and Jen had hosted, inviting Cleveland Ted Howard to speak on sustainable urban development and the role co-ops play within - and how such an event would not have been possible were it not for the larger cooperative movement.

Judy followed, addressing how the cooperative movement represented the avant-garde of sustainable business. She spoke of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), an organization founded, and how cooperatives play a necessary part in these communities. As always, she brought a warmth and effervescence, reflecting on her own process starting the trailblazing business of White Dog. She had, as you can see, Josephine, daughter of Tracy and Mia Levesque, at rapt attention below (not to mention John and Leanne).

Finally, John wrapped up the talking, with a speech peppered with amusing and instructive stories. The one that stands out in my mind now is the story of his friend in Massachusetts, driving late at night around and around a roundabout with her friends. At a certain point, they decided it make a lot of sense to go backwards, so around and around they went, backwards - and suddenly hit another car that was, of course, negotiating the turn.
The cops came, and checked out the car behind them first. Then he came over to their window, and asked if they had been drinking. Indeed they had - but denied any alcohol involved.
"Well, it's a good thing, because the guy behind you is so drunk he's saying you backed into him."
This an example of taking nothing for granted, and not knowing necessarily how you will go from here to there. But one way or another, you will make it.

Finally, we got around to signing our governing principles - written in large part by the Penn legal team - Jessica, Sam, and Praveen. We were editing up to the last minute - "which" or "that" - and does it make sense to have that clause in there? I can't tell you how nice it is to work at a company filled with people who care about grammar and spelling.

Finally, we read the governing principles, and, one by one, folks came up and signed the paper. Truth be told, we had printed the principles on glossy paper, and the pen really didn't take. But no one let on.

The dog, a trooper through this whole experience, finally had had enough. And then, right at the end, a ray of light came down - just before the rain started and we moved inside.

So while we still have steps to take - indeed this is only the beginning - the co-op opening was a truly uplifting experience. As John said, it was a glimmer of hope, a small point of resistance, a bunch of folks getting together and doing the right thing. I'm proud to be a part of it - and look forward to seeing what it will bring as it continues to develop.

Walking the dog

2011-02-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

An upturned Jack-o-Lantern, loose cobblestones, a yellowing Christmas tree. The remnants of a fire-escape, doors and windows sheet-metaled or plyed over, a blue tarp rising and falling with the wind. And the dog oh the dog, taking stock of this bombed out world.
But what about that those transoms? The casement windows with the venetian glass? The oxidized copper on the ground floor? Peer up into the second floor - those joists holding up the third? The spruce rising out of the ground, the winter-killed azalea sure to come back with spring?
So the paradoxes get summed up quickly as the dog roots around, faintly annoyed by the rain. Further on

down we have pressed squares of tin tacked into the masonry, above the skirtboard where the stairs once ran. Mortar filling in where the brick was hogged out for the treads, or perhaps the stringer bolted into the parting wall. Tin turned the color of shakshooka, a couple remants from the foyer. Further along, beyond the fenceline, a new development.
The dog takes stock of it all.
Behind us a bumpout wrapped in corrugated galvanized tin, a misshapen fruit tree of some sort seeming to hedge its bets on whether that fence will or won't remain.

Fish-scale freize, tin soffit at top. A lost art, except to folks like Dave Brooks who, thank the sweet lord, keep it alive.

The dog doesn't care for cobblestones. Maybe when they were chinked in with sand or mud, when horse hooves clotted over them, when they didn't have great gaps betwixt, he might have become accustomed to their humped backs. Now his paws slip into the gaps, especially in the rain.
But he does like these morning cruises, perambulating along this backwater behind fourth street, where resilient folks like Audrey Cooper pile split logs from the Firewood King (real name Dusty Tace - he should have been a baseball player) behind houses to burn in their rebuilt open fireplaces. Where trees get long shrift of airspace, and the dog gets long shrift of groundspace.

We walk on an old Philadelphia Street interrupted in the last fifty years by a subdivision smack in its path. A sewer runs through it. Rainwater from a warehouse downspout runs through a subdivision of moss. The dog sometimes take sips.

The walk is always too short - so he says right about at this point, with this absurd look, as we step through the gate we cut to get to Audrey's house, and arrive back at the shop. A pile of CMU, plastic piping for the graywater system at the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society, a dumpster from Revolution Recovery, Christmas trees we plan to de-limb and make fenceposts from, rescued joists from all over the city. We hope to put a chicken coop on top of the building. Vines climb the brick wall, a toupé for the filled in openings. The truck full of biodiesel courtesy of Moaz on South Street and the genius of Steve Richter.

We do our best. The dog knows it.

Op-Ed: By Jim Steiker, the oldest young employee ownership lawyer in America

2011-01-19T06:20:00.000-08:00

So Greensaw believes in "re-using material, and building with existing structures." There is a history to worker cooperatives in Philadelphia. Omega Press was a worker-cooperative printing company in the '70s and '80s, back when there were printing companies. House of Our Own was a worker-cooperative book store in West Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise ("PACE"), my original employer, promoted worker cooperatives for 10 years in the Delaware Valley in the '70s and '80s from center city offices and helped form a worker-cooperative supermarket in the Strawberry Mansion part of the city. Childspace is a worker-cooperative day care center in Mt. Airy and Germantown providing high quality child care today. There's material to reuse and structures to build on in this history.

Why did most of these worker cooperatives fail, or, at least, why aren't they around any more? The short answer is that they didn't make enough money to maintain themselves. For those who pick on Enron as the emblem of the failure of ESOPs, Enron fundamentally had the same problem. The ownership structure does not matter if the business can't make a sufficient profit to stay in business and provide an adequate reward for ownership.

The worker-cooperative movement is and has been about creating cohesive companies with a shared sense and reality of ownership and mission. The beauty of the structure is the dignity it creates for each employee owner and the cultural and class differences it breaks down in involving and rewarding each employee owner.

There is no dignity in "lemon socialism". This is America and folks want to play for a winner. We can define winning in a lot of different ways, we can view the game as a team sport, and we can win as a team but winning matters. Greensaw will succeed as a business because it has a winning business proposition for its customers, who ultimately pay money to Greensaw for Greensaw to do its work. The worker cooperative can make Greensaw better as a business and increase its appeal to its customers because of the ability of the structure to attract and retain great people and the ability of the people to make Greensaw a great place to work and be.

One downside of the worker-cooperative structure is the degree to which the members can focus inward on each other, endlessly defining and negotiating the rules of the game, rather than focusing outward on customers and the need to succeed as a business. My best answer to Beeg's bourbon-fueled lament is that he should form his own company if he thinks that's a better opportunity than the one in front of him to buy the business from Brendan and continue and build it as a worker-owned cooperative. Brendan's got the right and ability to get a fair return for what he's built and his job is to develop a good transition to worker-ownership that creates an attractive opportunity for Beeg and the rest of the folks at the company. This may involve making sure that the longer-time key folks get more in either pay or ownership from the business--this isn't unfair and doesn't undermine the worker-cooperative structure as long as each member with the ability and the commitment to the enterprise ends up with the same opportunity.

Finally, why do I do primarily ESOPs now, rather than worker-cooperatives, despite the "Enron" example? Well first, John Abrams is right in discussing Enron as a perversion. Enron wasn't an ESOP, it was a 401(k) plan where individuals could buy Enron stock as an alternate investment and it was a fraud. Second, most of the lost money was "Madoff profits"--money folks thought they had made on the run-up rather than actual invested money. Finally, ESOPs create some great employee-owned companies. Some, like Carris Reels, are more "coop"-like and some are more conventional. Some share wealth and governance more broadly and some start out primarily tax-driven for the seller. Nevertheless, they are all part of a potential transition to workplaces that create more dignity, involvement and reward for working people and should be honored on that basis. Greensaw, not surprisingly from what I've learned of them, is simply on the leading edge of this movement in its transition to a worker cooperative.

Second-guessing the co-op

2011-01-12T17:10:00.000-08:00

I guess it would be a red flag if Beeg, among others, didn’t immediately take issue with the pragmatism of an employee-owned co-op. Sure, you can pull it off in the talcum-white bell jar of Martha’s Vineyard, the mountains of New Hampshire, the hills of San Francisco. But Philly? C’mon man. Built on the shoulders of industry, proud of how far we stray from the actual meaning of our Greek name (City of Brotherly Love), this a city of grit, of the last man standing. If you don’t know the time, don’t bother asking. Just get a goddamn watch.
Nope, ain’t nothin' cooperative going on around here, buddy. Leave the collectives to the Puritans up in Boston, the co-ops to the hippies on the west coast. We’re here in the 215 doing what we do best: living in a dirty city, protecting ourselves from the police, trying not to get parking tickets.
And ESOPs? Well, we all saw how that worked with Enron.

If you ever find yourself considering starting a business in a city that charges a “business privilege” tax, you’re crazy. If you can negotiate this craziness with the help of meds/yoga/drugs what have you, then I counsel you to employ the services of Terence Buckley aka. Beeg. He just about kicks ass, slicing through the bureaucratic and seemingly impenetrable scar tissue that has enveloped City Hall. He’s also a cynic. As T.S. Eliott avows, a cynic is just a hurt romantic. I could flesh this out further, but not without Beeg, a bottle of bourbon, and his consent.
In any case he keeps an eye on the ticks and chiggers crawling in the fur of the dirty underbelly of any creature we wake up. One of his remarkable and valuable skills is coming up with hypothetical situations where we could get put in a tough situation – and thus looking out for our best interest.
“This took me five minutes to think of – it might take them seven. Yeah, you want to set up a co-op and head out to Alaska? Why don’t you go ahead fuck yourself while you're at it? Yeah -- go out to Alaska, sleep with the polar bears, have a wild affair with an Inuit, freeze your nuts off, and while you're at it, go fuck yourself. Yeah, we’ll buy your tools, we’ll even take your truck, but paying shares for your company, when you’re not gonna even be around? You shitting me? We’ll just start our own goddamn company.”
You see what I mean, both about Beeg, and about Philly. He comes up with worst-case scenario thought experiments, expressed in a disturbing and profane vernacular.
Except here’s the thing: it’s not working out that way. Even for Beeg, who, fascinated with the concept of starting Philadelphia’s first employee-owned co-op, has been generous with his time and expertise. And not for anyone at Greensaw.
We have scheduled, for the weekend of January 28th, a retreat in northern Pennsylvania. There we will don our powdered wigs (a gesture of the Romantic age in-and-of-itself, started by King Louis XIII when he was losing his hair) apply our beauty marks, and unleash our quills on what will become Philadelphia’s first employee-owned co-op constitution. Of course it would be even cooler if we could take a field trip ten blocks south to Independence Hall and have it all go down there as the Japanese tourists snap pics -- but I’m not sure the National Park Service would be down.

