The Edge Becomes the Center

Just around the corner from the Bowery, Barbara Shaum shuffles over to the stool in the middle of her shop. The whole place is swamped with leather. Everything else in this narrow space—shelves, chairs, cabinets, workbenches—peeks out from behind leather in one form or another: sandals, bags, belts, big sheets of it rolled up and stashed in overhead wooden bins, scraps of it gathered in drawers and corners and jars. Guarding her recently shattered femur, Barbara settles onto the stool. At eighty-four, she is short and slender and fits perfectly in this sliver of East Fourth Street. The empty-handed mailman is at the door.

Jimmy: Don’t worry, I pay attention for the check. I don’t give you bill; I throw it away.

She smiles and watches him go. She watches until he’s out of sight so it’s silent for a while. Then:

His name is—well, Jimmy is his American name, right? And I said, “Stop—that’s not your Chinese name.”

Barbara laughs, which leads to a throat-clearing cough. Her frailty cannot be overstated. She is a collection of bones beneath a magnetic smile and lucid, engaging eyes. With her sharp nose, pale coloring, and short auburn hair, she sits like a wise bird. She sips a large coffee and tosses small pinches of a pumpkin muffin into her mouth. She looks around constantly—searching for thoughts and tools all at once. Though most of the hammers in the shop seem to outweigh her, including those she made herself, she does not hesitate to raise any of them over her head—or to bring them down with authority. Another sip of coffee, another pinch of muffin, and this time it lodges in her throat. Her assistant, Jessica, emerges from behind a sheet of leather hanging in the back and begins patting Barbara on the back. Barbara, still doubled over with the choking, screams despite her disappearing voice:

Jessica thumps her in the back—wincing immediately, fearing what her blow might do to the old woman’s rib cage. But the impact is just right and suddenly Barbara rises, clearing her throat. She takes a sip of coffee, shakes her head, thanks Jessica, and reaches for a different, bigger hammer.

Above one workbench, phone numbers cover a wooden shelf, some written on scraps of paper, others scribbled directly into the wood. For every number Barbara recalls a person and a story:

That’s Sebastian. Sebastian’s gone. He’s a monk. And he used to come down here on Saturdays to make sandals for the monks.

Most of Barbara’s leatherwork is handmade sandals. Wednesday through Sunday, she kneels before customers and grabs hold of their feet. They might get embarrassed; she never does. She works in imperceptible increments. Never mind half or quarter inches; in the field of form-fitting open footwear, a sixteenth is consequential.

A young stylist enters and starts asking about belts. She mentions—with a kind of false casualness—that she is shopping for a fashion shoot with Naomi Campbell, at which point Barbara becomes annoyed and passes her off to Jessica. When the stylist finally leaves, Barbara watches her go, shaking her head:

Naomi Campbell? Am I really supposed to be impressed by someone who took a diamond from Charles Taylor?

Barbara sees my cell phone on her workbench and asks a few questions about “those little machines.” She just bought her first cell phone, reluctantly. The broken femur forced the issue.

I’m old-fashioned and I don’t like the idea that everyone has a cell phone. When a phone rings your tendency is to answer it, right? It’s very difficult not to. I don’t like that. I don’t like people picking up the phone in the middle of a conversation. And I don’t like that people think they can talk to me any time they damn please.

Someone unexpectedly pops in to say hello to Barbara every ten minutes or so. Sometimes it is someone who lives on the block, and sometimes it is someone who’s come from farther afield after many weeks or months or—in the case of one man—years. He tells Barbara he’s happy to see she’s still running the shop.

Barbara shoots back—Me too!—as she salvages the silver buckle from the belt she made for the man some ten years ago, freeing it from the grips of the deteriorating leather.

Soon thereafter the porter for the building comes in and asks Barbara to help him with the leather pouch for his phone. His name is Neptune Baptiste; he is a lanky Jamaican, at least six-four, and he wants a hole cut in the pouch so he can feed the wire for his headphones through the top flap. When he disconnects the headphones to show Barbara the problem, Bob Marley blares from the phone with “Keep on Moving.” Neptune watches Barbara raise a hammer over her head, driving it into the top of an awl that punctures the leather. She does so with remarkable precision—though she does warn Neptune as he leans toward her:

She finishes the job and hands over the altered pouch. Neptune slides the wire through the new hole, gets himself reconnected to Marley, and then leaves with a smile. Barbara blows a kiss.

We trade: I do things like this; he pulls big bolts of leather from the top shelves there and puts them down. He’s very nice.

I’m from a small town. Pennsylvania. West branch of the Susquehanna River. Foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. I’m a neighborhood person. I’m nosey. I don’t know. I like people. I really do, you know? People always ask me for this or that. If I can, I give it to them.

