The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  I had to lean on it to catch my breath, and as I did so, a detail in the factory’s unusual beige stone wall caught my eye: a large carved starburst, or a sunburst maybe, repeated in pairs at regular intervals, each time beneath an empty, window-size rectangle, all the way across the wall and all the way up to the roof. At the corner, the beige stone surface curved gently inward before continuing, more or less flat again, on the adjoining wall, the sunburst and empty-rectangle pattern repeating itself clear across that expanse as well until it disappeared behind a tall scaffold at the far corner. Now that the room was brightening, light leaking in at the edges of the roof, I started to make out other details in the walls, too: skinny, ridged columns flanking the open rectangles—and wasn’t that a small face there on the horizontal strip just above that column? Yes, sure it was: a woman’s face surrounded by a writhing tangle of hair, the image repeated again and again atop the columns.

  Looking at this stone wall, just the act of trying to see what I was seeing, was so disorienting I almost felt dizzy. I gripped the railing with both hands now, gripped and stared and then finally understood what so confused me about this place: This was no interior wall I was looking at. This was an exterior wall, and it wasn’t stone at all; it was cast iron. This was the lost Bogardus Building, the 150-ton city landmark we’d stolen from TriBeCa and delivered for its destruction to the Bronx scrap yard. This was New York’s oldest cast-iron building, a one-of-a-kind architectural treasure floated here in pieces and reassembled inside-out, bolted together panel by panel within this island factory’s steel walls. The outside walls of the Bogardus Building were now lining the inside walls of the factory, facing in.

  For a moment, and only a moment, I think I grasped what all the fuss over the Bogardus was about. Its age and hard travels aside, there was something about the building’s grand symmetry I liked, something about its magician’s trick of convincing the eye it was seeing stone. It was a clever building, an exultation of fragments that played on the human penchant for self-deception, our will to see a soaring, unified whole where there is none.

  But here in this factory, if you kept looking, what you mostly saw in that inside-out landmark was confinement. Here were tall columned windows opening onto closure. Vistas of corrugated steel. Here was a whole city, a whole world, looking inward.

  A voice boomed down from somewhere high up on the scaffold in the corner, startling me: “So it’s you, is it?” Four stories up, a man stepped forward on the scaffold planking. “Thought it might be that bastard Zev, come back to steal from me. Hold on a sec.”

  A lantern flamed on, bigger than the others, dangling from a scaffold pipe near the roof. Dad leaned forward into its light. He looked a bit like a salvaged city artifact himself, ragged and dusty. He had grown shockingly thin.

  “What good luck,” he called down. “Just the fellow I need. You came all the way out here alone, with this ugly storm brewing?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Pretty peculiar thing to do, I’d say, but as long as you’re here, I could use your help before things get too leaky up here. Come on up, will you?”

  The scaffold was pretty flimsy, a lattice of thin silver pipes. Its built-in steps carried me in long zigzags up the textured surface of the Bogardus, swaying, the higher I climbed, in a way that made me hugely uncomfortable. But the shakiness of the scaffold was nothing compared with the noise. The closer I got to the factory’s ceiling, the louder became the machine-gun patter of rain on roof, until I couldn’t even hear my own breathing anymore.

  “Not bad, eh?” Dad said as I pulled myself up beside him on the top level of planking. “I told you my Washington Market studio was remarkable.” He gestured grandly at the sweep of repeated ornamentation on the Bogardus’s iron façade. Its scale and rigorous beauty were impressive from this height. “This is your birthright, if you really think about it. You were made inside these walls.”

  I stared at him dumbly.

  “And I don’t mind telling you, son,” he went on, “I’m pretty proud of this restoration job.” He tapped a window column with some kind of cylindrical metal tool. “With all the work I put into this, you can bet the old place looks a hell of a lot better than it had for maybe the last eighty years back on Washington Street. After all this time, it finally has an owner who values it enough to take care of it.”

