In the former Christ Church Memorial building on W 36th street in Chelsea, Jim Morgan looks up at the vaulted wood ceiling high above and says he’d take it all if he had time. He’s in this 110-year-old church with a small crew to salvage, as quickly as possible, whatever materials he can before the wrecking ball hits the old structure and its completely leveled, making way for a hotel.
Morgan is grabbing materials that are rare and in high demand. Italian tiles. Marble. Stained glass. And, super long pine planks ripped from the crawlspace above the ceiling of the church. It’s a dusty, dirty and a fairly lucrative job.
I first reached out to Morgan months ago to see if I could tag along during a water tower salvage job. I’d heard that old water towers in New York were an unlikely source of local redwood and I wanted to capture images of a crew dismantling them. “They’re like hen’s teeth,” the Louisiana-born Morgan told me.
I figured it was probably a lost cause after not hearing from, but months later I got an email from Morgan “Pulling a pretty great floor/ceiling out of a church today if you’re in Manhattan. Hope you’re well. Jim.”
I jumped at the chance.
I usually feature makers on my blog the Hand & Eye, people who are creators. Even though Morgan and his company Tall Cotton Supply are not “makers” they are critical to the creation process. They are finding and saving materials that are used by really creative people. Materials he and his crew have salvaged have ended up in places like Five Leaves, Fellow Barber, the Etsy office in Brooklyn and countless other places.
Morgan got his start in the business early. He learned it from his dad who did beam salvage in the 70s and 80s. “Every summer I’d work for him, weekends and after school. I’d pull nails for him. It just gets in you that way, or me, I guess,” he says.
Fast forward to the early 2000s pre-recession and New York was booming. “Every corner there was a demo site,” says Morgan. “My dad’s business was growing, as were all businesses in the early 2000s. Everyone was booming.”
Then the recession hit, which turned out to be a fairly good for Morgan. “When the market crashed, when the market tanked everyone wanted their cash to work for them,” he says. If you notice, right around ‘07, ‘08, ‘09 there was a huge restaurant and bar boom in the city. And that was because everyone wanted to put their money in something tangible. “
Combine that with a design aesthetic that favored reclaimed woods, salvaged barn board etc, and Morgan was in the right place at the right time. Places like Five Leaves, Donna, Cafe Colette and so many more all ended up with wood or materials that Morgan and his ripped from some building that was going to be torn down somewhere else.
Since then things have certainly changed. The demand for unfinished salvage wood has slowed as design now favors blonder, cleaner finishes. “You try to stay ahead of the curve as best you can. I hate to say that. It’s just like anything else, any trend or fashion,” says Morgan. “I started seeing everyone coming around with barn board, grey wood and stuff like that and it’s like “ok there’s a lot of other people doing that so I don’t need to supply that stuff.” So what else am I going to supply?”
Morgan moved to tiles. Labor intensive tiles. Unlike wood which pulls up pretty easily, tiles need to be carefully cut out. In the case of the church on 36th, with a saw and an understanding that many will be unusable.
With the recession now gone, and building booming in places like the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront where Morgan keeps his shop demand for reclaimed goods is perhaps even higher than before, especially for residential. Business is good for Morgan, but as in the case for any small business owner there’s also worries about how to keep it going, hot to stay ahead of the curve. For Morgan, it’s especially sharp, given the nature of the work. The wave of building that’s going on in New York feeds his business, but also threatens to sweep him out of the city like so many hustling in it right now.
And for someone who just deeply loves old buildings and materials, it’s painful to watch.
“There’s this dichotomy that I deal with on a daily basis,” he says. “I’m trying to preserve the material, find (it) a new home. And then on the other side of that…look at all the condos around here. Yeah, I am a part of the gentrification.”
Perhaps, but only in the best way.
