Writing in The New Yorker, Burkhard Bilger recently profiled carpenter-extraordinaire Mark Ellison. In “The Art of Building the Impossible,” Bilger makes an admirable attempt at documenting the life of a renovator of high-end New York City homes who has clearly earned his chops working in one of the world’s most demanding cities. The article is especially worth reading for anyone who regularly works for an ultra-upper-echelon clientele. Only someone with Ellison’s penchant for the idiosyncratic, and a love of the work – in wood, in stone, and in metals and finishes of all kinds – would want this job. That penchant and love come through in Bilger’s prose, which strains to bring us inside Ellison’s world, but falls short.
The article does capture the eccentricities of working in New York City, and the unique skills required of carpenters working on high-priced homes there. One of my favorite passages, however generalized it is, rings true:
There’s no doctoral degree in high-end construction. No Cordon Bleu for carpenters. It’s the closest thing in America to a medieval guild, with a long and haphazard apprenticeship. It takes fifteen years to become a good carpenter, Ellison estimates, and another fifteen to do the style of project he does. “Most people just aren’t up for it. It’s too weird and hard,” he says. Even demolition can be a refined skill in New York. In most cities, a crew can just whale away with crowbars and sledgehammers and toss the debris into dumpsters. But in buildings filled with wealthy, finicky owners, the crews have to work with surgical stealth. Any dirt or noise could prompt a call to City Hall, and a single busted water pipe could ruin a Degas. So the walls have to be carefully dismantled, the pieces packed into rolling containers or fifty-five-gallon drums, sprayed down to settle the dust, and sealed in plastic. Just gutting an apartment can cost a third of a million dollars.
As fascinating a read as Bilger’s article is, it’s also a painful read. The seasoned carpenter will wince at least once every other paragraph as the author strains to impress with one superlative after another. The first of these is one of the hardest to get past: “Ellison is a carpenter—the best carpenter in New York, by some accounts …” Superlatives don’t often work in the building trades. There is no one best carpenter in New York City or elsewhere. Even at the high end, the City offers a much bigger and more diverse market than one carpenter could manage, and Ellison, as sublime as his projects are, does not have a lock on all the projects for billionaires in NYC. I know at least three others – Peter Strasser, Mark Luzio, and Jed Dixon – who could commiserate with Ellison, and have comparable experience and reputation. And they could each name at least three others. This city supports masterful craftsmanship in spades. And New York City is not the center of the billionaire universe.
Granted, Bilger is writing almost exclusively for a New York City readership, so it’s natural for him to lean hard into his myopia. But as dense with challenging work as the City is, alas, it is not “the hardest place to do construction in the world.” Saying so shows a profound lack of experience of, say, a high-end renovation in Venice, or the Seychelles, or the Malibu coast, or downtown Boston – to name only a few places where the combined force of renovation logistics and client expectations can verge on the absurd.
Nor is construction the industry with the most annual fatalities, as Bilger asserts. Truck drivers have the lock on that honor, followed by loggers, commercial fishers, and flight engineers. Yes, mental stress is a sure killer, too; physical duress is not the only danger.
Along with misused superlatives, there are also snarky undertones that bleed through. Comparing Ellison’s business partner to a dog (“a whippet among pitbulls”), or Ellison himself to a dwarf king (“the clever Nibelung, fabricator of treasures”), succeeds not in bringing us as readers closer to the subject, but proves how separate the author is from his subject. The author aligns himself with his readers more than with his subject and so the piece is only ever looking in at the strange and elusive world of high-end renovating. However much the author provides us with intimate details of Ellison’s life, and however much the author seems to crave a close rapport with him – close enough to be invited to his home and learn about the winding path that brought Ellison to his present station – we are never really brought inside Ellison’s world.
We get a few peeks of what he loves:
What Ellison loves most about carpentry, he’d told me, is how it gives rein to the body’s physical intelligence. As a kid watching the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium, he used to marvel at how Roberto Clemente knew just where a fly ball would go. He seemed to calculate its exact arc and acceleration the second it left the bat. It wasn’t so much muscle memory as embodied analysis. “Your body just knows how to do it,” he said. “It understands weight and leverage and space in a way that your brain would take forever to figure out.”
But we get a lot more sordid detail on how Ellison stands apart from his clients, with this as a pinnacle observation while Ellison was finishing up an interior in a rare English oak:
Late one night, Ellison was standing on a scaffold installing some crown molding when the owner walked in wearing a bathrobe and smoking a cigar. He stopped in front of one of the pilasters, which had been French-polished to a dusky glow, and shook his head. “God, that’s gorgeous!” he said. “Remind me what’s so special about that wood?” When Ellison told him, the owner just smiled and walked away. “It was as if he’d shot the last white tiger,” Ellison said.
Unlike John McPhee, the storied New Yorker contributor whose work offers a gold-standard of profile writing for the magazine, and who always helped us see a little of how his subject thinks about the work itself – the doing – Bilger only gives glimpses of what Ellison does. We are told he works out elaborate geometries of near-impossible staircases with little sense of what that might entail. Or we are given the suggestion of theatrical maneuvers with a table saw without understanding their purpose except in the most general sense to cut a curve. Reading this piece was a flirtation with what McPhee might have revealed – close, but agonizingly far off.
Don’t take my cantankerous word for it, though. However flawed, it’s still a good read, and especially so for anyone – new or experienced – in the building trades.
