A TALE OF TWO GAS STATIONS

THE 1960's

Once upon a time, there were two gas stations in my life.

PENN-PITT:   My Dad, Joe, (commonly referred to as 'Joe R') had a gas station in a pretty rough section of Brooklyn called 'East New York'. It was on the corner of Pennsylvania and Pitkin Avenues and so it was called 'Penn-Pitt.' The neighborhood was white, black and hispanic (generally referred to as 'Puerto Rican at this time) but it didn't matter what race you were because if you were at the gas station it meant you had a car. and in some strange way that car was your race and your religion. And on top of that, this was Brooklyn and everybody was a character. Everybody!

STATE PARK: The other gas station was my brother Don's (with his partner Mendy). It was not in New York City, but in Valley Stream, just blocks outside of the New York City city line in Nassau County. It was called 'State Park Service Station because it was across the road from 'Valley Stream State Park'. Compared to Penn-Pitt it was rural, But the biggest difference was that you could drive in Nassau county at 16. Sixteen! You had to be eighteen in New York City and when you're sixteen those were two very very long years. 

PENN-PITT: Penn-Pitt started off as a small corner station and eventually grew to be a block long, the second biggest gas station in Brooklyn. My first summer job was, of course, pumping gas. First of all you gotta understand that having a car in New York, especially in this part of Brooklyn, was an incredible luxury. It was expensive, you had to deal with parking and maintenance, you didn't really need a car to get around, and the winter was a bitch. Also because most people lived in rented apartments, a car was probably the biggest 'thing' you actually owned. The only new cars I ever saw in this part of Brooklyn were cop cars.

STATE PARK: If Brooklyn in those days was MEAN STREETS, State Park was BETTY AND VERONICA. Now, don't forget I'm only pumping gas in the summer but seeing a convertible (a convertible!) with four teenagers was, after Brooklyn, just like Archie Comics. Kids. All white and clean and happy, going someplace, having fun. I thought that was a myth. And one of the girls was a blonde. A blonde!

PENN-PITT: So Joe R. had three mechanics working for him. 'Rogers' was black, 'Jesus' (who I only knew as Hey-soo) was Puerto Rican and 'Sam' was a white Protestant. The place was always busy. When I said everybody was a character I meant it. Penn-Pitt was it's own Universe. The customers were of every race, religion, shape and size all connected by their car. It was its own asphalt island in busy Brooklyn. It was like the United Nations but with more yelling and more color and more motion and louder. It was a man/machine symphony and Joe R. was a great conductor.

STATE PARK: 27 9/10.  That was the price per gallon on the Tokheim pump when I started  pumping. The pump had a glass bubble on it filled with gas and a little propeller that turned when the gas was flowing. It always seemed dangerous to me. These were the days whengas pump nozzles had no automatic shut-off.  When someone wanted it filled up you had to listen for the sound of the gas coming up the fill tube and shut down before it gushed out, all over you and the person's car. I tend not to always pay attention so more than once I was rinsing someon's car down with the water can, assuring them that the gas wouldn't hurt their paint, knowing they didn't believe a word I said. Neither did I. Note the maximum dollar sale was 9.99


PENN-PITT: I've regretted many (many) things in my life and one of them was not photographing the incredible reality of daily life at the gas station. Even when I was in design school I wasted my time photographing inanimate objects when right in front of me was all the human visual drama and beauty that Brooklyn and cars in the '60's could offer. Just a photo of my Dad's desk, piled with a mountain of papers, strange greasy auto parts and various other stuff...and you know, in all those years I never once remember my dad actually sitting at that desk.

STATE PARK: In the '60's foreign cars were a rare sight. Occasionally in the summer in Valley Stream I'd see some foreign sports car pass by but on a regular basis there were only a few volkswagons around and they were always a curiosity with their air-cooled engines and gas tank in front. On a regular basis we had one customer who drove a Volvo, but he was Swedish so the whole thing fit together nicely. He also put that little line thru his 7's when he wrote the number. 

PENN-PITT: Since I was in school I pretty much worked only during the summers and the August summers in the city can somedays be brutal. Hot and humid with the sun beating down on everything. But what I remember most was that occasional warm short summer shower, heaven sent to briefly cool things off...and when it passed there was this unique aroma and vapors rising off the oil-soaked black asphalt of the gas station. Perfume.