Since we mentioned it let’s take a closer look at Enron. As John Abrams observes, not hyperbolically, “the Enron debacle and others like it are only the terrible perversion of a good thing, like rape is to sex.” There you have it.
At Enron thousands of employees lost $1.3 billion set aside in 401ks. In fact, only a very few had any say in the direction of company – which worked to the advantage of those in charge. These people at the top overstated earnings, encouraging employees to invest further into a company that was already tanking. They then, brilliantly, transferred the maintenance of the 401ks to a separate company, which required the money to be frozen for a month’s time. During this month they sold off their own stocks, made a killing, while ordinary Americans got the shaft, as did the reputation of ESOPS.
So much for that.
As far as co-ops go, there is no question that the entire structure has its foundation in trust. As John Abrams pointed out in an email, the owners at South Mountain, while he was down in Boston taking care of his wife, could very well have voted him out of the company.
“But they won’t,” he wrote.
From whence this trust?
It reminds me, if you can forgive the stretch, of the (near) penultimate line of Jonathan Franzen’s very good book “Freedom.” Spoiler alert, if you have intentions of reading it.
The book tells the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, and their two children. Patty cheats on Walter with his best friend, the transgression is discovered, a separation ensues. Walter goes to live in the wilds of Minnesota, while Patty does her best to cope, but mourns. After six years, she goes up to Minnesota, and sits on in the cold on Walter’s porch, until she is just about dead of hypothermia. Furious, he takes her in, they undress, and he curls up behind her to save her life. Full of rage, anxious for her life, mildly narrow-minded to start, Walter can’t figure out what to do. Patty, intuitively feeling his unease, whispers, “It’s me. It’s just me.”
Rest areas, birthdays, missed birthdays, scraped knees, dead cats, cracks in the plaster, victorious dinners, undercooked meals underpin both simple assertions. I mean life histories. These lines are signifiers to entire existences, over the course of which trust has been built.
And this – this is what sets us apart. Tenuous, yes. Adamantium-strong, yes. A living, walking paradox? Yes. Something to put my life’s work in the hands of?
Yes.

Learning to Fly the Co-op

2011-01-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Take my word – you see a person’s true colors in a paintball war – specifically on the Old West course in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. An abandoned movie set of a saloon, bank, forge, and post office provided cover as we Greensaw folks selected our positions. The start gun went off and suddenly we had guys blazing away in the street, some seeking cover, others picking off opponents from the saloon porch, others creeping around the periphery looking for a pot-shot. Not an easy thing, paintball. Especially when your goggles get fogged and you can’t see shit.
Thank the Lord above for folks like John Abrams, Alex Moss, Tedd Benson, and Melissa Hoover. I’m not sure if any of these folks have ever actually picked up a paintball gun. I wonder if paintball is even legal on that exquisite bell-jar of an island, Martha’s Vineyard, where John works. But I have a very good sense of how these leaders might conduct themselves on that Old West course in Jim Thorpe.
We at Greensaw have made the decision to follow in the footsteps of these visionaries, and, with their help and advice, become an employee-owned co-op. At the suggestion of a few, and also to follow in the footsteps of Abrams and Benson, I have committed to recording this process. Let me be clear – I have no aim of writing a book on how co-ops will make the world a better place. For one thing, John has already done this. I simply want to document and honor our process as we embark on this fraught but exciting journey. As Mr. Moss mentioned in an email, it's going to be a "wild ride."

To call ourselves trailblazers would be an overstatement. Perhaps trailblazers in the city of Philadelphia, but hell, we in the 215 haven’t even grasped the concept that citizens don’t pay taxes in order to be harassed daily by a parking authority. Although, with folks like Karen Randall at the Department of Commerce in Philly these things might change (a quick shout-out to her and the remarkable and awesome work she does).
There is a way forward there, and it has been marked, but it’s no stroll on the Wissahickon bridal path. Snow fills footsteps, thread tied to branches is gathered by nesting birds, handwritten notes bleed in the rain. Well that’s not entirely true – Abrams left a long note in the form of his book “The Companies We Keep,” and it has been a hugely helpful signpost, if not an outright bible. So there is a way forward – our goggles are not fogged, just hazy.

We first considered flying the co-op in November 2010. The process began with a question: how in tarnation to recognize the blood Greensaw employees have bled for the company? I mean let’s call it like it is: folks working here could take their skills to South Jersey or California and be making close to twice as much building high-end developments. Or working in an architecture firm. With the skill, professional acumen, and background employees bring and have gained at the company, they could be better-compensated elsewhere.
So what’s holding them back? Or formulated positively, why does a graduate of architecture school in her thirties choose to stay late in the office working on scheduling labor for the months to come? The answer, I don’t think, is a) she’s wants to stay warm (we have one space heater in the office – soon to be corrected with a move to our new offices – so no) b) she doesn’t want to go home (she’s got a great husband who happens to be a project manager at Greensaw and makes a damn good pomegranate martini – so no) c) she takes pride, and believes in what she does.
C, I do believe.
It’s no secret that employees, when they first start, get thrown into the fire just to see what happens. We put ‘em on a bus to New York, give an address for a jobsite and watch it like a spectator sport. Set them to cleaning up the fire set after the Phillies won the pennant. It’s something I learned from Tedd Benson at Bensonwood when they put me in the sawdust room with the chip augur for three days with no lights or windows to fix the motor mount – and don’t come out until you do.
So we have this – commitment to the work at hand. People aren’t playing paintball for just the fun of it. They’re playing because they believe in the larger goal at hand – to win the Wild West.

Second goal of the new model – I wanted to share managerial duties, and allow myself more freedom. To take advantage, for example, of the opportunity to buy a tugboat in Alaska and have the company come west to spread the good word on building with what already exists.

On the one hand, I could have just sold the company. Have it valued independently and either hire a head-hunter, or continue talks with folks who had already expressed interest. We did over a million dollars in gross revenue in 2010. It wouldn’t have been the hardest sell. The problem with that being that anyone buying us would very quickly dilute what has grown to be at best a family, at worst a cult (although cults can get pretty fun in the wee hours of the morn, as any dilly-dallyers at our parties witness).
What about choosing a couple central players, and selling them a share of the company, in return for taking on management?
This model had legs, and we investigated it. Capitalization, internal tensions, separation of site-work from office-work, resentment of me holding on to a percentage of a company I wouldn’t run on a daily basis – these questions made the choice problematic.
Yet the idea of empowering a choice number of individuals revealed an extraordinary truth about the company: not one person who has darkened our doors and made it through the gauntlet of the Greensaw hiring process and three-month review and come out the other side would be ill-suited to making decisions on the future of the company. Meaning that each person we hire gives a damn. Not only about Greensaw, but about how they treat others, the clothes they wear, the food they eat – and the work they do. And the more we thought about it, the more it became clear that this – this is the yeast that makes a co-op rise. Giving a damn about your every move on the face of this fine earth – or stated less crudely, speaking, working, eating, moving, living with intention.

First we looked into ESOPs – Employee Stock Option Plans. An interesting model, where employees own stock in the company where they work. Great idea, members don’t have as much of a voice in government, although different ESOP models work differently (I’m thinking of Carris Reels, essentially an ESOP co-op, on one side of the scale, and Enron on the other - whoops).
Aside from all these concrete reasons why an ESOP might not be the best fit, it also came down to personality. Give me Maine or Alaska, I’ll take Alaska any day of the week. Give me setting up a Christmas tree with a stand for the holiday party, or stringing it up with a come-along across the entrance horizontally – and I’ll choose the come-along. It comes from a muttish family that went on the ill-fated Klondike gold rush, has roots in Oregon and Greenville, South Carolina, suffered the loss of three brothers on the Confederate side in one Civil War battle, fled the pogroms in the Ukraine – and combine that with a kid who grew up roaming up and down city alleys on a Big Wheel reading Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” At a very young age, “Trust in what is difficult” became an obsession. This mantra has screwed me many times, often in quick succession, but it has never proved a dull.
ESOPs are co-ops Lite. There are a good 12,000 ESOPS across the US – but less than a thousand co-ops. It’s been done before, and it’s cool and all, but not as cool as a co-op.
And I do believe the guys and gals who make up Greensaw have always been up for the challenge in trusting what is difficult, what hasn’t been done. Often to a fault. Don’t take my word for it – come out and play paintball with us, or check out Friday Night Green Fights, or Sunday football. But especially paintball. I started that thought and I’ll end with it – but first I want to record where we are now.

Before the holidays, we formed the Founders’ Committee, whose ordained mission was to investigate and devise a set of bylaws and operating procedures for the co-op (I had just finished the "John Adams" series and visited Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia. I advocated for us all wearing wigs and talcum powder but people said no – except for Dave, who took it to the next level with mascara).
As is usual with us, we were putting the cart before the horse in order to make the horse uncomfortable with the order of things and get him moving to where he should be.
At that first meeting we began to wrap our heads around the organizational structure of the co-op. Concerns were raised over how much power a management and personnel committee would have over the company. Also over how much individuals would be liable if the company went into debt. We resolved to look into these questions.
Christmas, the New Year. I bought five copies of “The Companies We Keep” and told folks that, like Eric Clapton who wouldn’t speak to anyone not familiar with the Blues of Robert Johnson, I wouldn’t talk to anyone about co-ops who was unfamiliar with the work of John Abrams. I should mention that John Abrams, in his friendly, clear manner, made it evident that he had no interest in discussing co-ops at length with me until I did my homework and read what he had already taken the time to express in his book. Point noted and taken.
We returned following our break and had our first meeting yesterday. Terence Buckley, our financial guru, attended. He made it clear that individuals, unless they committed fraud, would not be liable for company debt. We determined that the board of owners would vote in a management committee – and we would organize ourselves in such a way to guard against cabals.
Heath asked if he had any experience with co-ops. In true Terence fashion, he responded, “No, is that a problem for you motherf—r?” Undoubtedly, this is going to be a Philadelphia co-op, albeit the city’s first, and not a Martha’s Vineyard co-op.
What has been incredible about this process is the interest people have expressed in wrapping their heads around the process. I have come to realize, thanks to the inspired help and guidance of Alex Moss at Praxis Consulting in Chestnut Hill, that the process by which we choose owners should be a spiral one, and not a selective one. In other words, cast a wide net, see who expresses interest, and narrow things down from there. As always, everything depends on team. And a team has the ability to self-select.
I should mention that I spoke with Alex at his offices in Chestnut Hill, and shared lunch with him. He has been kind enough to do work pro-bono in order to help us get on our feet. His deep knowledge, cool head, and devotion to the co-op model is inspiring. To have someone alongside us, his Virgil to our Dante (except we’re not going down into the multiple circles of Hell), is invaluable and hugely appreciated.
And that’s essentially where we are now. We have a meeting scheduled with Jim Steiker on Wednesday to help us wrap our heads around what needs to happen legally for this all to take place. We will need to get the company valued, figure out the cost of membership shares, devise methods of payment both for dividends as well as for the buyout, and sign on to birth the new Greensaw Design & Build Co-op.

