Anvil Chorus Still Resounds in New York

UEENS, N.Y. -- In a cold pre-fabricated warehouse just across the East River from Manhattan, James Garvey is bending a two-inch-thick beam of bronze.

"You don't take a piece out of metal without it taking a piece out of you."
Denes Petoe, Artist and Metalworker

He and two helpers are shaping the 170-pound pole by hand, watching as the dull orange glow of the curve slowly cools and dims, and the metal bends gracefully under the strength of their leverage.

Garvey, 46, stands in shirtsleeves, sandy red hair pulled back in a pony-tail illuminated by the blue flame of the blowtorch in his callused hand. His face is taut and lined as he concentrates on the tightening curve. He turns the torch on it again when the glow dulls too much.

In the next 20 minutes, the three men will bend the end of the pole again, and before the day is over, the 15-foot beam will have submitted entirely to Garvey's vision and the 1,600-degree heat of his forge and blowtorch. When it is finally bolted to a support girder in the 33rd Street IRT subway station, the polished bronze bar will be one of 14 growing from the rows of steel columns. The pole will bend sharply down, from six feet high to 28 inches low. Then it will loop smoothly around the column before merging again with the girder -- a minimalist seat for tired commuters.

New York is a modern city, and a high-tech one. But in the shadow of its monuments and skyscrapers, right about at eye level, is evidence of an ancient craft. Everywhere in the city, there is iron and steel, metal bent by hand or made to look as if it had been: window grills, stoop railings, fences, gates, lamp-posts. Some of it is still crafted by artisans like Garvey, one of the city's remaining handful of blacksmiths.

It is unclear exactly how many blacksmiths work in New York, but the Artist-Blacksmith Association of North America counts 13 members here among 4,200 nationwide.

"There just isn't the interest or demand that there was a hundred years ago," said James Banta, a technical assistant at the New York Landmark Conservancy. "Especially for the more decorative work, there's less of a demand."

Hand-forged metal requires expensive skilled labor. Denes Petoe, an artist and metalworker who owns Metalmorphosis in Manhattan's Chelsea district, is designing a railing that will cost a recording studio $1,200 a foot. It's 14 feet long.

Garvey's work, too, often carries a high price tag -- as much as $1,700 a foot for some railing designs and more than $500 each for most window grills.

"It's a little sad sometimes," Garvey said, lighting a filterless Camel as his assistants slide another bar into the forge. "I've done stairs where the only people that will use them are the husband and wife. And the servants."

Now he focuses more on street furniture like benches, garbage containers, lamps and fences. A railing he made runs along a staircase in Central Park. Perhaps his most-seen work is a fence in Times Square, designed by Monica Banks, that divides Broadway and Seventh Avenue with a long line of steel pickets and 35 orange-painted faces wrought out of coiled steel.

Most of New York's metalwork is not hand-forged. Almost all of it is less-expensive cast iron, made by pouring molten metal into a mold.

But shaping iron by hand is an ancient art -- archaeologists trace it back some 3,000 years -- and one that still carries a mystique.

Garvey's studio in this industrial Long Island City neighborhood clearly borrows from another time. A coal-burning forge and hood loom in one corner of the warehouse, an anvil squats next to it. And, although there is a hydraulic press, it is old and bears a patina of metal dust and age.

"It's all an extension of human force," Garvey said, standing by his long rack of mostly wood-handled tools next to the anvil. "These things are all very primitive."

Sometimes low-tech works better. Each end of the bronze-loop subway seats is flared a little, so it will look like it grows out of the girder to which it ultimately will be bolted. To widen the ends properly, Garvey hangs each bar from the ceiling by two chains, allowing it to swing parallel to the floor. Then, with one end red-hot, he rams the bar into a cold steel block, pushing the metal into the goblet-shape he has envisioned. In the next step, Garvey bends the last foot of each end into an intricate twisted swan-neck.

"A lot of things you have to do by eye," Garvey said, using a straight piece of scrap metal to deterine whether he likes the bend on his bronze bar. "You have to be able to look at it and know if it's right."

Like all industry and much art, however, the work is intense. "You don't take a piece out of metal without it taking a piece out of you," Petoe said. "I see some old guys with more scars on their hands than you can even imagine."

But the violence of the work attracted him, and helps keep him there, despite injuries to his own eyesight and hearing. "People in the metal industry are as a whole very self-destructive people," said Petoe, who described his introduction to metalworking at his uncle's shop when he was six. "The sparks, the fire, the noise -- for a little boy, this is G.I. Joe maximum. I had to do it."

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Last modified: Tuesday, February 1, 2000, 9:51 PM

Theo Francis
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