<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/garden/22earl.html>

Fine Old Plasterwork and Water Don't Mix 

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: September 22, 2005

CYPRESS, Tex. - Water is the enemy of plaster. Earl A. Barthé, the 83-year-old master plasterer of New Orleans, knows this deep in his heart. And so he waits.

For more than 150 years the Barthé family - like generations of other highly skilled plasterers, lathers, blacksmiths, masons, carpenters and contractors - has tended to its city's architectural soul. In an age of drywall, New Orleans is largely handmade, a city where louvered cypress shutters and filigree iron galleries greet the morning.

....

On Thursday Mr. Barthé, who has been called the Jelly Roll Morton of plaster, will put on a borrowed suit and a broad-brim hat sent by a family member familiar with his J. R. Ewing style to accept a now-bittersweet award from the National Endowment for the Arts: a National Heritage Fellowship, which carries a no-strings grant of $20,000. 

One of the few building artisans ever to be so honored, Mr. Barthé, who has been encamped since Hurricane Katrina with seven family members in a rented ranch house in Cypress, about 25 miles outside Houston, will join past winners like B. B. King and Doc Watson. 

In his pocket he will carry the plaster-specked leaf tool for mitering elaborate stepped corners of cornices that he inherited from his father, Clement J. Barthé. The tool, discovered on the floor of his pickup truck after he and his family drove to Cypress, is his lone working remnant of the trade: he caught a glimpse of his workshop near the old St. Bernard Market, its historic arches barely visible above the fetid water, on CNN. 

While the world has long celebrated the musicians and chefs of New Orleans, the cultural roots of the city lie, too, in the unsung generational know-how and anonymous public work of skilled artisans like "Mr. B," as he is known....

_______________________________________________________
Dan Becker,  Exec. Dir.      "The thing that destroyed 
Raleigh Historic               Babylon and Nineveh was 
Districts Commission        too much Waldorf Astoria."
[log in to unmask]                    -- Elbert Hubbard,
919/516-2632                 The Philistine, Feb. 1909




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