  I was really confused. “But I thought the Bogardus panels we brought to the scrap yard were found by the police all smashed to pieces,” I said. “That’s what it said in the paper, and I saw the men cutting them up myself.”

  Dad chuckled. “Yeah, we did cut up a handful of panels at the yard for the city to find, that’s true. I hated to do it, but it was the only way I could figure to make them think most of the pieces had been destroyed during the couple weeks we’d been carting them out of the lot down on West Street. Best way to get someone not to look for something is to convince them it doesn’t exist anymore.”

  My mind felt numb. I found myself staring down at the ten or twelve remaining cast-iron pieces piled up on the scaffold planking all around our feet. They were a jumble of different shapes, the last uninstalled sections of what must have been just about the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world.

  “What about the last third of the Bogardus they did recover?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the staccato drumming of rain. “All those panels we left in the lot downtown. And the ones Curtis helped the city get back from the scrap yard. You went and stole all of those, too, after they’d been moved again?”

  “Stole is such a harsh word, don’t you think?”

  “You, um, liberated those panels, then?”

  “That we did. It was an open secret that after Landmarks scooped them up from West Street, they stored them in an old Housing and Development warehouse over on West Fifty-Second. Pretty much all we had to do was grease a palm or two and go pick them up.”

  I scanned the great expanse of the reconstructed Bogardus, both the near wall and the adjoining one. Other than a small, incomplete section right where we were standing on the scaffold, the four-story cast-iron façade was fully intact, floor to roof.

  “But I don’t get it. If you guys destroyed some panels in the scrap yard, why aren’t there gaps in this Bogardus façade where those missing pieces should be?”

  Dad was enjoying this. “Because I replaced them with new castings,” he said. “Why do you think I needed you to keep such careful track of the stenciled numbers on the pieces we took? I had to make sure at least one of each of the Bogardus’s component parts made it into the barges we floated here. That was crucial, ’cause the window bays are different heights on different stories—it’s not one-size-fits-all. But as long as you have one of each kind, it’s relatively simple to cast replacement pieces off the originals.”

  “So all that stuff you—”

  “Shit!” Dad cried, looking up. In the corner, not far above where we were standing, the wind was working loose a section of the ripply metal roof, worrying it up and down with a terrific clatter. Each time the panel lifted, it revealed a swatch of roiling gray sky.

  I tried again. “All that stuff you told me about the stencils, how the numbers had to do with foundries’ production records and the weight of the panels and—”

  “Made it all up, I’m afraid.”

  “Then how did—”

  “Please, Griffin. Enough with the questions already.” He gripped my shoulders in his big palms and turned me to face him. “Here, let me look at you.” I avoided his eyes. The flesh around his neck had grown loose and a little wrinkly. The hair sprouting from the open V at the top of his corduroy shirt was going gray. “You’ve gotten a lot taller, kiddo. What’s your mother feeding you these days, anyway, Miracle-Gro?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t like when he talked about my mother.

  “Let me see your hand.” I lifted my left one and he held it in front of him, palm up, squinting as if he were trying to divine my fortune. “Yeah, th
at oughta do the trick.”

  He took the cylindrical tool from his belt and put it in my palm. It was only eight or so inches long, but it was extremely heavy. It had a big wide flat-head bit on it.

  “That’s an impact driver,” Dad said. Despite its industrial heft, he explained, it was basically just a big old screwdriver with a rotating inner core. You hit the bottom of the rugged steel handle with a two-pound sledgehammer and the impact driver’s head rotated to turn a screw bolt with far more torque than you could ever generate using just your hand and wrist.

  “Help me out with this spandrel, will you?” Dad said.

  He squatted beside one of the double-sunburst panels lying flat at our feet and nodded for me to do the same. We worked our fingers under it and tilted it up. Its front side was rough to the touch; it seemed that Dad had put sand in the beige paint to give it the texture of stone. With me following his lead, we gripped the top of the spandrel and shuffled over to the exposed factory wall together. Rain was leaking in at the factory’s seams, up where that wall and the others met the metal roof.