This country is full of levels of society. I grew up entitled, right? A small town, 5,600 people, and my family was a big deal. My parents were lawyers, both of them, always busy. And we had maids. So I was a snob before I got cut down to size, before I started to identify with workers. I was born in 1929 so during the Depression I was a little girl, and people would come by wanting to mow the lawn, do some gardening or anything for a meal. And I used to hang out with them. They didn’t come to the front door; they came to the back door and they’d have their meal there. I remember very clearly one woman came by saying, “Oh, I’m leaving. I’m taking the bus to the next big town.” I might have been almost ten by then. And she had been a miner’s wife, and not long before that there had been all these mining accidents. And she told me what it was like for the men who worked in the mines. So that’s where I started getting my politics, from sitting on the back porch talking with workers.

I spent a good part of my time away from the family. Girls’ school then college. Three colleges. I was searching, I was searching, I was searching. English at one point. Theater at one point. Theater was good. I preferred doing sets. I preferred doing costumes. But I never finished a degree. Some people can take courses they’re not interested in, in order to achieve a goal or something. I’m not one of those.

I went to Carnegie Tech, which is now Carnegie Mellon. I was in summer stock in Manistee, Michigan. Late ’40s. My parents were sending me five dollars a week. The end of the season came and I didn’t want to go back to Carnegie Tech. I certainly didn’t want to go back to Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. So I took a plane to New York City. When I arrived at the airport I had a dollar.

I had one dollar. I seem always to be able to get myself into these situations. I do things that other people won’t do.

I was twenty-one. Maybe twenty. Nineteen fifty-one. I escaped. I had no sense. I had no sense at all. I didn’t know what was happening. I called one of my classmates on Long Island. Couldn’t have been more than a dime, or maybe a nickel—oh god, Jesus. Anyhow, he came and picked me up, told his mother, “I’m moving into the city!” And we left.

His name was Steve and we ended up getting married. I don’t remember even where we got married. It certainly wasn’t religious in any way because I’ve been agnostic or atheist or whatever since I was twelve.

I wasn’t in love with him. I wasn’t with him more than two years at the very most. His parents didn’t like me. They just thought I was an interloper. I was trying to marry beyond my station in life. Funny.

Later I married again. But he was older than I, considerably, and he died a long time ago. I haven’t been married for decades. But you know, I’ve had stints. I’ve had stints with gents.

The late ’50s were absolutely wonderful days. It’s awful but it was marvelous. They were still making us pretend that if somebody dropped an atomic bomb on New York City we could survive it.

I made sure I never learned to type. I’m serious. Typing, no. Just—no. Oh god. Earning money and that sort of thing: jobs were weird things, just awful things. I had fun working one place and that was the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street. Going down to the stacks, right? Pulling books out. And I used to do Charlie Chaplin. I loved that.

She makes her finger a short mustache over her lip and shimmies her shoulders, as though waddling down an aisle with bookshelves on either side.

And I came out of work once and there was a news kiosk, right? There was The Nation. I looked at it and I said, “Gee, there are people that think the way I do! I’m not the only one!” That I remember really clearly, and it sort of wedded me to this city.

Those were the days with the Korean War, the War Resisters League—all that stuff, boiling all through the East Village. And I was involved with all of it. Anybody who was even half liberal was very much together on these issues. And there was a lot of creativity—a huge surge of new kinds of creativity: John Cage, modern dance.

I paid $21.45 a month for my first apartment. That was at 242 West 10th Street. Cold water flats. I used to pass by this leather shop and the guy that owned it was Walter, Walter Humphries was his name. He was wonderful. And he was sleeping in the back of the store. And Steve, my ex—I have to give him credit for this—he said, “Eh, she’s wonderful. She can do anything with her hands. Can she come in and work for you?” So that’s how I learned this stuff.

I was a natural. And I opened a shop on Seventh Street, down away a piece between Bowery and Second. Nineteen sixty-two. Seventy-five dollars a month rent. The Bowery was really the Bowery. It was. Bums would come by for a buck and they’d put a chalk mark outside. It meant, here’s a good place to ask for quarters. And I’d have more people coming all the time. And god, I got taken. I got taken so many times. Somebody would come in with a vacuum cleaner for twenty-five dollars and it would work for about a half an hour.

For twenty-four years, as a matter of fact, I had that shop and I lived in the back for a while. Had a huge backyard. I used to give barbecues. It was wonderful. It was next door to McSorley’s Ale House. I was a good friend of the pub. They would borrow my hose in the backyard to clean out the ovens, you know, that sort of thing. It was the only pub in New York that still didn’t allow women inside—they never had. But really I’d been stopping in after hours for a long time. Doc worked as a bartender there and he played the violin. He was a gypsy—a real honest-to-god gypsy—and he’d be playing music, sometimes threw concerts after they closed. And if I were passing by, he would say, “Hey Barbara,” and wave me in. Funny. They had a cat that wouldn’t stay there, it insisted on coming over to where I lived. It was family.