STATE PARK: One day a guy drives in and his car is sputtering and missing badly. He leaves his car with my brother to fix and I noticed when my brother opened the hood and checked things out out he just re-connected some wire and the car started running perfectly. Later when they guy returned my brother charged him fifteen dollars or so and the guy went happily along. Fifteen dollars wasn't a lot of money but it seemed like a lot just to put some wire in it's place. So I asked him about it. "Ah", he said,"I didn't charge him for putting the wire in it's place, I charged him for knowing what place to put the wire in". I learned a lot from my brother.

PENN-PITT: I have to remind you, and myself, that cars were 'simpler' machines back then but also much less reliable than they are now. Things regularly went wrong. If you had a car your relationship with a gas station was probably one of your most important relationships, especially in the winter. 

STATE PARK: My brother Don somehow figured that renting trucks to people would be a good new business. I asked him why trucks. He said that if you rent a guy a car he goes out and has a good time, but if you rent him a truck he goes out and does some business. That's what I recall. This was a LONG time ago when the idea of renting itself was new. So he and Mendy became MENDON and I was there when they rented their first truck, a step-in, to a local kid, Jimmy McIntire, and then it seemed like they waited around the whole day for him, and their only truck, to safely return. They both did. The business grew.

PENN-PITT: For many years PENN-PITT was the only gas station on the intersection of Pennsylvania and Pitkin Avenues. Then one year a new gas station was built caddy-corner from my dads. Now there were two basic kinds of gas stations; owner-owned, like my dads and company owned like the new one across the street. Owner-owned is pretty self-explanatory; my dad had a deal with Flying A to supply gas but it was his station to run, to hire and fire, to make a profit or not. A company station was owned by the giant oil company. They hired a manager and paid him a salary. An oil company had endless monies and the station they built was big, beautiful, spotlessly clean and orderly. Compared to them PENN-PITT was barely controlled chaos, with cars and trucks everywhere. My dad knew I admired the neatness of the company station. "Let me tell you something Stanley," he said, pointing across the street. "The reason they can be so neat and clean is that they don't really have customers or much repeat business so if you're ever looking for a good mechanic, look for one whose busy, and probably greasy, not clean." Smart man.


                                                            TO BE CONTINUED... 

JAILBIRD 

 INTRODUCTION

SOLID LANDFILL

SOLID LANDFILL

It’s always hard to know where to start a story but this one has to start pretty far back before it get’s to it’s point, so just bear with me.

The year was 1971. I was 26, a Vista Volunteer assigned to the University of Hawaii’s Curriculum Development Center developing creative educational materials for the schools of Hawaii. Since I had a degree in design from Pratt Institute they assumed I knew what I was doing. They were wrong, but I was a fast learner and was soon put in charge of design. Since it was a serious project there were a lot of older PhD’s on the staff and what I want to say is that my ‘dress code’ was a little more on the casual side. I didn’t own shoes etc. They didn’t really care because not only did I love working there, I was also adding some nice touches to their work.  I just didn’t exactly ‘visually ‘ fit in. Anyway while I was walking down the hall one day I saw this other young ‘casual’ guy, coming the other way, bouncing and smiling and kind of jiving along. When we finally met a couple of days later we both had to confess that we both thought the other guy was on the janitorial staff. Turned out Rick Caalaman was an educator and developer for the Language Systems part of the project, which was the coolest place to be. We became good friends. 

In addition to my work at the Center, I had also been experimenting with the design of natural playgrounds where little kids who were handicapped could play, as complete sensory equals, with kids who were not handicapped. When the Curriculum Center’s project came to an end, I was offered a fellowship to The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT to develop my playgrounds further. I headed east to Cambridge, Mass.  Rick took the wages he had saved and headed west to Asia and a trip around the world with no itinerary or schedule.

Nobody was more unhappy than me to be at MIT. I knew what an honor it was to be there (they were paying me!) but I had left beautiful Hawaii...paradise. And it was cold. And dirty. And dark. And concrete. And did I mention cold. I tried not to show it but I was heartbroken,

Clay Model

and besides, I was here because of my natural playgrounds, and the winter seemed to put a damper on any support from nature herself. But it was MIT and there were interesting things all around . I busied myself making a model of my playground in my studio and doing drawings but still I had to face facts and I didnʼt feel as if I fit in. I remember making this idiot deal with myself actually thinking ʻwell, either I leave or everybody else has to leaveʼ. 