  From the looks of it, all that was left to install to complete the Bogardus’s resurrection were three window bays and the final section of cornice above them. The system for assembling this cast-iron front, as Dad explained it, was ingeniously simple. Each bay had a horizontal iron beam at the bottom, on which stood a pair of columns a window’s space apart. Between the columns, and below the window opening, went a double-sunburst spandrel. Resting atop the two columns was another horizontal beam, which in turn supported the columns and spandrel for the window bay of the floor above. And so on.

  All of these pieces had small, strategically placed holes drilled in them so they could be bolted together like a giant Erector set.

  “Trouble is,” Dad grumbled, “the goddamn steel wall bows inward here on this whole section of the factory, so I can’t fit my hand back there behind the iron to get at the bolt holes on the column flange. I was thinking you might have more luck with your smaller hand.”

  On the count of three, we lifted the spandrel again and Dad guided it into place against the edge of the closest column. He walked carefully around me so we could switch places, then fished a screw bolt out of a pouch on his tool belt. He handed it to me along with a small sledgehammer.

  “Just hand-twist the screw bolt into the hole on the back of the spandrel there, then give the impact driver a few hits,” he said. “The bolt should screw itself right into the column.”

  But it didn’t. Something kept blocking the bolt from going all the way through the hole from the spandrel to the column.

  “What’s the problem?” Dad asked, irritated.

  “It won’t go.” I removed the sharp-edged screw bolt. “I don’t think the holes are lined up right.”

  “Jesus Christ!”—he hurried over to see what stupid thing I was doing—“Are you sure?”

  I closed my hand into a fist around the screw bolt.

  He peered over my shoulder at the hole to make certain I wasn’t being an idiot, then had a thought. He had me help him tip the spandrel back down flat on the planking again. He hurried over to a satchel on the other end of the scaffold and took out a sheaf of papers. “What’s the number stenciled on the back of that spandrel again?”

  I told him it was 327.

  “Shit. Three twenty-five is the one we want.” He put the papers and the satchel down and came over to inspect the other two spandrels on the planking. I went over to take a look at the papers, my left hand still balled tightly into a fist.

  The sheet on top was a line drawing of the Bogardus Building, labeled NORTHEAST ELEVATION. Each of the building’s dozens of columns, spandrels, and beams had a line running to the edge of the drawing, where it was identified by a number. I flipped to the next page, marked ISOMETRIC OF FOURTH FLOOR DETAILS. It was one of those exploded diagrams showing a close-up of all the components of the very window bay we were working on, and how they fit together.

  I was flabbergasted. “But I thought you told me none of Bogardus’s construction drawings of whole buildings survive!” I could feel every muscle in my arms and fists tense up.

  “These weren’t made by Bogardus. These are measured drawings done by a bunch of grad students when the building was dismantled four years ago. Landmarks got the city to kick in preservation money to have architectural historians document every inch of it as it came down. How else would they have known how to reconstruct it at the new college?”

  I flipped quickly through the drawings. At the bottom of one, marked TRANSVERSE SECTION A-A, were a lot of small handwritten words: DRAWN BY JAMES DALY TOBIN, 1971. HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY, SHEET 13 OF 17.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You liberated these drawings, too.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then how’d you get your hands on them?”

  Dad looked at me in surprise. “You really don’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “You got them for me.”

  “Me?” I was horrified.

  “Sure. The Laing drawings. That’s what you swiped from the Gardner girl’s party. Her dad ran the historic preservation program at Columbia. He was in charge of the whole documentation project.”

  The Gardner girl. The one who dumped me for stealing those drawings. The one who wouldn’t talk to me anymore.

  I felt a pounding in my temples. In my hand, too, which was suddenly in horrible agony. I unballed my fist and was astonished to discover I had gripped the bolt so tightly that the sharp edges of its head had opened a gash in my palm. It was bleeding like a son of a bitch.

  Dad didn’t notice. “And I really owe you, Griff,” he said. “I couldn’t have done any of this without your help.”