Dorothy Kirwan—she was a friend of mine—she inherited the place from her dad, and when he died she promised him she would never go inside so long as she lived. That was way back in the ’40s and even in 1970 she wouldn’t do it. On the day the city passed a law allowing women in the bar, Dorothy asked her son, Danny, to be her surrogate and so he asked me to walk in with him. I was on Danny’s arm. And my friend Sara—Sara Penn, she had a shop in the neighborhood, too—she was on somebody else’s arm behind us. I said, “Sara, I’m putting on a hat.”

So she did, too. We both had big hats and pretended it was afternoon tea or something. Although I think it was the morning. They had cameras and all that. It was a civil rights thing, you know? Everybody got very excited. The whole block was very excited.

I don’t think I actually had a drink. Maybe a wee little sip. I came back to work. Really it was a small thing when you think about it, drinking at the bar with the men. Equal pay, when we get that, now that will be something big.

Shortly after that I was living in an apartment on Seventh Street. That was a sublet—perfectly legal but when the landlord found out it was me subletting the place, he said, I don’t want that woman in my building.

Banker and boss hate the red Soviet star

Gladly they build a new throne for the czar

But from the steps to the Caspian Sea

Trotsky’s great army brings vic-to-ry

So workers hold your ranks

Stay sharp and steady

For freedom’s name raise your bayonets bright

For workers’ Russia, the Soviet Union

Get ready for the next great fight.

I was fighting for some kind of—I don’t know what you call it. People who had Laundromats, for instance, they would be paying $600 a month. And you have absolutely no rights, so suddenly they’d say, $5,000 a month. You can’t change from $600 a month to $5,000. You can’t do that.

Miriam Friedlander—great, great, great congresswoman—she came into my shop one day and said I should start organizing. So I did. And in those days you couldn’t just email and say, let’s meet at so-and-so place; you went and got them—you had to physically go and gather everybody together.

A lot of us, we fought. We didn’t go far enough though. We didn’t have enough billions of dollars, I guess. It didn’t work. It worked sometimes. On Avenue C there was a bakery and I did manage to save him. There were two older ladies that lived in my building, and they tried to get rid of them. I got them a lawyer. There were times I had goons come by my shop and threaten me. “We know who you are and where you are … lay off the boss.” That sort of thing. It was happening all over—Brooklyn, too.

I think it started to really change in the ’80s. Suddenly I began to see people in suits. And there were briefcases! That’s when I knew things were different. See there’s a whole area here around the Bowery that is “in rem” properties. It means that the landlords didn’t pay their taxes, they just abandoned the properties. So the city was selling those off and people were coming in to buy them up for nothing.

I got kicked out of my shop next to McSorley’s. The owner of the building died, and his wife couldn’t keep it. She moved out to Astoria. So some investors bought the building and they wanted me out.

I went to court in 1980 and I guess you could say I won the case. The first time I went to court, the owners said, “She has parties in the backyard!”

And the judge said—in a sarcastic voice—“Oh, she has barbecues in the backyard in the city in the summertime?” And then he turned to me and said, “You never asked me over?”

So the first time going through court it was heaven, you know. But that was the beginning of the end. I was back five years later. And finally they won. My lawyer had said, “Whoa, we’re in luck, we got the same judge.”

Oh, no, no, no. The judge looked at my lawyer and said, “The politics have changed.”

So in 1985 I got a shop through Cooper Square, the community development committee. The place had rubble this deep on the floor—she reaches down to tap her knee.

I was fifty-six. I didn’t have money because I hadn’t worked for six months. And some kid on the block came in, right? And he said, “Give me that broom.” So all we needed was a shovel and a broom and garbage bags and you know, there was nobody on the streets in those days so we packed these garbage bags full of rubble and we’d go down to the corner and … shhh.

I paid him what I could. And other kids came by, too, and started helping out. Now, would that happen these days? I don’t know. Now people are so isolated in some strange manner. I don’t know.

I don’t want to be done with the shop. I guess I’ll have to be at some point. But I have tools—tools that I’ve worked with and changed and made. All kinds of stuff like that. It’s been so much a part of me, who I am, that removing myself from it, I would really—I don’t know what I’d then do. I probably shouldn’t even worry about it but smashing this femur was really a wake up. I mean I thought I would be rolling around, scooting down on the floor and fitting things. I can sort of work around it, but it’s not, you know, it’s not like it was.

I quit smoking three years ago. After sixty-two years. I just decided I didn’t like smoking any more—I’m done. And I don’t drink a couple of vodkas and tonics a day anymore either. Just one here or there. I have a squished vertebrae, and as I work, here, this one spot—she points at her lower back—give me a vodka tonic, yeah, no more pain.

That’s the other thing: I don’t like to hang out with old people. I really don’t. They all talk about their injuries.

