In the decade from about 1991 until 2001, one of my responsibilities was to maintain a recommended contractor list for a not-for-profit preservation organization and an architectural firm. To do this I looked at a lot of good and bad work, climbed ladders and scaffolds, and had beer with both humble and hubristic contractors and characters. It was apparent to me - way back then - that the preservation trades had an acute shortage of good journeymen and that the highly skilled, conscientious craftspeople are rare indeed.

The three most prevalent requests for contractors were for roofers, carpenters, and masons. Finding a roofer who could flash, a carpenter to match old details, or a mason who understood old mortar was nearly impossible and those that did were endlessly booked -- especially the masons, and their work was often limited by seasonal restrictions.

The masons I met fell into ethnic categories: second-generation Italians and first-generation Irish, supplemented later by immigrants from Bosnia and other parts of Eastern Europe. We were always looking for masons willing to use a soft lime mortar, match an old stucco texture, or trowel a smooth, three-coat plaster wall. The same Irish names passed my desk day after day -- Naughton, Daley, Keene, Gavin, Fee, Needham, and Fallon. Many of them had served long arduous masonry apprenticeships in Ireland, and they explained to me that as young men they were treated more like animals than humans, working long hours, six days a week, for low pay. And that’s why they had moved here to their tight-knit, insular community.

It didn’t take me long to figure out how it worked. Let’s say you ask for proposals from contractors Bill, Sam, and Jim. The numbers are usually similar, so you base your choice on personal qualities and availability – Bill gets the job. And on the first day of work, Sam and Jim accompany Bill as his workmen. Or you could choose Sam, and Bill and Jim are the workmen. Or hire Jim, and Bill and Sam are there, too, trowels in hand. Hum . . . was this collusion? You decide. I eventually learned that they all socialized over beer at Carroll’s Irish Bar on Friday afternoons, where I’m sure they laughed and regaled each other with stories about overcharging naive Americans for single day’s or week’s work. They knew they had a monopoly.

Most had a specialty. Patrick Fee, a scrawny, bewiskered, chain-smoking force of mortar was known far and wide as the best stucco man in town. He had taken the place of the former number-one stucco man, who had quit after buying a restaurant in nearby Churchville, NY. My old friend, masonry contractor Charlie Vella, once told me, “Pat’s a genius with stucco but he’s sloppy. When he subcontracts for me, I add 10% to clean up after him.” Pat worked until an advanced age; and then I think he simply disappeared.

These men disliked oversight from an architect or from an outsider like me. One surly character troweling a pure lime stucco told a friend of mine never to climb his scaffold again without the proper boots. Another told me, in his thickest brogue, that if I was going to criticize his work maybe I should do it myself and, “If you want it exact, find the man who originally did this, cut off his arms, and put them on mine.”

The late Pat Gavin was my go-to guy for traditional plaster and stucco. I've never known anyone who could so easily copy the rough texture of "harled" stucco or so quickly cover a wall in a glass-smooth putty coat. I climbed his scaffolds for twenty years, and he always greeted me cheerfully, willing to show me his techniques. Once I broke up a heated argument between him and a cranky customer as they stood on the roof of a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece arguing over the stucco chimney and the flashing details. It didn’t go well for either of them, and I had to beg Pat to finish the job. Another time I discovered a box of bloody bandages at the base of his ladder. He had fallen, grabbed a flimsy aluminum gutter, and cut all ten fingers, badly. But that was no reason to quit; I found him on the roof pointing the chimney with a bloody trowel. Every Christmas Pat brought me a bottle of Scotch whiskey and offered, "This is a single malt and I think you're gonna like it." I wish I’d told him I was a bourbon drinker.

Most of these men are gone now. A few of them trained their sons or apprentices, but all these years later there are fewer and fewer with the skills to do it the “old country” way. To all those Irish gentle and not so gentle masons, “May the road rise up to meet you . . . until we meet again.”

04/30/2020 ©Steve Jordan 2020