  I closed my hand again to hide my wound. I couldn’t stop thinking of Dani, how I had driven her away by stealing that folder. “Why are they called the Laing drawings, anyway?”

  Dad took the sheaf of diagrams from me and showed me the cover page. THE EDGAR LAING STORES, it said. N.W. CORNER WASHINGTON & MURRAY STREETS, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK COUNTY, NY (1849).

  “Laing was the fellow, a coal merchant, who hired Bogardus to put up this building on the site of his old coal yard,” Dad said. “Bogardus designed it to read as a single façade, but it was really five contiguous storefronts wrapping around the corner. Laing rented them to fruit and flour wholesalers. The one I lived in in the sixties had been used for years before me by a butter-and-cheese guy.”

  Before I could even gather my thoughts, a wrenching, whining sound ripped through the factory. I looked up in time to see the corner roof panel lift right off the building and sail up into the sky and out of sight. Wind roared in at us through the new hole. The camp lantern swung anxiously on its pipe. Its flame darted and shuddered in its glass like a small trapped animal, then quickly died.

  “We’ve gotta get down from here,” Dad said. He brandished the drawings and tried to wave me down the scaffold with them.

  “Never mind,” he said when I stood there frozen. “Follow me!”

  He grabbed a scaffold pipe and swung easily down to the next level, unconcerned by the way the whole thing was swaying. I followed carefully. Once on the ground, he ran around turning the gas off in the other lanterns, a couple of which had blown off their keystones and shattered.

  The green plastic square sealing one of the high windows in the long corrugated-steel wall opposite the Bogardus façade tore away and blew off into the sky, end over end. Wind and light poured in.

  “Come on, son! Hurry up,” Dad called when he saw me standing terrified at the base of the scaffold, clutching one of its horizontal pipes for no good reason. When I still didn’t move, he hurried over and unpeeled my fingers from the bar. My hand in his, he led me across the factory floor, past his plywood sleeping platform with the Carrère and Hastings railings and past the elaborate wrought-iron gate I’d stepped through when I came up from the basement. I now recognized that gate, I felt sur
e, from one of Dad’s old postcards: it was not so much a gate, really, as a pair of tall iron doors, now absent their glass, that had once been set into the grand Fifth Avenue entrance of the Gould-Vanderbilt mansion on Sixty-Seventh Street.

  But Dad had no patience for my sightseeing just now. He yanked me by the wrist to the far side of the factory, pausing just a moment to rummage around in a trunk beneath a makeshift kitchen counter—a marble slab resting across a pair of overturned, richly carved stone corbels. Lined up alongside the counter as stools were the matching stumps of three granite columns. On the counter’s other side, extending at a right angle from its far end to create a defined kitchen space, was a jury-rigged stovetop of intricate open ironwork that I recognized—again from one of Dad’s vintage postcards—as a section of balcony railing at the now-demolished Union League Club on Madison Square (right across the street from the building where I chipped off that carved nose and got my own nose busted). The balcony railing was laid flat now in Dad’s kitchen, with two pots, a frying pan, and a coffeepot resting atop it and Coleman camping stoves positioned beneath the iron filigree to create four burners, as in any ordinary kitchen. For a double sink, a regular wood-panel door had also been laid flat, resting on a couple of sandstone stoop railing supports carved in the shape of dogs. Dad had sawed two holes in the door panels and set a cheap plastic basin into each one. I picked up a dishrag and balled it up in my left hand to stop the bleeding.

  “Hold this, will you?”

  Dad handed me a bunched-up blue tarp over his shoulder. He rummaged around in some big cardboard boxes, cursing.

  My feet were suddenly freezing. I looked down to discover I was standing in three inches of water. And it wasn’t coming from the sink. The floor of the entire factory had become a shallow pool.

  “Jesus!” Dad said. “This is a lot worse than I expected.” He handed me another tarp, this one black, and stood up.

  “Let’s go!” he barked, as if I’d been delaying him.