My Studio

And then an amazing thing happened. Everybody left. What I didnʼt realize was that this was a school. The summer came. Everybody went home, somewhere else, or on vacation. I was there alone. I loved it.

I found out that Harvard University owned an arboretum close by. It was essentially a park and tree ʻmuseumʼ where all sorts of research went on. I told them about my playgrounds and they offered me some space and help to create some small living grass models. I wanted to put them in big pots so I could move them around but if anybody made pots like I wanted, I certainly wouldnʼt have been able to afford them. One day when I was driving to the Arboretum I passed this giant concrete pipe factory (NEPCO (New England Concrete Pipe Co), and seeing these giant culverts stacked up, I had an idea. I went in with my MIT/Playground story hoping that maybe they could cut their pipe for me. The manager said that they couldnʼt, but if I wanted to cast some big pots there, it would be ok with him. Like I said, this was a huge, huge place with giant mixing machines, molds, drying sheds, tractor-trailers being loaded by huge fork lifts, and me, on the side, making my pots. And loving it.

And when I was finished, they loaded them up for me, and I drove them over to the Arboretum where I started my project.

I was enjoying myself and making some nice progress as the summer came to an end and everyone began to trickle back to the Center at MIT. Because of all the work Iʼd accomplished I felt pretty good about everything now. The first order of MIT business was that the Center was going to have a traveling exhibit of all of our works which would go to several prestigious Science centers across the country. This was very exciting, until, for some reason, it was decided that my project, because the models were living, wouldnʼt be eligible for inclusion. I argued and explained and pleaded but there was no convincing them. They did say that I could come up with something else and it would go in the show. But I didnʼt have ʻsomething elseʼ. My playgrounds, and the logic behind them, was my reason for being at MIT in the first place.

ʻSomething elseʼ, I thought.

Now Iʼm not sure why I came up with what I did - even now. Somehow I decided to cast two

big special concrete discs, that when bolted together and rotated, would give the viewer the feeling that the center portion was moving back and forth thru the solid shape. Besides being hard to explain, and maybe even not possible to execute, it really had nothing to do with who I was. Nonetheless I began to sculpt a clay shape that I would cast in fibreglass and attach to my imagined mold. I also talked myself back into the concrete pipe factory.

At the plant, one of the guys, a machinist/welder named Joe Tavola took a liking to my project and helped me quite a bit. He reinforced and welded my fibreglass form into the mold. 

Then wrapped the mold with this removable steel band and added the pipes that would create the holes to bolt the two halves together.

Even though a lot of activity was going on, I still was apprehensive about everything I was doing. The morning I showed up for the first ʻpourʼ I got a wonderful visual surprise. Totally unplanned, the combination of the moldʼs unique curves cast a shadow that was the perfect beautiful Yin and Yang sign. 

Maybe this whole thing was gonna work out after all, I thought..... We created reinforcement, put it all together and poured it. twice. 

We rotated the halves 180 degrees to each other and bolted them together. I had designed a little motor and roller assembly that was supposed to make the whole thing rotate on its edge, but there wasnʼt time to even test it out because the truck was arriving today to head for Chicago and either it was ready to go or it was gonna be left behind. I hoped I could put the finishing touches on it, and get it to work, in Chicago, before the opening. We loaded it onto the truck. 

Even with the task of making it roll still hanging over me, I remember feeling relief that I had at least made the deadline. Sure. Next stop:

CHICAGO 

The Museum of Science and Industry was a very impressive place. Huge. I think they had a whole working coal mine inside and endless science and Industry exhibits. One room was devoted to a huge Foucault pendulum that swung across the gallery floor, successively knocking down pins and demonstrating the rotation of the earth. Anyway after a great tour we were escorted to the gallery where our show was to open tomorrow.

That weekend, the Chicago Sunday times ran this wonderful article about our show and the Center at MIT. 