So there you are, huddled on the roof of the bank, green blue and pink paintballs whizzing around at 240 feet a second left, right and almost center. You’ve got Melissa, John, Tedd and Alex by your side – the kings and queens of the co-op. How would they play this game?
I’ll tell you how. They would come out blazing. I’m not talking about you cover me or I’ll cover you or let’s coordinate – I’m talking about stepping into the midway Clint Eastwood style and taking folks out. Which, paradoxically, is why the co-op model works so well. It allows these gunners - and that's what they are - the space to shoot from the hip, to be dreamers, to go blazing away and see what sticks.
Or not. The collective makes it clear, as a whole, when the time is for blazing, and when the time is for taking cover and waiting, playing defensively. I never last in paintball. As I wrote in a previous blog, I’ll take a teammates’ gun with the promise to give it back, then I won’t give it back. I’m awful. Abraham Lincoln says that every man can weather adversity, but give him power, and you know what sort of character you’ve got.
Here we are collectively, hunkered down, our hoppers brimming, our goggles clear, our hearts full. We can’t lose.

Biodiesel

2010-09-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

The poetic justice is almost too much.

Steve Richter, who culls used fry oil from falafel houses and Japanese restaurants in Philadelphia and New Jersey (tip: Japanese restaurants end with cleaner oil than fry joints start with), sails oil tankers for a living. Is it the equivalent to a carbon offset? Say a conscience offset? I'm sure Steve would have a thoughtful answer to this, but I'm not going to call and put him on the spot.

I've witnessed a couple biodiesel operations. Most appear dirtier than a used car mechanics garage. Congealing oil, leftover kerosene in coffee cans, rusted-out 50-gallon tanks.

Steve, through his genius, has managed to set up the cleanest, most efficient operation I've ever seen in a space the size of a garage. Well, it's in a garage. He has built a loftspace for the the filtered down oil, with a series of valves and strainers to get the biodiesel down to five microns.

Steve has contacted the state of Pennsylvania, in earnest hopes of paying his road taxes. They don't know where to start with him. Indeed, they can't even wrap their head around his operation, and so ignore him.

Filling up is about as enjoyable as it gets. Pull up next to the garage, unload the five Sun & Earth containers, and start fillin 'em up. Steve has his trusty pink rag on hand to take care of any overflow. We use a funnel - and I consistently overestimate what the tank will hold. I take it down to empty and trust that the 26.5 gallon tank can take another twenty - not so. The nice thing is biodiesel is a solvent - so it's not the worst thing to have spill on the sidewalk.

At a recently bachelor party I ran into a guy working for the Department of Energy. Obama had asked him to look into the long-term possibilities of biodiesel. His research showed him that investment into biodiesel wasn't feasible; the creation of infrastructure, a biodiesel factory, shipment of raw materials, distribution, would not be practical on a large scale.

At the time, I had four five-gallon containers of bio swishing around in the bed of the GMC. I took him outside and had him smell the stuff, look at it, its straw-colored beauty, Rumpelstiltskin's liquid dream.

"Yeah, that's a pretty small-minded view," I said (it was a bachelor party, I had had a few too many).

"What about encouraging grass-roots growth that's already happening?"

I told him about Greensgrow in Philadelphia and their biodiesel operation, Steve Richter, and other local outfits. Why not, instead of using the old top-down model, instead empower community leaders to build smaller, more efficient biodiesel factories? Almost like a cottage industry.

He said it was a brilliant idea, that he'd bring it up at the next meeting. I think he was pretty drunk too.

For now, I'm quite content supporting the good work Steve does. He does it well, it's enjoyable to get fuel, and his stories of operating oil tankers make it all worth it.

filling bucket

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

2010-09-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-09-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

Hunting Bass in the Modern Age

I first noticed the bass on an afternoon walk around the lake. He made his rounds, carving a semicircle around the dock, the lowering sun catching the grey band along his side. A scar the color of pig’s skin dappled his lower lip, marking his progress through the lakescape of rocks, sticks, and blackened rhododendron leaves.

At the age of 32, the urge to catch fish, though refined, had not lessened. I had made the move from spin-cast to fly-fishing; yet standing on that dock, I resolved to do whatever it took to lift this leviathan from the water – and save myself the 45-minute trip to the Pennsdale butcher for a rib eye.

The day previous young Emmett and I set anchor – a stone wrapped in nylon rope – a couple hundred feet off Edgemere dock. Fourteen years my junior, Emmett and I had fished annually at the Memorial Day gathering for a good ten years. Emmett used my spin-cast rod, an old stick with rusted guides and an ancient Zebco reel. I used my fly rod.

“Is that hook tied off properly?” I asked him, as he dropped his weighted line to the lake bottom.

He had caught his first fish at about the same spot. I had him reach into the gills of the bass, find the soft dimple behind the neck with his thumb, and break the neck. I told him the local Indians would eat the eyeballs of the fish they caught, and we should do the same. He did so – perhaps my first experience with the power of passing on tradition, invented or not.
After problems in high school, Emmett went to Idaho and got his GED. At the age of 18, he now lived in Washington D.C. I liked to think of myself as something between older brother and father to him.

He reached now over the gunwales to take a look at his knot.

“Should work,” he said. And it did. He caught two perch to my none.

I came down later in the evening with my fly rod and the same spin rod Emmett had used the day before. As my nuclear option, I brought along a plastic container of “Baby Nightcrawlers.”

Slightly lethargic from their nap in the fridge, the worms rallied to my touch in the black dirt, less than five feet as the net flies from my bass, who perambulated around the dock piers.

A man on a neighboring dock watched as I threaded the guides of the fly rod. He smoked while taking occasional glances at the newspaper in his lap.

“You going for trout?” he asked.

“Bass.”

“The one with the pink lip?”

I tied on the wooly bugger, a fly made from olive pipe cleaner and a burnished brass bead, and listened only to the click of the gears on the reel as I worked out line. I cast the bugger well beyond the fish, let the wet fly sink to his cruising depth, and began stripping line. The bass made the slightest re-adjustment of direction – out of the path of my bugger – but otherwise paid no attention.

For the next hour I tried various flies – muddler minnow, Dave’s hopper, even a ghoulish frog in desperation. I experimented with retrieves, letting the imitation ride high and dip, bringing it in straight and fast, letting the minnow bounce along the bottom.

Meanwhile, a cigarette butt floated on the lake waves in front of my dock.

I looked over at the man, who held a red keg cup in one hand for ash. He had folded up the collar of his Navy blue polo, and lit one cigarette off another.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“Workin’ at it.”

I took up the same rod Emmett had used, imagining that some of his luck from the previous day might rub off.

The pink of my baby nightcrawler matched almost perfectly the dapple on the bass’ lower lip. I set a bobber to just about that height. He cruised up and, like an embarrassed teenager, curved his head off to the side.

Each time the fish changed location, I chased him down. Finally, perhaps drawing on his years of experience, the bass left his orbit and traveled over to a neighboring dock. Still, I could make out the pink of his lip, ever so faint in the gunmetal water.
I cast over. Almost immediately the bobber began to skate along the surface, then jerked from view. I gave a flick of the wrist, and it was on. He torpedoed under the dock. I held the rod out from my body, keeping the tip high, reeling in quickly. He exploded in a flurry of whitewater, beaver-slapping the water’s surface.

He dove again, then suddenly surfaced on his side, resting, the thick grey band facing me now. The dog, usually disinterested when it came to trout and smaller fish, came over to check out this creature in the same way he checks out smaller dogs.
In my haste to catch this fish, I had not brought my net. So I tightened up the line, wrapped the filament around my palm, and lay on my stomach. As I reached toward the water I heard the man click his tongue.

The gills of the fish flapped as I lifted, two sand dollars of armor. I got him just far enough out to see the glory of his 20 inches and the thousand-volt line of his back before a single twitch did its work – the line broke, the water splashed, and the monster retreated beneath the leaves of a mountain laurel.

There is a silence after you have lost a fish that echoes to the ends of the earth. Even the guy watching me with his polo and cigarette had the decency not to break it. Such a deep prehistoric disappointment, that drop from electricity and everything sharp and meaningful to nothing.

I looked at the line. Instead of a clean break, there was a squiggle at the end. The knot had failed. I looked at the fish, now finning near the bank. The hook and line extended from the side of its mouth like a gossamer of drool.

“Helps to have a net,” the fellow said, rubbing out his cigarette in his beer cup.

Truth is, as much as I wanted to de-limb him as he said this, he was right. Present this fish with a worm, and he will eat it. He has little choice in this calculus.

I too as hunter have an end of the bargain to uphold. It consists of attention to detail, a conscientiousness of tradition, and a devotion of thought and reflection to the task at hand. It means arriving with a sharpened knife, a proper knot, and a net to lift a fish from the water.

Friday Night Green Fights II

2010-07-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

A fairly classic event, in plein air, with the dumpster making once side of the ring, and the granite curb the other. We used pink chalk to outline Marquis of Queensberry style our lines of battle. Dave squared off against Chris, read Provenance went up against Greensaw, and they fought a fairly equitable battle.

It's a well-known fact around Greensaw that Dave's Facebook animal turns out to be the hummingbird, and he did his animal totem justice in the ring. Chris meanwhile was a bear waking up from hibernation, eager to mix it up.

