Crafting the Future From a Vanishing Art
About 20 years ago, an old man walked into Ronald Nizza’s workshop in Queens.
Now as then, R&R; Pattern Works is a clean, well-lighted space artfully filled with woodworking machines--jointers, planers, lathes, band saws, table saws, disk and drum sanders--everything necessary to turn a block of wood into an object of beauty and utility.
At first, the placement of the machines seems haphazard, but it is not: Everything’s set so that it won’t interfere with work coming off any other machine. “He said he had some tools he wanted to sell,” Nizza recalls of his visitor. “We went outside and he opened the trunk of his car, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
The car trunk was filled with hand tools used to shape wood turned on a lathe. What stunned Nizza was their size: They looked like they had been shaped for a giant, for giant labors.
“I asked him what kind of work he had done,” Nizza says. “He told me that he used to make the patterns for the face plates--the big, round front ends, where the headlight goes--of steam locomotives.”
Pattern making, at least the sort practiced by Nizza and his visitor, is a noble but vanishing art. Pattern-makers shaped the nation as surely as industrialists, politicians and financiers. Think about it: Until recently, anything cast in metal--the bodies of locomotives, the frames of great industrial machines, the engine block and much else beneath the hood of every automobile--began as a full-size wood model created by a pattern-maker. Molds were fashioned around the patterns, and molten metal (and, later, plastic) was poured into the molds.
When America’s smokestack industries were booming, pattern-makers were courted the way computer graduates were a couple of years ago. “My old boss was a German,” Nizza recalls. “He used to go down and wait for the boats to dock to see if he could find pattern-makers among the immigrants.”
The boss was George Reichelmann, who had been a foreman at National Pattern Makers. Workers at the Brooklyn shop made the patterns for such objects as the bronze doors at the Brooklyn Public Library’s main building, an eagle that gazes down on the U.S. House of Representatives and the aluminum frieze work on the Empire State Building.
When he opened his own shop, one of Reichelmann’s workers was Nizza’s older brother, Joseph. In time, he was joined by another Nizza brother, Rudolph. Ronald, the youngest, did chores around the shop until he was 19 years old, when he became a full-fledged employee. At the time, Reichelmann had eight employees.
“I’ve been here 44 years, almost,” Nizza says. “A long time in the same job, in the same place.” He runs the shop alone unless business is brisk. When that happens, his brother Rudolph comes out of his semi-retirement to help.
“If I get one job, I’m busy,” he says. “If I get three jobs I’m swamped, and I call my brother.” The jobs average out to around two a week, bringing in between $50,000 and $70,000 a year.
For many years, a lot of the work that came out of the shop was patterns for heavy paper-handling and printing equipment. The business died off in part because of pollution rules, Nizza says. “Brooklyn used to be full of big foundries,” he says. “Then, in the 1960s, the government said, ‘You’ve got to put $1 million in the stack.”’ Foundries that complied found themselves unable to compete with unfettered foreign-made goods. Twenty years ago, the operator of a big foundry told Nizza that he could deliver castings at $1 a pound. The same piece from a foundry in Taiwan cost 41 cents a pound.
Computers, too, have impinged upon traditional pattern making. Parts can be designed on a screen, and the parts can be machined by CNC, computer numerical control.
A lot of jobs these days are for objects that will be molded in plastic rather than metal. On a recent afternoon, Nizza was putting the finishing touches on a pattern for a cosmetics display unit that would hold a few bottles and tubes.
“The only reason this guy gave me this is, he only needs 10,000 pieces,” Nizza says, explaining that setting up a computer to manufacture so few pieces would cost more than paying for a model and mold.
His jobs thus tend to be small and often quirky. One recent project was to make a briefcase-size model of a package of Oscar Meyer hot dogs. Nizza machined the individual franks out of basswood and assembled them into a nice replica of the well-known package. The model was used to make sample cases for the company’s sales force. He also made a pattern for a giant brandy snifter, for a liquor display. Nizza is under no illusions about the future of pattern making. “I say to my brother we’re two dinosaurs who forgot to die,” he says with a laugh. “You know where all the good pattern-makers are? They’re in Greenwood Cemetery.”
He has a daughter who’s a bank vice president and a son at Met Life. “I had a nephew who worked here and thought it was a nice place,” Nizza says. “My son said this was a great place; he stayed in college for six years and got his master’s degree. ‘This was a very good place to start,’ he told me. ‘You learn what you don’t want to do for the rest of your life.”’
Nizza’s own view of the work is quite different. “There was a good lifetime of work in here,” he says with a fond look around the shop at his machines. “I always made a good living. The satisfaction of working here was high. Sometimes I couldn’t wait to get to work, because the work I had waiting for me was so interesting.”
