End of an era... last Tool Dealer to leave Canal St.....

Joe Last year I was in that part of the city and stopped at Katz's for lunch....... while they still do make a pretty good sandwich you could tell it had changed from what it was...... I think any place that has that many pictures of Presidents and movie stars on the wall just can't stay the same forever........ all that said if anyone hasn't been there yet, do stop by to get a glimpse of the past.......

As a side note..... the equivalent to radio row in Tokyo is a district named Akihabara....... after WWII it is where the US sorted and sold off all the left over electronic stuff...... the Japanese bought this junk, took it apart and used the components to start making consumer electronics..... and so started a whole industry.

As a kid growing up in the New Jersey sururbs in the 1950's, my friends and I went to "Radio Row" fairly frequently, although I didn't but too much. I also went to Canal Street, the surplus area, not the machine tool district. By the 1960's, there were as many junk shops as real surplus houses. My most memorable purchase was a surplus parachute harness that I used as a safety harness working on several radio towers.

Things change. My late father was an executive with a textile manufacturer. Up till the 1960's, all the textile manufacturers had offices in lower Manhatten, around Worth Street. For some reason, all of them left lower Manhatten for mid town in the 1960s.

I can remember the big fight over the location of World Trade Center, and the comments that it would wipe out Radio Row.

Things change in other cities as well. There is (or was) a well known electronic surplus shop in Cambridge, MA, Eli Heffron and Sons. They used to have lots of equipment besides run of the mill electronics: A friend of mine bought his 16" South Bend there, and I bought a lot of test gear, and scored an Ampex 351 professinal recorder there. Last time I was there, which was a few years ago, they were more of a surplus computer store than electronics shop. Times change. The reel to reel recorder I bought is obsolete, and electronics has gone almost all digital. Eli's has sifted emphasis with the change in the market.

Thermo1

Thermo1

Joes description of the give & take 1950's approach to interaction brought back memories of my first experience of that type. I grew up in Maryland hard beside the rails of what was then still a mainline RR in the early 60's. Periodically, track maintenance or re-railing would bring crews slowly along the line to where us kids could watch them for a couple days or so before the work moved them out of sight in the other direction. Usually they didn't say too much but one crew working on the crossing could not shoe us away as we were standing on our own property within inches of the near edge where they were working. Nothing startled me more than to hear them speak. I decided it had to be french or chinese, definitely a foreign language, as I had heard of foreigners, though these guys looked "normal" enough. It became clear they were gruff, but friendly and were looking for some sort of reponse. But how do you communicate with someone with a different language? I told my mom my surmisal, and she laughed and said "oh, honey, I think they are just from New York". We went back and listened, and sure enough, it was sort of like english. But like if we were used to hearing english at 33-1/3 rpm, and they spoke it at 78rpm! It was a barrage, and even after growing up and working in NYC I never heard anyone since speak so fast or with such friendly "attitude". We tried to get them to speak just to experience the sheer impossible stream of words compressed into such a short duration. In retrospect, they were probably getting a kick out of trying to get us to talk, to hear us, too. It helped me understand what the terms "New York minute" and "talking faster than a New York (telephone) operator" meant.

back to Lafeyette, Center, and etc, below Canal St: The metamorphosis continues. I believe if you travel a couple dozen blocks north on the west side into the garment district, other interesting things have taken place in recent years. This is where a small start up company built the robotics for the Mars explorers "spirit" & "opportunity", taking engineering and metal work on to other planets. These MER's are controlled from Cornell. Some of the protective covers in the "hands" of the MER's are machined out of "junk" from Cortland St....pieces of metal from the Twin Trade Towers.

http://athena.cornell.edu/

smt

To continue this thread: This past weekend, my family & I went down to Lower Manhattan to attend our niece's wedding. We stayed in a Sheraton Hotel sandwiched into Canal Street. The wedding venue was in a former industrial building, by the Holland Tunnel entry. The experience was something special, in that it was the first trip we'd made into NYC for some purpose other than going to Memorial-Sloan-Kettering Hospital for my cancer treatment and follow-up scans. It was also quite interesting in that we stayed smack in the heart of what had been the Canal Street surplus store district and near to the used machine tool district. We drove around a bit to get to the parking garage on Canal Street (a bunch of one-way streets meant a tour of the area). We walked a good bit in the area as well, since we had slack time and the wedding event venues were all within 15-20 minutes' walking from our hotel.

To say the area had changed would be a bland understatement. There is one holdover from the "old Canal Street", and that is a plastics dealer. Otherwise, there is not a vestige of any of the old surplus dealers and machinery dealers. Canal Street was full of hipsters, some good girl watching and the sidewalks were a third-world marketplace or bazaar. Mostly African immigrants, some in their home country style of clothing, were taking up the sidewalks with their wares. Knockoffs of designer label stuff and endless numbers of knockoffs of Rolex watches. One enterprising guy had setup an old carton and was running the old 'shell game' on it, trying to con passersby into taking him up on 'finding the pea' under one of the three shells. Another guy, another upended carton, and he was rolling dice and trying to hustle people into some kind of con job. Vendors hawking knockoffs competed not just for space, but in spieling to describe their wares and lure customers. It reminded me of the marketplaces in Ghana, West Africa, when I was on a job there in 1980.

