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CHAPTER 4

Live from New York

WHEN I PICKED UP a hammer right out of college, I discovered that skilled manual work offered spiritual rewards to which academic institutions and my parent’s social milieu were oblivious. My subsequent decision to quit carpentry for furniture making turned out to be equally fateful, although at the time I intuited the difference between the two occupations more than I rationally understood it. As a carpenter I had worked with my hands. As a furniture maker I began to work creatively with my hands, which has made all the difference. Becoming a carpenter may have been a process of self-definition and self-transformation, but as I gained competence the daily work of carpentry became a known quantity. Designing and building furniture, on the other hand, has never lost the challenge of exploration and the delight of discovery. While it is possible to calcify in a creative field – to stop asking new questions and stick with what one knows – by its very nature furniture making offers doors to new experience at every turn.

As a young carpenter, I found ready employment and I had a role model in Carl Borchert, whose integrity and independence provided signposts to a good life. As a nascent craftsman in a society where the trade of furniture making had apparently vanished, I was going to have to find my way on my own. The first step would be to make the transition from wanting to become a craftsman to actually being one.

Frederick, Maryland

In June of 1975, a year and a half after I made my first cradle, I packed a truckload of handmade furniture into a well-worn Ford Econoline van that had succeeded my pickup truck, boarded a ferry from Nantucket to Woods Hole, and drove to Frederick, Maryland, to participate in my first major craft show. I had no idea what to expect. What I found were scores of young craftspeople setting up a nomadic encampment that was a cross between Woodstock and a medieval market fair. Craft shows were highly informal events in those days, often as not held in livestock barns on county fairgrounds. I didn’t sell more than a few small boxes, but it was affirming to have people connect to my work.

I was single again (my own damn fault) and had spent the past winter aching over Gail in a claustrophobic house on a dirt road about two miles outside of town. My workshop was down in the tiny, windowless basement, where I had to duck floor joists every time I moved. I don’t remember everything I made in the course of those ten months, but they included an oak cabinet for a tugboat someone was converting into a yacht, heart-shaped mahogany boxes for Valentine’s Day, a walnut quilt rack, a set of carved walnut boxes that a customer characterized as “canary coffins,” and a run of six cherry rocking chairs. I was hugely ignorant – I barely had a clue how to sharpen a chisel and would pretty much hack away at wood with a hand plane – but lovely objects still took shape under my hands. Looking back, it amazes me.

On the morning I left for Frederick, Bear Boy was strangely apathetic. I had to lift him into the passenger seat of the van. By the time we reached New York City he could barely walk. I took him to the Animal Medical Center and two days later learned over the telephone, from Frederick, that he had lymphoma. The next day I called back to discuss treatment and was told that he had died overnight.

When I returned home after a week off-island, I was ready to leave Nantucket for good. Heartbreak over Gail was one reason, the absence of Bear another, plus I didn’t want to be there for the tidal wave of real estate development that even then was looming on the horizon. Mostly, though, I was ambitious to be a furniture maker, and the craft show had made it clear that living on the mainland offered more opportunities to learn and to sell. The amiable search for a good life that I had embarked upon five years earlier had been hijacked by a passion for furniture making that drove me forward with its own logic. I was becoming aware that a good life was not some Shangri-La waiting to be stumbled upon. One constructed it from the materials at hand.

Frederick Again

Having decided to leave Nantucket, I arbitrarily settled upon Washington D.C. as my next home. But the only house I found that met my three requirements – inexpensive rent, space for a workshop, and sufficient distance from neighbors that the sound of a table saw wouldn’t bother anyone – was forty miles to the west in Frederick, Maryland. So to Frederick I returned.

The subsequent year in Frederick was one of semi-monastic isolation. All I did, Monday through Saturday, was make furniture in a one-car garage under the house. In particular, I recall a drop-leaf walnut table, a cherry trestle desk, a red oak bed with a pattern of hearts sawn out of the headboard, and a sculptural music stand. I gained confidence. My work was shown in galleries in New Jersey and Washington. I was written up in the Washington Star. A senator invited me to see Jefferson’s writing desk at the State Department prior to ordering a small writing desk of his own.

I didn’t know a soul in Frederick. There were weeks when the full extent of my personal human interaction consisted of thanking the cashier at the supermarket. The telephone rarely rang, and when it did I would limber up my croaky voice with practice hellos before lifting the receiver. Eventually, I began to talk to my table saw. Not full-blown conversations – I wasn’t crazy – just the occasional companionable observation. In the evenings, having no television, I sometimes entertained myself by making funny faces in the bathroom mirror.

The exception to my isolation came every Saturday, when I drove forty-five minutes to spend the night with my Uncle Ed and Aunt Mickey in Bethesda. We would eat dinner and talk and then, on Sunday, walk the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal path beside the Potomac River and talk. Sunday evening before I left, we would watch Masterpiece Theater on television and talk. It didn’t matter much what we talked about; it was the pleasure of sharp conversation that counted. At dinner, I would often haul their dictionary or encyclopedia to the table to settle any disputes.

I watched the mailbox in front of the house in Frederick as expectantly as a Melanesian might have scanned the sky for manna in the days of the cargo cults. But furniture orders never materialized. Nor was there any reason they should have. I didn’t have a clue about marketing and somehow assumed that the world would find me, unprompted. The brown rice jar became my financial barometer. When it fell to a five-day supply I would telephone my father for a check, for which I was both grateful and ashamed. It was, in retrospect, a stark and solitary year. I was achingly lonely, anxious about money, and insecure in so many ways, yet I had no complaints. I was deeply engaged in acquiring the skills of craftsmanship; my days in the garage workshop were full. By the end of the year in Frederick I had made the transition from wanting to be a furniture maker to thinking of myself as a furniture maker.