Dave is certainly the happiest boxer around, again staying true to his animal totem. He never turns down a fight, to his immense credit.

We made an appeal for ringcard girls. Lindsay and Mia thought about it ... nah.

Instead, Mia wanted to fight.

She tried to convince Jay to strip down to his undies and be the ringcard guy but he wasn't having it. Although it should be noted, he has yet to put on the gloves...

Mia fought a good fight, and fairly kicked my ass.

She's got a wicked jab.

And managed to keep just out of reach of mine.

In the end I'd tell the world to watch out. She's vicious in the ring.

Meanwhile Jay and Dave used the propane tank to get the fire lit. We call it the modern-day Boy Scouts.

We tried to get get Lynne and Lindsay to jump in there, but Lynne said she's waiting for the mud wrestling, and Lindsay had a trip to North Carolina planned.

So Phil didn't show up - he was still in court was his excuse. So I got to fight the 230-pounder from Provenance.

He can give and take a punch, I'll tell you that.

And afterwards, it was the evening, with the smell of sweat, beer, and the dead possum from the Mercer site wrapped up in a garbage bag somewhere in the dumpster filling the air.

Friday Night Green Fights

2010-06-25T06:51:00.001-07:00

So our first Friday Night Green Fights was pretty informal, the product of a winter's worth of frustration. Like a bunch of raccoons stuck inside an upright piano we were, ready to flex our wings and - well, you get the picture. We had some swingin to get out.

If you can't convince people to do the green sustainable thing with the force of a moral argument, why not tell them, "Hey, unless you are involved in a green trade, then you can't get in the boxing ring and get beat up!"

Well, that's exactly what we did. The only requirement to box was that you be involved in some sort of business that emphasizes sustainablility. Something green, anything green. We would consider all applications. Not that we had that many - but we had enough.

It saved us money on company therapy. We wore 16-ounce gloves, big balloons, just enough to tap the riser of blood in the nose. The fightcard, drawn up on the spot, was:

(Samir cheated and used an axe)

Brian Eckert vs. Eric King
Samir Patel vs. David Wing
Niko Dyshniku vs. Reed Anderson
Angelo Anastasio vs. Brendan Jones
Reed Anderson vs. Brendan Jones

Please don't tell the Boxing Federation, or the state commissioner. We should have used more furniture blankets to cover edges of the table, and a mat of some sort instead of the concrete floor wouldn't have been the worst idea.

At first one corner of the ring was the tablesaw, then someone had the bright idea to unplug it, then someone had the bright idea to lower the blade, then someone had the bright idea to turn it around so it wasn't facing the ring, then someone had the bright idea not to use a tablesaw at all for a ring boundary. We're all thinkers here.

In any case, the photos speak for themselves. We went on to the Piazza afterward to watch the Flyers beat Chicago. For that night, at least, we were all quite content.

LEED's Lamentable Lacunae

2010-06-03T06:19:00.000-07:00

In his New York Times Op-ed piece “Don’t LEED Us Astray” (10 May 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/opinion/20Appelbaum.html) Alec Appelbaum addresses an essential problem of the LEED rating system: it measures the possibility of a building performing in a sustainable manner, instead of the building’s actual performance. This is a valid and understandable complaint. However, there exists an additional lack in the LEED rating system that is much more grave: its myopic focus on new build construction.

On the one hand, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a standard developed by the United States Green Building Council – note the word “building.” Based on a system started in the United Kingdom called BREEAM (BRE Environmental Assessment Method), LEED came into existence in 1998. Today, LEED is the nation’s most recognized rating system for environmental standards.

As Mr. Appelbaum notes, for better or worse, LEED has become the torchbearer for sustainable building. Structures such as 1 Bryant Park aspire to LEED’s highest rating: platinum. While it is unrealistic to believe that all new building will come to a halt, LEED needs to award substantially more points for the reuse of existing building stock, and employment of reclaimed materials in construction.

As it stands now, LEED awards one point – as much as you would get for screwing in a bike rack in front of the building – for using an existing structure. This boggles the mind. I could build a zero energy thermodynamically perfect house, and I’d still be in the red when it came to expenditure of fossil fuels because of the energy it took to create this structure in the first place. Constructing a LEED platinum building uses considerably more fossil fuels than a typical renovation of an existing structure.

Factors that contribute to this are: transportation of waste material; landfill or incinerator use; oil burned to remove structure; residual planetary impact of the waste as it biodegrades. My company, for example, refuses to take on new build jobs, including additions. Instead, we believe in innovative design solutions, and a re-envisioning of space in order to meet a client’s goals for their space.

Recently, we have been in the process of building a LEED Platinum home and commercial space in Philadelpia’s Fishtown area. As it stands, the property is a 6500 square foot shell. However, the brick walls are in fine shape, and most of the joists will continue to do work for years down the line. The previous general contractor on the job refused the job, because he said the building should just be ripped down.

We approach it differently. Our first step in deconstruction will be to salvage all the flooring and set aside the re-usable material for re-use in the finished building. The other material we will re-mill for use elsewhere. The remainder of the deconstruction material will be sorted and portioned out for re-use, with the goal being 100% recycling. Not unlike the goal of the Native Americans to use every part of the animal, instead of just the meat.

In addition, over 90% of our framing material will be coming from struck movie sets in the Philadelphia area. Instead of dumping the used TJIs and dimensional lumber, we have arranged to purchase and clean up the lumber for re-use. All our kitchen and bathroom cabinetry will be fashioned from local reclaimed material – milled up joists, staves from old water towers, siding from local barns.

With these moves, we have taken care of most of the framing, the cabinetry, and a large chunk of the floors – the remainder will be reclaimed from elsewhere. How much does LEED award us? Half a point for each section. We end up with a point and a half – again, half a point more for what we would get with a bike rack out front.

As we speak, in Las Vegas and California, a mini-building boom occurs. Despite extensive tracts of unused and empty housing surrounding cities, builders continue to build new. This is the most egregious example of America’s need to build, build, build. In the same way we are addicted to oil, we are also addicted to creation of new buildings.

LEED needs to present a counterpoint, and award points for it. I would like to take this opportunity to present one: SlowBuild. We have been following the tenets of this philosophy since the inception of our company. Energy and thought are expended on figuring out how best to incorporate existing building stock and material into a finished project. The act of creation engages the design mind, reclaimed material, and the environment. Sustainability, job creation, and a consciousness of the physical surrounding in which the building stands are central goals.

The United States Green Building Council has a great weight on its shoulders. Other rating systems – the Living Building Council, Passive House, Green Globes – carry little weight with the public, or anyone else. While Mr. Applebaum points out a central problem on the energy front, we need to take a step back and look at the larger picture. LEED should be considerably more aggressive in rewarding builders for a thoughtful and considered approach, using existing building stock and reclaimed material at every possible turn.

SlowBuild: The Intimate Connections Between Paintball, SEPTA, & Architectural Salvage

2010-05-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

"Straight up the gut."

So said the expert paintballer as he refilled his hopper. As we prepared to go into battle, these were his words of wisdom on how to win the field.

The company played last Friday at Skirmish USA, America's largest and most notorious paintball course. Castles, Alamo-styled forts, Old Western ghost towns, demilitarized zones -- myriad options for blowing each other away with pellets the size of gum balls that traveled at 200 feet a second, and often broke skin (Photo to the side, with names appointed by Niko).

Looking at an aerial map of Philadelphia SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) routes, or even better driving or biking each morning beside their buses, it becomes apparent that "straight up the gut" constitutes the organization's own philosophy. Philadelphia, its streets laid out by William Penn in a simple grid easy enough for drunk colonists to negotiate (unlike Washington D.C., laid out by the consistently drunk French Major Charles Pierre L'enfant, and completely unnavigable) is ideally situated for executing what seems to be the operating principal of SEPTA: get to end of town to the other as fast as possible. Buses barrel down Second, Seventh, Eighth, Tenth, Lombard, Walnut, Chestnut, etc., moving like motorized battering rams, shredding quarter panels, exploding mirrors, the bike racks on the front of the buses functioning more as truck grills to keep off the errant bikers andoccasional pedestrian. Safest way to avoid the capriciousness of SEPTA is just to ride the damn thing.

I've made a practice of driving to work along Second Street, ordering the dog in the back cab, and picking up passengers. I grant you, there is significant confusion when I lean out the window and make the proposition. While it makes perfect sense -- I'm headed across the city, and have four empty seats -- people, understandably, are wary. It's usually a crowd of three or four, and half will flat-out ignore me. But one rider will throw up his or her hands and say the hell with it, I'll take that ride. Others usually follow, especially when it's raining.

In place of Straight up the gut, the Art of Waiting. Some people do it so gracefully, as if they were born to lean against that brick wall and stare off at a distant gnome. Others can't seem to get comfortable in their own skin, checking and rechecking their black brick of a phone, looking unsure about their socks, the particular contents of the Starbucks cup in their hand.

Of the fifteen or twenty rounds of paintball we played, "Straight up the gut" worked a few times. We split into teams of 8 -- most of us Greensaw folks, a couple others from North Jersey sprinkled about, and one or two self-proclaimed "experts" -- and wrapped blue or red tape around our biceps. On the Alamo course we the Blue Team arranged a sort of blitzkreig, swooping around from either side on of their fort, pinning them down. Reed got a straight shot at four backs, defending against a flank attack.

But for the most part, I would argue the Art of Waiting took the day. In one battle in particular. This one played out in a variation of how I imagine Sherwood Forest, scattered with boulders emerging from the brush like bony knobs on a horse's foreleg, oak and maple trees generously spaced, strategically situated mounds of deadwood scattered among the brush.

The referees placed a flag in the center of the course. The object, they explained, would be to secure the flag, and take it to the opposing team's orange pole. Not unlike recovering a fumble and running it into the opposite endzone.

Well, we decided to take the expert's advide and go straight up the gut. Samir would make a sprint for the flag. Once he secured it, he would fall back, and we would create a horseshoe around him, and shove it down their throats, easily walking the flag across the course.

To move faster, we suggested Samir relinquish his weapon. With understandable reluctance he gave me his gun. The ref counted down, and at the word Go Samir transformed into an Avatar, leaping over deadfalls, balancing one-footed on the crests of boulders, changing direction on a dime, like a running back on a dream run. He snatched the yellow kerchief from the pole, and fell back to us. We encircled him. He found me as I was laying down steady fire to secure our position.