My son & I shared a room on the 20th floor of the hotel, and we had a view looking up Canal Street towards Chinatown & the Manhattan Bridge. The skyline has changed dramatically, with all sorts of modern high rise buildings, some with weird angles and curves and lots of glass. In between, the old buildings with cast iron storefronts and architectural elements are interspersed, as are older buildings with copper work and slating on the roofs and terra cotta architectural details. All of these buildings are now loft housing or given over to 'venues' for events, or trendy businesses. Buildings that held surplus stores at street level and warehouse space on the upper stories all had new windows and from our viewpoint, appeared to be loft housing. Roof tops were repurposed and many had large planters with trees and shrubs growing. The constant was the wood-stave water tanks on the roof tops. In old photos of those same buildings, plumes of steam from the steam elevator hoisting engines would have been visible rather than wood-slat windbreaks, LED light strings, and trees and shrubs.

The wedding venue was on the upper most stores of a building that apparently had been a warehouse or factory, given its construction. No effort was made to hide sprinkler system piping or waste piping from the story above the event space. Reinforced concrete construction with brick curtain walls, stripped to the bare brick on the curtain walls. There was a live band which played traditional old country music during the wedding ceremony, and then switched to contemporary fast and loud music for dancing and general carryings-on. The reinforced concrete slab floor and ceiling and masonry walls made for a really LOUD environment. I tried taking out my hearing aids and it was still too loud.

The wedding venue was in a building that may well have been a wholesale dealer/warehouse for HVAC supplies. A contractor doing work in our house out in Brooklyn had been ordering HVAC supplies from a firm down by the Holland Tunnel entry. They had a whole building back then. I know about 1958, my father and I went down that way to W.W. Grainger to pick up an attic exhaust fan for our house. Any hint that Grainger had a major location there is gone, as is any other of the type of businesses that had been active at that end of Canal Street.

I found myself on quite a mental journey this past weekend. I remembered walking those streets as a small boy with my father, who would take me to browse the surplus stores on Canal Street. I remembered walking those same streets as a teenaged student at Brooklyn Technical HS, browsing the used machine tool dealers before hitting the surplus stores. In those days, owning a 9" or 10" Southbend lathe with the luxury of quick change gears was a dream. I could not afford a used lathe of that type, and never dreamed of the machine tools I would one day have in my own shop. In those days, I knew I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but did not know what actual work I'd be going into. A lot of dreams, a lot of unknowns, and the streets seemed hard and gritty back then when the wind blew between the buildings. I'd take the subway out to my parents' home in Brooklyn at about 5 PM when the surplus stores and machinery dealers closed up. Returning to the old haunts this past weekend was quite an experience given the events in my life. There are three lathes in my home machine shop, along with milling machines, grinders, and more. There are still pieces of tooling I bought during those days when I tramped around Canal Street and the used machine tool district as a teenage, stuff I will still occasionally use. Some years back, several of us chipped in to buy the contents of a deceased toolmaker's shop.Aside from a well-tooled Bridgeport and lots more, I got a Southbend Light 10" lathe. I did not need nor want that little 10" lathe. Neither did any of the other guys. SInce I had shop space for it, it went to me by default. It is a Southbend '10K' (I think), on cast iron legs, rear mounted countershaft assembly. Fully tooled, quick change gears, most of the factory scraping still quite visible. I told my wife that while the little 10K lathe is really just extra machinery in our shop, it is pretty much THE lathe I dreamed of as a kid tramping those streets in NYC with maybe 3 bucks and a subway token in my pocket and plenty of dreams. A few weeks back, I got the mineral spirits and shop wipes and cleaned that little 10" lathe and put it back to work after it had sat for 10 years un-used and covered. It was not wanting to take a job out of the SOuthbend Heavy 10" lathe as any other reason. As I cleaned that little lathe, the years fell away to the times when I'd browse the used machinery dealers' shops on Centre, Lafayette, and the surrounding streets as a teenage. It is hard to believe it is nearly 60 years since those times. The gray enamel all cleaned up and the crisp scraping on the little 10" lathe had taken me back in time. This weekend's trip did not have me waxing nostalgic for what that area of NYC had once held. It is long gone and the throngs of people in the streets are so totally removed from anything related to it. Hipsters, tourists and recent immigrants trying to hustle a living. I realizing where I am in my own life, and truth be known, felt quite good and quite strong, returning as I did.

At one juncture, my family wanted to catch lunch at Wo Hop, down the basement on Mott Street in Chinatown. From the time I was an engineering student, eating at Wo Hop, down the basement, was something we did. The locals ate at Wo Hop, and it was open 24/7. Policemen, firemen, and anyone else wanting a cheap Chinese meal went to Wo Hop. It was down a narrow stair in a basement, and mostly local Chinese people seemed to eat there. Tourists would see a dingy basement entry and go for the restaurants with the fishtanks (and large goldfish or carp swimming in them) and plants with red ribbons having gold Chinese calligraphy in their windows. I had taken my family to Wo Hop many times. This time, we were chagrined to find a line going up the block waiting to go into Wo Hop. Locals who saw us about to get on line said Wo Hop was bad news, had changed for the worse. We walked around Chinatown for a bit, found a Chinese fast food type place where mostly Asian people were eating with chopsticks and had a great meal, nice and quick, no line, for a reasonable price. When a place like Wo Hop, with the same dingy basement entry, has a line of tourists going up the block, and when all of Canal Street and the used machine tool district is trendy and populated with millenials and hipsters, the best thing is to be glad I am where I am at in my own life.