Nr. 145 Bearded man with hat
This carved keystone came from a building at 308 West 145th st between 8th ave and Edgecombe, Manhattan. I removed him with several others in Sept and Oct 1976- I had only been collecting this stuff at that point for about 3 years, I was also only SIXTEEN. Having hooked up with someone who had a car and similar interests, we found this building on a drive around one day and made plans to go very early in the morning, remove the interior bricks and loosen these up.
There were 16 of these on the connected pair of buildings, many were damaged by fire, I seem to remember having about 4 of them and the other guy with the car also kept a couple or maybe sold his to me later, hard to remember now but I think we removed 4 the following morning all within an hour and left with them around sunrise. 145th and 8th was not a good neighborhood, drug dealers, muggers, street gangs and so on, and we were literally the only caucasion people there so we stood out and attracted unwanted attention if we did this salvaging during the daytime.
The keystones followed a theme- bearded men with various hats, this one has a soft hat I do not recognize but another keystone had an obvious cowboy style hat. These differed from typical in that they were not mythical, fantasy or Greek Gods, but appeared to have been real-life portraits of local men of the day, either that the carver knew or saw and used for his models.
Below is the first cast in the Old Limestone Grey finish
I had the stone till 1987 when I sold the collection and moved West, amazingly and entirely by accident I happened to find him at a live auction house as lot 202A with the description that it “reportedly came from a NYC building”, of course I recognized it immediately as an old friend, even though it’s been almost 20 years!
Having purchased him back, I’ll be bringing him home again next week, soon after I will make the mold and casts will be available to purchase.
He is 15-1/2″ high.
I had 9,300 pounds of salvage in a 2 room apartment, here’s a photo I took of a portion of some of my salvage kept in a 5th floor walkup apartment on MacDougal St by
Washington Square Park which I rented for a paltry $70/mo for storage, there’s about 900 pounds worth in this view;
He can be seen top left in this photo dated on the back June, 1977. To his immediate right is another keystone from that same building. The 3 white stones to the right of that were from 299 E3rd st (1898), the 2 other white men near the bottom were from Attorney and Stanton St while the man between those was from 5th st and Ave D. In the extreme right bottom corner partially obscured is a stone wolf or dog head from 53 Suffolk st
Now if you want to read something wierd, my daily log showed I removed the last keystone from this buildin gon Oct 24th, 1976, my first BID on this to buy it back was on Oct-23-06 23:55:41 PDT which for me in the Midwest was already Oct 24th. But I also went back and upgraded my bid on Oct-24-06 00:06:50 PDT
Here’s a satellite view of 145th st, looks like the entire block is gone now. The red square is where the building was, even the light post that shows in my 1977 photo can be seen below the red box
Having received it today, first thing I noticed was my red magic marker identification on it’s side still intact and readable after all these years! Here’s a photo of the side showing where I jotted down the basic information I also put in a log book for every piece, it shows “6″ at the top, so this was the 6th keystone I removed from this building, and then “308 W 145″ and then a little harder to read but typically I noted the floor the pieces came from and then the window location, so assuming I kept to that order 100%, the slightly worn off markings appear to show “2nd FL” “2-L”
The photo has been enhanced to make the writing darker.
My “308″ also looks like 306, hard to tell because it’s uneven writing on the rough stone and now I don’t remember how I addressed the two buildings since they have one entrance, but being 2 lots they were either 308 and 306 or 308 and 310, but there must have been a sign with the 308 number which is what I wrote down in my daily log.
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Randall on October 31st 2006 in Architectural models