He asked for his gun back. Dear Reader, I am generally a good person. But I so much enjoyed playing Rambo, I did not give it back.

"It'll be cool, I'll cover you man," was the wartime justification I gave.

With a good-humored shrug off went Samir, only to get lit up Platoon-style behind a tangle of branches a couple seconds later. I felt a brief tinge of guilt before taking a couple in the chest from god knows where.

As it happened, the Red Team had taken the tact opposite of straight up the gut. They had decided to wait in the brush, and pick us off as we traveled, like hardwired king salmon, upstream. Anchored by Jason, Heath and Niko, nestled into natural bunkers, they blasted us one by one as we advanced with the flag. Finally, they gathered the yellow kerchief, and walked it across the field, unopposed.

And so it goes, I would argue, with architectural salvage. We are upon the point of completing the most magnificent armoire in the history of the company at the house of Judy Wicks (pictured above, sans center sink, which is to come).

Originally culled from the stocks at Architectural Antiques (www.architecturalantiques.com), the armoire required an enormous amount of waiting in order to complete. Waiting for the correct router bit to imitate the original pediments, waiting patiently with our handcarving knives and Arkansas soapstone for sharpening to get the floret exactly right.

It is the process of SlowBuild: careful, considered movements, in reaction to something done before. Human energy - mindpower, problem-solving, manual dexterity - is expended on material that would otherwise have been incinerated, made to disappear. Instead of shooting across the city, instead of running over all competition with overpowering Tippman paintball guns, we practice the art of waiting. We do not expend fossil fuels while waiting. Rather we practice our chops, or converse on the subject of the intricacies of the job at hand. How can we make this happen? A lot less burning through material, a lot more thought.

And let me be clear here: when we move, when we start shooting, when we start cutting wood, we take no prisoners. We don't need to - careful consideration of the work at hand, multiple iterations of design, checking in constantly with clients - obviate any second thoughts. In fact, we can't afford to. The sublime paradox of salvage is that we give it a second chance, but it doesn't return the favor; if we miss a cut, ain't no going down to the Depot to pick up a replacement.

In a word, straight up the gut doesn't work if the opposition has a gut to go by, a gut they trust -- and a gut that has done a certain amount of sit-ups.

We still have years, miles to go before our education is anywhere near to complete. And yet we know - instinctively - that SlowBuild, and more particularly, building with what already exists, constitutes the future. It is just a matter of time before SEPTA, other contractors, paintball experts, and the rest of the world catches on.

What's All This Green-Tech Hype?

2010-05-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

“I know very few environmentalists whose heads aren’t firmly up their ass.” So says Saul Griffith, the subject of the New Yorker article “The Inventor’s Dilemma” (17 May 2010).

Griffith, perhaps one of the foremost green-minded inventors to have sprung from the prodigious loins of M.I.T., has forsaken inventing new technology. Instead, he tinkers with what already exists. This is a concerted step away from what he labels the “green-tech hype,” and a step toward making do with what we have.

I won’t spend any more time dealing with his epiphanic moment – the New Yorker does that well enough. But I would like to touch on a few key points he raises, and examine how they dovetail into our own philosophy of building.

“We’ve been working on energy, as a society, for a few thousand years, and especially for the last two hundred years, so we’ve already turned over most of the stones,” Griffith says. This revolution of thought came after brainstorming floating wind turbines, solar-powered highways, spoke-mounted L.E.D. lights for bicycles, and a machine to made eyeglass lenses cheaply. His basic point is that we ignore, at our peril, the consummation of natural resources and the greenhouse gases created in the process of building.

Instead, Griffith has made a study of Portugal, where houses have thick walls and small windows. I would imagine he would interest himself in a French farmhouse, called a mas, a one-story masonry building oriented to the south, built into a hillside to catch the low-lying winter sun, while avoiding the high sun come the vicious Provençal summer.

As a model for his new thought he looks to the power supply for a telephone from the 1920s. Almost a century old, it still works as it first did, generating enough electricity to throw someone across the room. Ostensibly, it will continue to work for the next five hundred years.

Cell phones, on the other hand, become useless after a finite number of charging cycles. Automobiles, kitchen appliances, computers – they are not built to last. We must figure out exactly what we have at our fingertips, and reclaim it for a current use.

Griffith speaks of his ability to build a “thermodynamically amazing…zero energy” structure. But, he points out, the energy it takes to build this structure would derive from fossil fuels. Even his idea of solar-powered highways, he believes, would not be a “green” move, due to the amount of fossil fuels needed for its construction.

It is from this platform that he addresses the work of Al Gore, who he dubbed the “No. 1 environmental hypocrite.” Gore flies constantly, justifying his carbon footprint by pointing to his effort to spread the word on global warming. Griffith responds, “I don’t think we can buy the argument anymore that you get special dispensation just because what you’re doing is worthwhile.”

It’s a difficult and complicated argument. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s as simple as Griffith calculates. On his website, www.wattzon.com, one can create a pie chart that shows the energy consumed in all aspects of life – driving, flying, and eating. The program calculates this number down to the watt. Griffith’s goal is to live at 2,500 watts. He’s currently at about 8,000.

Griffith’s realization boils down is this: we cannot invent our way out of this problem. Sure, it’s sexier to think we can “discover” a new avenue that will suddenly cut a swath through issues of heating and cooling, the desire to travel, to eat what we want when we want. We are a country built on Benjamin Franklin’s belief that “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Send the kite up to the skies in a thunderstorm, and see what happens….

As a company, we are currently finishing a job at the house of Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café, and the Sustainable Business Network. Wicks has been trailblazer here in Philadelphia, and the world, for local, sustainable practice. We follow in the large footprints she has left.

To build her kitchen, we used the rafters that were deconstructed from her third floor. The cherry countertop comes from a tree in Lancaster that was downed in a lightning storm. The armoire we built for her bedroom is reclaimed from an estate, the material on her deck comes from a New York City water tower, the cedar in the lockers in her yard from a barn in Lancaster.
We are completing a job for the Whitesell’s on Fifth and Spruce in Society Hill. Oak flooring was removed, exposing the original yellow pine beneath. We will use the oak flooring – almost an inch thick – to construct their third floor bathroom.

A LEED Platinum job in Northern Liberties is also getting under way. We will use reclaimed material for the flooring, kitchens, bathrooms, trim, and framing – we get our framing material from struck movie sets.

In my mind, this is what Griffith is talking about: instead of thinking that someone will create a skeleton key to unlock the answer to all our problems, just be a little bit smarter about the materials you work with. Find innovative ways to re-use what already exists, or take a look back to the old-timers to get a sense of how they wrapped their heads around problems of energy.

The answer here lies not only in reclaiming and recycling building material. It also concerns the buildings strategies employed to get you to a finished structure. I’m thinking here of Passive House technology.

Tim McDonald, President and CEO of Onion Flats (www.onionflats.com), is a huge proponent of Passive House, a concept that promotes carbon-neutrality by using passive solar gain and an aggressively sealed and thought-through house. This is directly in line with what we are doing at Greensaw: don’t depend on technology, but rather look to the cards we’re dealt already. The wind blows here, the sun shines here, and it rains every so often. How do we make this work without hugely complicated machinery?

The United States Green Building Council, inventors of LEED, is not especially helpful on this. We can score points in LEED for Homes if we use reclaimed tropical wood, but not local reclaimed wood. Why is this? All our framing material comes from Resource Exchange (www.resourceexchange.org) here in Philadelphia. Resource Exchange is non-profit, re-use company who salvages movie set materials that typically ends up in a dumpster. It is possible that we will score an “innovation” point for this in the LEED charette, but it won’t be a whole lot more.

In addition, you only get one lonely point for building using an existing structure. This strikes me as absurd. The amount of fossil fuel not to mention landfill space that it takes to demo a building and build new should hugely influence the final LEED score.

Now it is one thing for a literature major like me to spout on about reclaimed material, the great stories behind architectural salvage, how much more beautiful it is than new wood and so forth and so on. But when a lifelong inventor and recipient of the 500k MacArthur “genius grant” starts saying that this invention thing ain’t going so hot, maybe we should start figuring out better ways to reclaim and recycle what we already have – well, I, for one, am all ears.

On Remembering to Eat Popsicles

2010-03-14T09:10:00.001-07:00

Three years ago, if you told me that I would be posting a photo of Lance Corporal David Wing on top of a pile of debris left over from a shop fire at the company I started, I would have said you’re probably right.

And almost to date, there he is, a victorious weed staked by his side, our Greensaw Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. Someone lit a fire at the back of the shop when the Phillies won the pennant (good thing they didn't win the World Series), hot enough to melt a truck box. We juiced up the pressure washer, cleaned it up, and got a good pic. It all makes perfect sense. I can’t tell you why, or how, but it somehow does.

Yet when it comes to describing the exact trajectory of this company, I hesitate. I’ve had to, in these last couple weeks, as we prepare to hire help in the office. Applicants ask: how did you guys get to where you are now? Tell me a bit about your company? When I think about it, I don’t think we’ve had too much of a chance to sit back and consider the answers.

We had to the other day. Mind TV came by to film our work in the shop, and conduct interviews. Unlike every other experience with the media I’ve had, things weren’t off the cuff. Rather, the producers arrived with a cogent list of thoughtful questions. They switched on the lights, set up a chair, and we were suddenly on the Barbara Walters' show.

I didn’t hear all the answers – I wish I did – but my sense is that the guys and girls who sat through the interview made more sense than I did. That is to say, they have a greater sense of how we got to where we are now. Ask me, and I’ll say something about how we've built ourselves up using the logic of a meritocracy, bringing on individuals with varying skills ranging from squirrel whisperer to sculptor to gymnast (Dave). By the same token, despite what are P&L looks like, we are a for-profit organization, and we like folks who git er done. So -- my upshot is we're built out of men and women who kicks ass, are visionaries, and make a buck or two.

While it's these greater questions I obviously need to struggle with, instead I worry about dogs in the office. Lately we've been kicking the GDDs as Brenda and I call them (God Damn Dogs) out when clients visit. On the one hand they’re great to have around, adding a touch of warmth to what would otherwise be a decadent jail cell with acoustical tile ceiling minus the toilet which is half a click away. On the other hand they’re relentless when it comes to getting pets. And they could care less whether someone wears pressed black slacks or not. (There they are below, unhappy to be given the boot, despite the march sun.)