And because the article was about the Center as a whole, a photo of one of my grass playgrounds was actually included

That was great, but I had work to do. The museum staff knew of my problem and had provided me with power and even built a kind of plastic tent around my work area so I wouldnʼt get everything dusty with my grinding. Everyone wished me well and went off to a nice dinner. I started to work, grinding away, and testing to see whether my sculpture would rotate continually. That was at 5pm. Soon, any workmen who were around setting up the show went home. A kid from some local cable-access channel was videotaping me for awhile, but by midnight he was gone too. I worked on but finally, at maybe 4 am, it still wasnʼt working. I was so tired. I gave up. 

Now, dusty and exhausted, I had to find my way out of this huge place. This task was made harder by the simple fact that everything except my little area was pitch black.I could wander around in here still lost until dawn. I remembered something Iʼd once read about getting out of a labyrinth by keeping your left hand on the wall and never taking it off. I set out. Slowly. After awhile I saw a dim light ahead and headed towards it. As I came around the corner I saw it was the Foucault Pendulum Room Iʼd seen earlier......but the pendulum was not now swinging. It was tied back against the wall with a big red ribbon and giant bow. I remember thinking right then that everything was a sham, the whole story about the earth rotating and everything else. But I had more immediate problems than the end of the world as I knew it. I still had to get out of here. I headed on with my left hand still on the wall. 

Finally the Museums lobby and doors came onto view and I staggered across the street to the hotel where I promptly fell asleep. 

The next day the show opened and everything went well except I, of course, my piece didn't rotate and I was totally disappointed. After the opening we all headed back to Cambridge.

After Chicago, the show was trucked to San Franciscoʼs Exploratorium, where, being a smaller museum, they had to ask the US Army to help them move my work. I tried again, in vain, to get it to rotate but I couldnʼt and it stayed unmoving during the show.

When I got back to MIT I got called into the office where the assistant Director, Friedrich St. Florian ( who years later would design the WWII Memorial in Washington DC) and I reviewed the situation. It was pretty clear my piece wasnʼt working as I had intended, and, he explained, the trucking company was charging by the mile and by the pound. Then he sheepishly slid a contract in front of me that would legally give them permission to bury my work somewhere in the San Francisco area. The term was SOLID LANDFILL. 

I think he thought that I would be offended or insulted by this proposal so he was relieved to see that I wasnʼt. Secretly I was delighted. There were a couple of reasons why. First, as part of the deal, without me even suggesting it, they said theyʼd take one of my real playground models to the last stop on our traveling exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art. And secondly, MIT had already agreed to have a show of my playgrounds in their Hayden Gallery. 

Besides figuratively and literally taking a load off my back, I kind of liked even the ʻSolid Landfillʼ concept; burying my work for the ages. It was ʻarcheologicalʼ. 


I signed. 

It was a year or so until the show moved to New Orleans, and it had been a good year for me. I had my show at the MIT gallery, I came up with a new idea at the Center that involved nothing heavier than a stick of chalk and I even got a part time job as the exhibits director of the Boston Childrenʼs Museum, a legendary place. 

Finally it was time for New Orleans and one of my living models and I headed south. This time the show went off without a hitch and was, for once, an enjoyable experience for me. The only problem I had was that I had never been to New Orleans in July before and it was unbearably hot and humid. Unbearably


The museum had secured me a room in the Latin Quarter, very beautiful and wonderfully historic, but all I wanted was a pool. I asked the Museum staff if they would mind moving me to anywhere that had a pool. I noticed from the tone of their response that they had gone to some trouble to get us these rooms, but nonetheless they obliged and sent me to a large, Las Vegas style motel. Big neon sign, a lounge with nightly entertainment and an immense pool. Heaven. 

The next morning, after a quick swim, I headed to the restaurant for breakfast. I was just about to pick up the menu when, looking across the dining room, I found myself staring right at Rick Caalaman. Neither of us could believe this. He had gone completely around the world and it was just chance that brought us together again at this motel in New Orleans. Great

And, as if that wasnʼt enough, that night Fats Domino was playing live at the lounge. Rick, me, my playground at the museum, New Orleans and Blueberry Hill.


Maybe it was all worth it.

EPILOG

By the way, eight years later I finally built one of my playgrounds; the PLAYCANO, at the Queens Botanical Gardens in New York City.