>
> A bunch of PTN stuff going on... I'd like to see more TRADE related
discussion
> here.
>
> What is this crap about "all the way down to the trades"? I would think
that
> the preservation industry would be visualized as a flat file, not an
up/down
> thing. Talking about *headless hands* --

As a now official PTN trade representative, I request that you please leave
us on the bottom where we belong. It is a badge of honour. We are artisans,
about as close as you can get to being lumpen proletariat these days, and
therefore have special rights to start revolutions, commit acts of
unregenerate Luddism, and aim spitballs at all above us in the food chain.

Did I ever tell you all the story of my grandpa who began life in this
country 90 odd years ago as a house painter and one of the founders of the
painter's union? When he started a family he began to moonlight as a
freelancer, which eventually led to his becoming one of the biggest
painting contractors in NYC. They, of course, chucked him out of the union,
which so disconcerted him that he turned around and founded the NY
Association of Painting Contractors, which he forever after referred to as
"the boss painters union". The two groups, both with membership drawn
almost entirely from inter-related families, immigrants from a cluster of
towns in the Pale of Settlement, had halls in second story premises
opposite each other on Pitkin Ave. in Brownsville (Bklyn, not Texas). Every
day after work the groups would assemble at the floor-to-ceiling windows of
their respective halls and hurl insults at each other across the avenue
while consuming huge quantities of schnapps. Most evenings ended with the
whole lot of them dead drunk in each other's arms in a Turkish bath.

This is the same grandpa who made me swear to him on his deathbed that I
would never work with my hands! That was two weeks before I took off for
Maine and my life's dream of having a woodworking business. I console
myself, and placate his ghost by believing that I at least remain true to
his younger instincts.
'
And, it just dawned on me that my grandpa was probably responsible for a
fair percentage of the lead paint that is now being abated in NYC. And he
lived well into his 80s.

I've been reading a book about right-
> brain disorders. Contemplate the modern emphasis on abstraction as a
defining
> quality of a higher human form. I think that the increasing interest in
> Emotional Intelligence is a good place to key in the sensory knowledge of
hand
> work. I firmly believe that historic preservation starts and ends in the
> hands. Bite that!

Agree, sortof. The Alna oldhouse Mafia is comprised of three factions:
There are the experts, who's knowledge is almost entirely learned from
books and relating observation to what they have read: there are the
hands-on guys, who never fail to get a building to remain standing upright;
and those of us in the middle. The experts are dogmatic, never doubt for a
moment that their conclusions are the right ones. The hands-on types too
often get their results by pragmatic decisions that short out fealty to the
fabric of the structure. Those of us in the middle, who combine both
approaches, I think do best by the buildings we attempt to understand and
preserve. And I say that having , at one time or another in my evolution,
been a member of all three camps.

So hands is good, but some abstraction helps too.

Bruce