I left my previous job as a timber framer at Bensonwood when a company-wide email was sent out forbidding dogs at all future company events. Apparently, an older woman had tripped over either my dog or a buddy’s -- we were both eager to take credit although we didn't truly know. In my humble view, Bensonwood’s profound community-based roots, sewn over 35 years of beer-infused silliness coupled with some serious hard driving, with its dual appreciation of wackiness and wickedness, was being obscured by a production-line mentality. Also, they just stopped letting dogs come to parties, which sucked. Yet compromises are called for.

I had a girlfriend from Newport Oregon. Her father, who I think about and adore more and more each day that passes, was a great fan of Rogue beer. We would go to the family campsite on Milepost 19 on the Alsea River and drink Rogue 22-ouncers from morn until morn, passing out beneath the stars or in the RVs. “Red beers in the morning!” was his rallying cry. This meant a Rogue mixed with tomato juice.

She would tell me about a black lab, the master brewer's best friend at Rogue. He even appeared on a beer bottle. Lately, I can’t go anywhere on the East Coast without seeing a Rogue beer. I wonder how they have been negotiating their success. The distillery must have been modernized from the one I saw beneath the bridge as we crossed out of Newport. Do dogs still wander among the beer casks? How have the folks in charge adjusted their hiring processes? Are dogs allowed in the offices? Do the offices have windows?

In the interview for Mind TV, we each provided different answers to just about every question asked, save for one. What is a typical Greensaw job? There ain’t one. It just doesn’t exist. We do things very traditionally, showing great respect for the old-timers, for people and community. And yet each job differs from the first, due to the highly variable quality of salvage and recycled material. Not to mention the highly variable quality of each individual in the company, and the highly variable quality of our esteemed clients, despite our best efforts to screen.

All to say that when it comes to determining the road forward, it helps to be able to understand the past. Reflecting, I can only think of the hijinks involved, despite Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that entrepreneurs are really conservative -- which in my mind misses the forest for the trees. Dave triumphant on a pile of smoldering debris gives some clue to what brings us through the smoke: humor and hard work. This is what stands out. And we feel both qualities deserve a certain amount of leeway when it comes to lifestyle -- meaning dogs should not be kicked out of the office.

We're all good people who need cities but crave the outdoors. Who want to work, but not compromise who we are. We're hard drivers with a certain amount of whimsy, and a large amount of curmudgeonliness that comes out when things don't work as we hope. We take things so personally -- it's our greatest strength, and our greatest weakness. At bottom, we want to build this company from individuals who won't let go of the rope when it starts to burn, and who still like Popsicles.

It's the last part that keeps me up at night.

Scrolling through old Greensaw pics

2010-01-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

I kept coming across photos that made me chuckle. Below a collection of pics with cutlines describing what in the heck's going on (whenever I know).

Heath and I were working in the shop for this one -- I think it was his first or second day on the job -- when from around the corner appears this parade of sexy females, who dragged him away from the nearest exist into the photo. I can't imagine what was going through his head. Jay looks like he's found his true calling as a cross-dresser, while Phil's midriff is priceless.

What strikes me about this photo is how much Jay looks like the pickerel he's alligator wrestling. This great catch took place in Eagles Mere Pennsylvania while completing the Lingenheld kitchen. Frustrated over the Betsy's decision to paint her cabinets -- made from reclaimed oak wainscot -- we staged a mutiny and went fishing.

Dave looks time-machined from the seventies, while Niko still hasn't changed out of his paintball outfit. In any case we had a good dinner of trout, catfish, and pickerel.

And while the guys went fishing, the female took her dog and went out for bigger game...

Here again in Eagles Mere heading home for lunch, dogs in tow (is this illegal nowadays?).

Can't help but think of Iwo Jima with this, trying to maneuver a cabinet to level in a house without a straight line. The wall was going one way, the floor another, the ceiling another. I can't imagine walking into that kitchen first thing in the morning, it's like being on a boat. The crazy thing is everything we installed was plumb, level and square, nutty as it looked.

This pic goes back a minute. Luke, Reed and Brian. It's pretty typical, Luke starting off to do something or other on his own, Brian pissed he's worn shorts and generally ticked off about the whole situation, and Reed could give a shit. We took that house from essentially a shell inhabited to squatters to something habitable...basically one huge guinea pig for all the harebrained ideas we come up with at the shop.

It's Brian we give a hard time to for the drooping pants, but here I'm the culprit, handing Alberto a trashbag. Again at my house, cleaning the place out, under the gun to make prepare it for the renter.

Dave, so confident in everything he does, pushed confidently off the Rhode Island beach into the great blue, cigarette between lips, jeans belted on. And somehow, some way he got off balance. There he was, statuesque, frozen for one beautiful second against the horizon, his body fighting the boat flipping beneath him. The next moment he was gone beneath the waves, and up he came, cigarette still between lips.

Mr. Smooth a bit more successful. Take a look at those waves -- you can't blame Dave for going down in those seas. Jason and Brenda encountered a flood of red roses, and of course one had to go, in true Joycean fashion, between the teeth.

Bry on the outboard right before it died in the middle of the ocean .

Niko and I using the truck for what it was made for....

Preparing to make a killing out in Jamestown Bay...

Predicting the kill we were gonna make....

Niko and Brenda modelling a bit first...

And the catch, with Brenda contributing a bluefish.

It's no secret that we end up travelling a bunch. Alexandria, Nantucket, Vermont, Brooklyn, Washington D.C., Manhattan, Jersey (which one of these is not like the other?). This a photo taken after cobbling together a truck rack from timbers and transporting close to a thousand pounds of wood down I-95 in winds gusting up to 25 -- which was about my speed going down there. I was sure the whole thing was going to yard sale over the highway causing a huge pileup. Sometimes I consider myself blessed -- which isn't the best thing because I figure I can continue to get away with stupid stunts like this.

Reed at about 6 in the morning showing off his stunning flexibility before setting off for Alexandria.

It's no secret Niko's quite limber as well -- showing off here at 40 feet in the air on Prince Street in Alexandria while Jay considers ending it all.

Dave and Niko finishing off the copper flashing under serious historical skies.

Building the icehouse roof in Alexandria

Holding our breath and checking it for level (look real close, you can't even SEE the bubble...)

And posing triumphant above.

Working in New York on the Upper East Side we were put up at a B&B on 92nd and Madison -- where Dave found a long-lost relative.

When we travel, we all travel together (see previous post on Cornice the squirrel).

And sometimes we pick up a few passengers...

But it's always nice to make it back home, even if it means working on more roofs.

Or talking on the goddamn cellphone

But the shop always offers some peace, here with Cornice checking to make sure measurements are correct.

This in Kennett Square. We took out a bathtub, brought it up the hill, ran the hose up, I got a Bud and Wallace Stegner's bio, and couldn't have been happier.

Nor could Cal, sweet love.

And the other folks, at least from the bathtub, looked fairly content. This was in the Toyota days, before we had a shop -- notice the cabinet carcasses strewn over the lawn.

This is from the Mancaves show. The fluted columns were short so we had to hack em down, and cut in a mortise and tenon. Work spaces weren't ideal there. We had three days working about 18 hours a day to completely transform Siragusa's restaurant.

And on the last night, we had a couple. Notice Jay's busted lip -- and on the far right Sal, Greensaw member for the evening, who incidentally is a genius at painting goalie masks for the NHL. This was shortly before having the brilliant idea to pour beer on Jason's head.

Back in Philly, doing what we do best. At church, or rather, ripping apart a church. We took up a collection of all the floors, as it were, which we then re-installed in Alexandria. Nice to work in pretty places. Notice the organ part in the top righthand corner.

Or maybe this is what we do best. Sunday 11am in Fairmount, Green Builder's football. Alex Keaton and the K Group showed up (once) the Stock Group has yet to make an appearance, Ben Boyd from Grass has become a regular, and Angelo from Greenable has come out a few times.

One way or another, when it comes down to it, I guess it's about this -- doing our best being country guys in a city, re-using whatever we can, making it look nice, finding clients who treat us good -- and trying not to forget to take it easy every now and then, dogs included. This pic gets credited to Jason's good eye.

A Humble Plea for Salvaging Jambs with Doors

2009-09-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

Walk into any store selling reclaimed material and you will see doors door doors. Arranged like children's books, hardbacked but thin, slumped in a way that makes one nervous. Occasionally a white piece of tape will inform you of measurements -- don't trust it. Rarely is an old door square top to bottom.

How could humans spend so much time keeping other humans out? All this craft to separate us from each other?

Get over it. We've been taking our privacy for years, and I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon (as I blog away...). Fact remains we need these moveable walls, with their rails, stiles, raised panels and jambs, put together in a way that allows us to say hello or goodbye.

That lost foyer door you came across last weekend that can't help but remind you of Cider House Rules will work great for a pocket door -- these things seem to be all the rage. Put it on some old trolley track or barn door hardware, clear your walls of pipe and wire, and you have a classy clean divider. All well and good.

But for those interested in salvaging doors and re-using them for the same purpose, let me make a suggestion. Whether you're taking your door from a rowhome in Philly or the Mohawk House in the Catskills -- keep the doorjamb. It makes life so much easier. You don't find the folks at Home Depot selling too many doors that aren't pre-hung -- if they're good at one over there and one thing only it's figuring out what's easiest to install.

The importance of keeping the jamb makes even more sense when it comes to salvaged doors. (See an episode we taped on this same subject for Discovery Channel's "Renovation Nation" on their Green channel at http://www.greensawdesign.com/news.html.) The old-timers were just better carpenters than us, despite our best efforts with fancy tools. Clean even dadoes, inbuilt door stops, uniform-width jambs constructed from red or white oak to withstand centuries of slamming doors -- they put us to shame, and we can do nothing but learn at their feet. Or when that doesn't work -- just keep what they already @!%* built!

Listen buddy maybe you want to mess with the jamb but me I'll stick with the door and build the jamb later.

I'll grant you popping a few pins and unscrewing hinges is about as non-threatening as it gets. But trust me this takes more time then slipping in a reciprocating saw and slicing (pic to the left) through the shims and screws fastening the jamb to the rough opening and walking off with the whole kitten caboodle. Code your jambs to your door with blue tape, throw it in the truck bed and you're good to go.

Maybe your fancy Philadelphia Carpenter Hall craftsmen wanted to show off with their dadoed thresholds but my jamb, nice as it is, has no saddle. How is it gonna stay together?

