Woodside Press

Open House NYC is an annual event where buildings and sites in the city that are usually not accessible to the public are opened up to visitors. Last year, it coincided with the end of my time as a Visiting Artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although I'd had access to the Yard for months, I hadn't actually been inside many of the businesses. So I spent much of that day drawing inside Kings County Distillery and Brooklyn Roasting Company. At the very end of the day, I was wandering through Building 2, visiting various shops and studios, when I came across a room full of old printing presses. It was Woodside Press. All the old machines looked so cool, but it was the very end of the day and there was no more time to draw anything, and I wasn't able to make it back before the residency ended. So when Open House rolled around this year, I made a return trip to the Yard and made it a point of dropping by to sketch. It is a traditional letterpress printing studio that produces business cards, posters, stationary, etc., and does book-binding. They sometimes host tours and workshops.

These are just two of the presses they own. They are Chandler & Price platen letterpresses, dating back to the mid to late 1940's. This post from another printmaker, Tiny Dog Press, has a good step-by-step demonstration of how these presses work.

Chandler & Price founded in 1884 in Cleveland by Harrison T. Chandler, an Illinois banker, and William H. Price, son of a builder of printing presses. The company came to dominate the market through the 1960's, when offset duplicating led to the decline to the letterpress. The company went out of business in 1964, but its machines are still in use by printmakers today.

Below are two process pictures for the above drawing. First, down in 2H pencil. This was done very fast, and rougher and looser than I usually do, because of time. Then, finished in ink, mostly with Micron pens. I relied heavily on photo reference I'd taken for some of the machine details. Then applied the color with watercolor and Derwent Inktense pencils.

History of Chandler & Price: C & P - Pressman's Favorite

The last batch of Navy Yard drawings

Here's the last batch of drawings I did during my time with the Visiting Artist Program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I spent nine months, from April through December, of 2018 at the Yard, drawing every corner I could get to. There were four other terrific people in the group: Filmmaker Mark Street, artists Niki Lederer and Amy Lemaire, and poet Gerald Wagoner. Over these nine months, I produced 96 finished drawings. I have done series of studies of a place or theme, but this was, by far, the longest sustained project I've done. It's taken me almost another year to get everything scanned and posted. I tried to batch them by location or theme or subject, but this last bunch is just in the category "Miscellaneous."

At the start, I did not have a specific agenda; my plan was to just draw everything. As time went on, I found myself focusing most on the smaller remnants of the Yard's past - unused structures, discarded equipment, old street furniture, rusted machinery, century-old canons, and the like. These objects were almost like characters, silent observers of the bustling activity around them. I also thought of this phrase "industrial palimpsest" to describe my focus. "Palimpsest" refers to manuscripts, scrolls, or paper which has been reused; the original writing having been erased, but traces of which are still visible beneath the new text. This is the fascinating thing about a place like the Brooklyn Navy Yard; it is full of active businesses, many of whom are quite high-tech and modern, but everywhere you look are remnants of an industrial past, from the 1940's and sometimes even much further back, pushing through the modern veneer.

First Ave. doesn't exist anymore. It's shown on a 1904 map, but by the 1943 map it is gone, a large building which I think is now the NYPD Tow Pound in its space. I guess they just never got around to taking down this sign. In the background is the Sand Street Gatehouse.

Building 20, originally the Machine Shop and Auto Repair shop.

A security booth. I don't remember why this caught my eye at the time. Sometimes something strikes me visually, and later I can't see what that was. One interesting note is that I visited the Navy Yard again a few weeks ago, and that green fence and concrete barrier are gone. It's now open to the entrance to the gigantic WeWork building on Dock 72.

Giant satellite dish for Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network, outside Building 292. HITN is the largest Spanish-language network in the United States.

FDR

Monument of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. I did this piece as an entry for a contest. It wasn't selected as a finalist, but here it is anyway.

The original bust was sculpted by Jo Davidson after his first election in 1933. In 2012 it was scaled up from 18" to 6' and poured in bronze by Polich Tallix foundry for installation in the park.

Opposite the bust is a plaque quoting FDR's Four Freedoms speech:

In future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . Everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . .  Anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. 

FDR Jan 6 1941

I've been reading Jill Lepore's  history of the United States, These Truths, and just read the section on FDR's era. I was surprised at how many things - universal health care, civil rights, wealth inequality - things current in today's political debates, things deemed by many as recently-thought up pipe dreams, have in fact been on the agenda for decades, for over a century. I hope the tide turns in 2020, and all these things are no longer the vision of a distant millennium.