New York

In August 1977 I moved to New York City so I could learn drafting and drawing by taking night courses at the now-defunct Jiranek School of Furniture Design and Technology. By day, after considerable looking, I set up my workshop in a relatively inexpensive storefront on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, between Houston and Prince, a block off the Bowery (plate 4).

Elizabeth Street was awash in the city’s demographic tides. There were elderly Italians whose children had long since moved out to more upscale boroughs and suburbs, lively Dominican families who dominated street life, reserved Chinese pushing north from Chinatown, and hopeful young artists living at the edge of Soho, which was just starting to percolate as an arts district. The few storefront businesses on the block were still Italian-owned: Mary’s butcher shop next door, Mike’s hardware store across the street, the sandwich shop down at the corner of Prince where I first tasted an eggplant parmesan sub, and a dry-cleaner’s that was rumored to be a Mafia front.

The day I moved in was sweltering. Across the street, just to the left of the hardware store, children were playing around a jet of water from a yellow hydrant that thrummed a tattoo against the side of every passing vehicle. Having read numerous subway posters warning that open hydrants reduce water pressure for fighting fires, I strode across the street with a heavy, orange Stillson wrench and shut off the hydrant. I couldn’t have made more impact if I had cartwheeled down the street naked. Children and adults stared in disbelief. I should have been branded an outcast then and there, but what happened, I suspect, was that Mike, who was sitting on a lawn chair in front of his hardware store, took bemused pity on my obvious lack of survival instincts. Over the next two years there were subtle indications that he had placed me under his protection. When someone smashed a neighboring store’s plate glass windows, Mike assured me I didn’t have to worry about my own.

I certainly had little understanding of the environment into which I had plunged. There didn’t seem to be any crime on my block, but it never occurred to me to wonder why. Then, when I had been there a year or so, a young derelict who had wandered over from the Bowery foolishly snatched a purse from one of the elderly Italian women who congregated at Mary’s butcher shop. He didn’t make it thirty yards before knives and guns appeared everywhere and he was knocked down to the concrete, kicked and beaten like an errant mutt, jerked to his feet, and roughly escorted off the block. It was only then that I realized that the Dominican and Italian men on the block carried concealed weapons. It was their family neighborhood, and they kept it safe.

My rundown storefront was small, perhaps 400 square feet. I restored the plate glass windows, repaired and painted the exterior, and partitioned the inside to create a showroom at the front and a workshop at the rear. It was a proud moment when I hung out my first sign: “Peter Korn: Fine Furniture.”

Finding a place to live was my next priority. At first I stayed with two sisters I knew from Nantucket who shared a loft apartment off Gramercy Park. Then, for several months, I rented a dingy fifth-floor walkup on Prince Street, around the corner from my workshop. The building was a warren of Italian families who seemed to have been there for decades. When the plumbing backed up and loose tea leaves began to bubble out of sink drains on the first floor, everyone immediately knew whom to blame; I was the only possible tea drinker in the entire building. Finally, I ended up three doors down from my workshop, in a second-floor apartment that had two special features: a bathtub under the kitchen counter and a tribe of albino cockroaches in the cupboard.

The author in his workshop showroom at 236 Elizabeth Street in New York, 1978.

After the isolation of Frederick, New York was a social whirl. I’d make furniture all day, as I had before, but being in a storefront, people would stop in all the time – neighborhood artists, potential customers, and visiting friends. Many afternoons I would put a closed sign on the door and walk with a friend down to Café Roma, on Broome Street, for cappuccino and sfogliatelle.

I sketched every day in a spiral-bound notebook, sometimes designing on commission, but more often developing speculative pieces to sell at craft shows and through my showroom. The entire process of making furniture was captivating. First I would tease an idea into being with pencil and paper, sketching and drafting to think through the challenges of construction, wood movement, joinery, proportion, function, and a dozen other factors. Then I would ride the subway out to Rosenzweig Lumber in the Bronx to sort through bays of dusty, rough-sawn hardwood for the few boards that had the best grain, width, and color. A day or two later Rosenzweig’s delivery truck would block our narrow street and I would start the real work: marking out rough cuts with a framing square, straight edge, and lumber crayon; milling the components flat and square with the band saw, jointer, planer, and table saw; hand-planing boards that were too wide for my jointer; cutting dovetails and mortise and tenons with marking gauges, a sliding T-bevel, a try square, chisels, a coping saw, and a back saw; smoothing surfaces with a scraper and sandpaper; gluing up with clamps; trimming proud joints with a block plane; and, after more scraping and sanding, applying a tung oil finish that finally unveiled the beauty of the wood.

Page from the author’s sketchbook.

Every day was a process of learning and becoming. When I hung out my shingle in New York, I had been making furniture for only three years and was entirely self-taught. The extent of my ignorance might have been crushing had I been fully aware of it. But the world made room for my modest skills. The major craft show in the country at the time was held in Rhinebeck, New York, by the American Craft Council, and I believe that in 1978 I was one of only six full-time furniture makers out of five hundred exhibitors. In the entire country there were relatively few independent woodworkers building furniture one piece at a time from their own designs, and many of them didn’t know much more than I did. We were all scaling the steep front end of the learning curve.