Just screw in some one-by material to the endgrain of the jamb sides. And if you don't have a truck code the jamb carefully with A1, A2, and A3, take it completely apart, and put it back together again when you're ready for install (below, from a house on 21st & Pine, where we put in over thirty doors from St. Joseph's Seminary). The dadoes will make this task all the easier.

Same story for trim. If you have a bit of ambition and aren't too far from your install site and your trim is cross-nailed at the miters (as it should be) keep it all together, as shown in this photo to the right. If you've carefully pre-measured and built your rough openings with appropriate space left for your jamb thickness plus half an inch on either side for shims and play, you'll have your door in with trim in less than an hour.

Metal doors work the same way. Below are photos from a house in Pennsport where we used a salvaged metal door with lites from a house on Philadelphia's Main Line. After removing the old door, installing a lintel into the brick to extend the opening, we slipped in our new piece, carefully installed corner bead for the drywall, spackled and were golden.

So hallelujah for the movement to use salvaged doors. And many thanks to anyone interested and ambitious enough to even think of re-using a door. Hopefully this small piece of advice will help the descendants of all those lonely orphan doors in salvage shops find a happy home, and not sit stacked in a corner for so long -- unswung, unjambed, and generally unhinged.

Architectural Salvage & the Media

2009-09-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

"Mr. Phillips... slight and sinewy with a long gray ponytail and bushy mustache. He grips the armrests of his chair when he talks as if his latent energy might otherwise catapult him out of his seat."

This a line from the New York Times article describing a man who builds houses out of "trash" ("One Man's Trash," NYT, 2 September 2009). The article can be read in full at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/garden/03recycle.html?_r=1&ref=style).

Bottle butts, wine corks, scratched DVDs, a cow skull scoured by beetles from a nearby cattle yard -- all fair game for Mr. Phillips, who does his work in Huntsville, Texas -- a town better known for putting people to death under the state's auspices. There he is with his raisined body, drooping mustache and healthy ponytail, doing his admirable work seventy miles north of Houston.

Not a far cry from Isaiah Zagar, the recent subject of a documentary, and someone I grew up with in Philadelphia. Zagar, a famed mosaic mural artist, uses bike rims, wine bottles, crucibles -- essentially anything to construct his edifices. Isaiah's Magic Gardens, his artistic flagship, on Tenth and South (www.phillygardens.org) invites people into the medulla oblongata of his forbidding genius. Version 2.0 of a circus funhouse, it's at the top of NFT's list of Philly art stops.

For this is salvage's fate: relegated to the quirky innovator who might or might not have a screw loose. Shot through with latent energy, requiring straps on his wrist lest he catapult from his restrictive chair, more fox than hedgehog, to use Isaiah Berlin's criteria -- working furiously, solo, prisoner of his (it's always men singled out -- the reason for this the subject of another piece) own brilliance. Occasionally conscious of the world around him, as Mr. Phillips seems to be, when he points to salvage as a strategy to cut down on landfill use. But more often tortured by his "ideas," the possibilities which, as they always are in these articles (Mr. Phillips does not fail in his duty to the journalist here) "endless."

Here's what I'm waiting for: an article on the use of salvage on the Upper East Side, or Rittenhouse Square. How the marble foyer, the baseboard, all 32 oak doors, casement, mantels, panelling -- how all of it was done from materials reclaimed. Because it's been done -- we've done it, and so have others. I'm not talking about a house with soda bottles encased in the mortar so that the light falls green on the stairs, or a wall of pastry plate shards from the bakery down the block that shut its doors last year. I want an article on local reclaimed material used in a home constructed by socially-conscious people who otherwise would have hired a mainstream high-end contractor. People intent on transporting the stories of salvage into their house, on doing the right thing, and having it look beautiful.

Because they're out there. In force. Banging on the door of our shop to ask for good work. It's the media that's failed to pick up the scent.

A few minutes ago a highly-published freelance journalist emailed me, and described The New York Times as asking its reporters to "bring me last year's idea today." I'm fine with print journalism giving an idea some time to marinate -- no one ever accused The New York Times of being avant-garde. But what is happening with reclaimed material is not just an "idea" -- the hobby of an innovative misanthrope, tormented by his overflow of chi, the reclusive genius building in a way that makes you chuckle over your Sunday coffee. We are taking the construction of the homes in which we live to a more sustainable, a more attractive, and a more intriguing level. Much bigger than one man and his brainchild. These articles therefore aren't behind the times; they miss the point entirely.

If the end of the twentieth century was about California tracts and sprawl, production housing and an endless supply of 2x4s, the 21st century is about building with what already exists. This is not a mercurial building strategy practiced by the few, or even an alternative idea. It is the full-on future of building. Our clients understand this. I am waiting for the media to catch up.

Portrait of a Squirrel as a Young Man

2009-08-27T06:10:00.001-07:00

It was during a thunderstorm atop scaffolding that we stumbled upon Cornice, the endangered Del Ray Squirrel.

The day previous, while using hammers and crowbars to deconstruct water and termite-damaged corbels, brackets, and fascia from a house on Prince Street, in historic downtown Alexandria Virginia, we heard a shuffling. As Jay pried off a return, a full-sized squirrel exploded out, balanced briefly on his arm, jumped to the scaffolding, and scampered down the side of the building. This, we decided, was a sad but necessary consequence of replacing an entire cornice on a house that dated from the 19th century.

The following day, dressed in foul weather gear, while replacing rotted out framing, a splinter of wood fell on the yellow grating of the scaffolding platform. Just before sweeping it away onto the waiting canvas forty feet below, the splinter moved. On closer inspection, it revealed a dun-colored belly, tiny whiskers, and two slits where eyes should be. It looked, with its little arms, like a ginger root.

Niko picked up the creature. We crowded around. After considering the events of the previous day, we decided that we had on, or rather in our hands, a baby squirrel.

Descending the scaffolding with one arm, Niko got the little guy, small enough to fit in a closed palm, to ground level and out of the rain. Hammers were put away and IPhones came out. We searched "Emergency care for a baby squirrel." Advice came pouring back. The consensus seemed to be that we would need, then and there, a baby dropper, filled with baby formula heated to room temperature.

Back at the apartment where we were staying, Jason put the formula on the stove, Niko held the little guy, and Dave and I looked on. Dave, bless his heart, recounted animal stories involving babies and inevitable death. Niko stayed quiet and ran his finger over our new friend's head. I searched on the Internet for more information, relaying back information that seemed relevant, such as the need to massage the squirrel's belly every couple hours to make sure he emptied his intestines, as well as to make sure he got fed up to four times a day.

Plastic dropper filled, we huddled around and gave it a shot. Niko held the squirrels head aloft while Jay attempted to squeeze formula down his throat. We discussed names. Cornice was decided upon. The milk went just about everywhere except into Cornice's mouth, dribbling down his cheeks, gathering in the creases of Niko's hands, ending up on rather than in the squirrel's belly.

After three or four dropper-fulls came to rest in paper towels, we gave up. Niko made Cornice a bed from fleece pants and installed him by the bathroom radiator. I read that creases in the squirrel's skin means dehydration. Our little friend looked like one big California raisin, aged way beyond his years. When you pinched his skin, soft as the underside of a wrist, it stood up like a paper back, requiring a good minute or two to return to his skeleton.

The rain had stopped and we had lost valuable hours on the job. We returned to work, finished rebuilding the necessary frame for the (actual) cornice, filling in with pressure-treated lumber to support the brackets and corbels we had pre-built in the shop, all the while discussing different permutations of possibilities for Cornice. Should we bring him to a rescue? The local fire department? Construct him a new home in the new cornice? Let nature take its course and send him on his way?

At the end of the work day we walked quickly back to the apartment, everyone silent and (I would guess) worried we might have a dead baby squirrel in our bathroom. Niko undid the folds of fleece as we watched. Indeed our friend looked in bad shape, the folds of his skin even deeper, like an emaciated rodent, dragging himself across Jay's open palm more like a miniature sloth than anything resembling a squirrel.

I found in my dopp kit a glass dropper from a tincture bottle. We heated the milk, took up our positions around the kitchen table, and gave it another shot. Again Niko held the squirrel, cradling his head between his thumb and index finger, while Jay prepared our new dropper. I found a number for a local rescue and began researching whether they would take a baby squirrel. Dave stood by and again voiced his skepticism about the general project. As I watched the formula dribbling down Cornice's cheeks, I couldn't help but agree with him. Each time Niko would get near his mouth with the tip of the dropper, the squirrel would turn his head away and exhale, small air bubbles appearing around his mouth.

I dialed the number for the rescue and had my finger over the Send button. Then Jay let out a yelp. "He's sucking!" We huddled around – and indeed he was, the little bugger – and not only taking a drop at a time but sucking eagerly, as if his life depended on it – which it surely did. Each of us shouted encouragement to the little guy, including Dave, and a chorus of cheers went up when Cornice pooped on Niko's hand. Another one when he took a pee.

Fully fed, we nestled him back into his bed by the radiator. The four of us leaning over, collective squirrel fathers, peering down at the little guy and happy with ourselves, feeling like gods I suppose. We made a grand dinner involving bacon and beer and fell into a deep sleep.

Thus began a tenuous juggle between work, eating, and squirrel-sitting. Two girls, recently moved to Alexandria, lived beneath where we were staying, and, as soon as they caught wind of the squirrel, we realized the awesome potential of our new pet. We redoubled our efforts in feeding him.

(The finished product in Alexandria, despite squirrel-sitting duties)

Thus began the era of the squirrel. Perched on your shoulder as you make a cut on the chop saw, rolling on his back and boxing with you as you fasten on a sanding pad, rotating a strawberry between his two paws like corn on the cob, or spiraling up a down your leg as you attempted to move lumber. Cornice, nicknamed "Boog" by Niko, became a presence in the shop. Niko became the squirrel's care keeper, while Jason and Brian pitched in whenever they could. We had Brian's birthday at the shop, and the squirrel upstaged him, party goers in disbelief that the squirrel could be a permanent fixture in our lives.

Meanwhile Cornice grew. His eyelids, as if operated by a slow-moving pump jack, slowly opened, revealing two brown beads. His fur grew in, and his tremendous tail grew out. We all remarked proudly on his endowment, figuring that he could put a full-grown squirrel to shame. We pondered the possibilities of finding him a suitable mate.

