Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. Peter Korn

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.