Just lately, oh my god, every which way I turn is, it’s tough. My next-door neighbor, suddenly she’s in the hospital somewhere. She fell out of bed and I guess she broke her hip or something. Shirley, my neighbor, she’s getting dementia. Every which way I turn it’s rough. It makes me older! And I’m trying to stay young so I can work.

This block is still incredible. There is a community. But NYU started taking up all the space. They just rip out everything and anything. Beautiful things. Destroy everything. They build huge monstrosities all over the village. And Cooper Union, the art and engineering school, now they’ve started doing the same thing. You see these big buildings they paid for? And now they want to start charging tuition. They have never charged their students tuition and now they’re talking about doing it for the first time in their history. She’s going there now—she’ll tell you.

Barbara nods in the direction of Jessica, the twenty-four-year-old assistant from Williamsburg, Virginia. Jessica has a crew cut and wears overalls. She’s been working in the shop for roughly eight months. She is an art student just around the corner at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. The school was set up in 1859 by Peter Cooper, the industrialist and presidential candidate who wanted to institute a model for free higher education for those who qualify “independent of race, religion, sex, wealth, or social status.” The highly coveted, tuition-free education on offer keeps the school’s acceptance rate at 8 percent.

Jessica: I definitely came to New York with nothing. I worked my ass off for a couple years. I was a waitress for a while. And then I just tried to get into schools. I applied early to Cooper Union. I didn’t get in, got waitlisted. So I went to Parsons for a year and now I’m in an incredible amount of debt from that. Then I applied to Cooper again and got in. It was so interesting to go from Parsons to Cooper. Luckily at Cooper I don’t have to pay for education and I’m able to just go to school. Well, and pay for my expenses through working for Barbara.

Jessica: I live Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Six hundred and fifty-five dollars a month. I have two roommates. And we have a studio. It can be pretty dirt cheap out there. Props to Crown Heights.

She pumps her fist in the air, keeping at her task of unrolling and measuring a large swath of leather.

Jessica: Now everyone is in Brooklyn. Bushwick, specifically. Some of the richest friends I have actually have an apartment in Bushwick and I just don’t understand why. You’re living in these really awful homes, the architecture’s terrible, the neighborhood’s not great. It’s not even about what’s actually there, materially. It’s really weird. There’s the perversity of being on the edge—I don’t know. It’s like farm-to-table food: it sounds so nice and it sounds like you’re really being close to something but it’s really about this ideal. People want to belong to something, or be a part of a new art scene in Bushwick. But they’re not. They’re paying $3,000 for a two-bedroom apartment in Bushwick.

I could just stay at Cooper and live in this little wonderful, creative fantasy world. Why not? The community that’s there is so unlike anything I’ve ever had. Everyone is there for a reason and knows that they’re there for a reason, and it’s all about collaborating and being open and trying to formulate new ideas. You can’t beat it. I’ve never been anywhere where the faculty really treats you as a part of this democratic experience instead of an authoritative situation. It’s all based on merit and hard work so you get all of these different people. Like my friend Marina is from Berkeley, pretty well-to-do, middle-class family; there’s a kid who lived in the school without anyone’s permission last year; and there are these two twins that go to my school that lived through a bunch of different adoption homes and are still sort of very wayward. The professors are always willing to help out where they can. In different ways, too. But that’s starting to happen less and less. There used to be this thing, a Cooper loan, and any time you needed it you could just go and borrow $500 on the spot—whenever. They don’t do that anymore. Financially they can’t do it.

They voted against charging tuition for this year but after that we don’t know. A lot of the seniors are heavily involved trying to keep the conversation going for those of us who will still be around but we all just feel like it’s inevitable. It seems like they’ve made up their mind to start charging tuition. So we’ve slacked off. And now maybe we’re fucked.

Barbara: It’s all money, money, money, money. We flee to New York because we know it’s the place where there’s freedom. But it’s not going to be free for too much longer.

A few months later, Cooper Union’s board of trustees votes to begin charging tuition in the fall due to the institution’s financial shortfall—against the mandate of the institution’s founder and the will of faculty, students, and alumni. The announcement is made in the school’s famous Great Hall, just across the street from a brand new academic building, 41 Cooper Square, one of Barbara’s “huge monstrosities.” While the necessity and financial feasibility of the building were being publicly debated—it had a price tag of $165 million—the trustees approved a range of expenditures that included $350,000 for an inauguration party and $50,000 for a guest speaker.

In his review of 41 Cooper Square, the architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff said, “We’ll have to wait to find out exactly what the end of the Age of Excess means for architecture in New York … The new academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is yet more proof that some great art was produced in those self-indulgent times.” The aluminum and glass building looks a bit like a boxy spaceship, and those who were protesting the tuition fees have all been cleared out of the lobby.

19.