One morning Niko came in with a dark look. His girlfriend's terrier had gotten loose and made an attempt on Boog's life. The squirrel made it beneath the couch but not before the dog yanked off a mouthful of tail, and shucking off the fur, leaving Cornice with more of a stub. Niko – a card-carrying animal lover and protective of our newest family member – told us he almost strangled the dog.

We spent three days retrofitting Tony Siragusa's North Jersey restaurant for the DIY show "Mancaves" with architectural salvage. Expecting to get a fair amount of face time speaking on our redwood staves from the brewing barrels of Schmidt's brewery in Philadelphia, we instead found ourselves watching as Cornice had lights and cameras shoved in his face, and Siragusa marveled over our shop pet. Cornice did, however, work his squirrel magic and helped to lure over two cute female designers, giving us the inside track on the other dudes.

(Below - the finished restaurant, absent Cornice)

At stoplights Cornice perched on Niko's steering wheel. Fellow drivers honked and laughed. He saved Niko from a parking ticket while briefly stopped in front of Greenables (a regular stop of ours for purchasing environmentally-safe construction materials.) When the Philadelphia Parking Authority officer saw Cornice staring out the back window, instead of handing Niko a ticket, she shared her own squirrel stories from caring for one when she was a kid.

I'm sure he got us jobs – and perhaps lost us a few – when people saw him running around the shop. He never roamed far, but he never moved slowly either. The dogs, Sol and Colorado, just stared at him, whining. How did this creature, representative of everything they desired to catch, get to roam free in the shop that used to be their domain. One afternoon, in a second attempt on Cornice's life, Colorado rammed through a folding chair in front of the garden door and went for Cornice, who managed to escape to the top of the bookshelf.

Meanwhile Cornice's nails developed into mini-wolverine claws. Undulled by a normal squirrel existence of scampering up and down bark, he began to be something of a liability in the shop, leaping a good four feet in the air toward your face as you tried to make a cut on the table saw. While transporting tools to a kitchen site, I turned around to see a flying squirrel, midair, coming toward my nose. At the last moment I turned my head, and he slid down the side of my face like a cat down a curtain, drawing a number of inquiries over whether I had been swatted by a bobcat.

The requirements of taking care of him also began to weigh on Niko. Left at home in Niko's room, Boog rummaged into orange oil paint. When Niko returned home, he had a new paint design or squirrel prints – not confined to the walls. The car where Cornice spent much of his time began to resemble a squirrel nest, with nut shells strewn over the floor mats, almonds hidden within the seat crevices and various deposits of peanut-butter colored squirrel doo on the dash.

We contemplated the idea of building a squirrel habitat in Niko's garden, allowing Boog to roam as he pleased. Indeed he would play outside, and come home at night to sleep – often in Niko's bed, closing his eyes only after a thorough stomach scratching. It seemed like a plausible dream.

Then he bit a neighbor of Niko's, drawing blood. And then he bit one more. Then he chewed through his plastic carrier. And it became clear that Boog's days of a domesticated lifestyle were drawing to a close.

He was released into the Schuykhill Valley Nature preserve. On weekends we occasionally go out to check on our friend. Sometimes he appears, sometimes he doesn't. Niko reported seeing Cornice with another squirrel, seemingly at peace in the wild. Either way, we miss his presence, and hope he does well in the wild. Perhaps, years down the line, a biologist will report a new population of Del Ray squirrels in the Philadelphia area – and we'll know our little guy has been busy.

J.P. Morgan's Walnut Bookshelves

2008-10-06T17:20:00.000-07:00

The tale of John Pierpont Morgan's bookshelves begins, I suppose, somewhere in the hardwood forests of the Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Onondoga, Cayuga, Tuscarora – who knows, somewhere in what was later called the Hudson River Valley, if I had to guess. Iroquois hunting grounds. Where a walnut seedling took root, and was growing gangbusters two hundred years later, a Canadian goose flight from where J.P. was born, in Hartford, Connecticut, one thousand eight hundred thirty seventh year of our lord.

Fly forward four hundred years to a phone call I received from New York asking if Greensaw would be interested in taking a look at J.P. Morgan's salvaged library shelves, currently being stored in a church warehouse in southwest Philadelphia. The client, Amy Langer, was interested in buying four sets, building cabinetry and drawers in the bays, and installing them into her Manhattan townhouse. Would we be willing to do the millwork and install?

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It is no secret J.P. Morgan had good instincts. He was booked to sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, with his own promenade deck and private suite. He cancelled at the last minute. So it went with business (he is credited with saving the economy, and the United States Federal Goverment – twice) and so it went with the arts. He collected books, paintings and prints (he was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and fine woodwork. Those oeuvres not on loan to the Met he kept in his London House, or at his private library on 36th Street near Madison Avenue in New York City.

In 2005 the Morgan library underwent a renovation. The handcarved shelves fell into the hands of Olde Good Things, a venerable and respected purveyor of architectural salvage that has led the way in ensuring that much of America's heritage does not end up in a landfill. Amy was in the process of purchasing these shelves from OGT, and wanted us, as she so nicely put it, "to be her eyes and ears on the ground."

With all due respect to Old Goode Things, and to their foresight in rescuing these works of art, J.P. Morgan's bookshelves, whose dentils and pearls crown moulding is lovingly built from nine separate pieces of walnut, beautiful enough to bring a woodworker to his knees, are being stored in a hell hole. Like a pen of cows crowded into the corner before execution, piled up on themselves out of brute fear. Brass railings rusting in black puddles, dentils turning to dirt in plastic waste bins, pallettes threatening to be dragged underwater by groundwater from an unknown source – if these words accomplish any end, let them please spark a rescue effort for America's history molding away in the dankest of warehouses.

Which had no lights, as I found out, arriving on a sweltering day this past August. Thank you to Craig, who works for OGT, for the use of his Mag Lite. We went in through the front, square foot after square foot of utter junk. It was like travelling to the ocean floor where the Titanic lay, in 125 degree water. And there at the bottom, in a dark corner of 62nd & Cedar, we switched on the lights of our deep sea explorer. Lo and behold, from a hundred years before, the Morgan library shelves!

An associate once commented that the presence of J.P. Morgan felt like "a gale blowing through the house." He smoked upwards of a baker's dozen of cigars, (Cubans, called "Hercules Club"). The gales, the cigar smoke, frustrated exhalations from J.P.'s famously large nose over underperforming mergers – all must have contributed to the singular patina on the Morgan Library shelves that this light brought forth. The aforementioned dentil and pearl crown moulding, the subtle handcarved stiles, the mortised top and bottom rails, the flush escutcheons with oxidized brass numbers marking the bay. Notorious for his good taste, J.P. did not skimp when it came to his library. On going to see them, I expected them to speak, as all furniture does, in one register or another. Standing there with Craig's flashlight, preparing to dial Amy in New York and tell her exactly what she was looking at, these shelves seemed to be saying, in sotto vocce, "I dare you sonofabitch, I dare you to take me apart."

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J.P. hated having his picture taken. A photograph of the old rhino has him looking back at the camera, winding up at the paparazzi with his black cane. Likewise, his son J.P. Jr. avoided publicity. So it makes sense that a library would be of no small value to the Morgan family. It was out of an open spirit, I suppose, and respect for his father, that J.P. Morgan Jr. opened the Pierpont Public Library in 1924. A sanctuary, with the most modern in heat, lighting, and the oldest, and finest in woodwork.

Our client Amy appreciated this. And, in her own brilliance, she wanted to take this process one step further. She wanted to build drawers, cabinets, shoe racks, an ironing board, puck lights, and wood shelving into the library shelves (see drawing below). And she wanted them taken apart, and installed as walk-in closets for her and her husband.

We rented a truck and alligator-wrestled the beasts into the back. Out they went to the shop, where we propped them up and stared at them for two weeks. We took a field trip to New York to see the site, and discussed how to get shelves up three floors. The conclusion, as you might have guessed: the shelves would need to be built with all the cabinetry, drawers and shoe racks, labeled, taken apart, and rebuilt in Manhattan. This would involve buying over a hundred board feet of American Walnut, twenty sheets of birch ply for drawers, and a whole lot of planning. It's the funny, paradoxical thing about working with architectural salvage: we're giving the damn stuff a second chance, rescuing it from the bottom of the ocean, but it doesn't return the favor. One bad cut and that's that.

So we went to work. Off came the walnut ply backs, out came the stiles and rails. Tim and Dave, who are leading the charge on the shelves, made a box to keep their saw straight, and minimize the kerf.

And alas it worked.

Dave and Tim routed the new walnut, cut the removed backs to correct size, and worked carefully off of Amy's mid-September drawings (below).

Special attention was paid to the outside mitred corners, and we used extra trim to piece in where the wood was damaged.

We discovered that the top crown was contructed from nine separate pieces, each handcarved, each requiring its own special treatment (we're getting paid good money by Coca-Cola, by the way. That endorsement was not free).

Usually, when you take furniture apart, it loses its grandeur. Not so with this stuff – the more we broke it down, the more the individual pieces seemed to sit on their own (see above). It gives one tremendous respect for the old timers, and gives us a heavy dose of humility. It's kind of depressing how much we don't know.

On the flip side of that coin, working with these shelves is something akin to taking a class in classic furniture design. Except the teacher doesn't speak -- he just does. You learn by taking apart what he does, and putting it back together again at your own speed, with your own design.

And so here we are, October 6, the sunlight growing crisper, T-shirts turn into sweatshirts, and the shelves turning into something different than they once were. I wonder what old J.P. would think strolling into our shop, his cane clicking on the cement floor, his badger eyes squinting.

Be that as it may, Tim and Dave have been kicking ass on this complicated job, balancing the need for speed with the importance of careful planning, mapping, clean cutting, and 360 degree thinking. Meanwhile the rest of us – Ryan, Brian, Niko and myself –have been completing a large green renovation of a house in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, incorporating a blend of salvage and new green construction that deserves its own blog. Problem is there are so many interesting things going on, it's hard to find time to sit down and write, nevermind take photos and try to put all this into words. Especially when I want to get my dirty hands with every little job. Perhaps with this first entry I will make a commitment to sit down and try to make sense of our nutty days, and the clients who make them so (Hi Rick!).

As for the Morgan library shelves, I think the entire crew is ready to pack up the truck and head north to complete a slew of work we've got scheduled in Gotham. Autumn in New York. A bunch of Philly boys let loose on the Upper East Side. Stay tuned.