Eddie Boros’ Tower of Toys grew and stood for a few decades on 6th and B. It was taken down in May 2008, a year after its creator’s passing. At my first encounter with the tower, the garden was closed. It was a cloudy day. It drizzled. The tower stopped me in my tracks. I lingered to take it in, looking through the bars of the fence. As a recent art school graduate, the Tower of Toys mesmerized me. It both honored and defied design theory. The structure was showing honesty in how it was built, starting on a broad base, tapering towards the welkin of this skyscraper city. It showed clarity in how it was created. If there is a comparison worth making with an architect-built structure it might be San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, while in the realm of outsider architecture the structure has evoked Simon Rodia’s Watts towers for many. Eddie Boros defied what I learned in design theory in his construction and connection details. Although his tower looked and stood like a tall structure, its details did neither suggest that it should, nor assure its stability or longevity, where Rodia’s creation does. But Boros wasn’t a designer or architect in that schoolish way. He built from passion, with intuition, using that rough-n-tumble New York grit as the tower’s backbone and his own longevity as mortar. How cool is that

A photo album:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jschumacher/sets/72157605010716901/show/with/2485379258/

An elegy: http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/47237/

Taking it down:

Reminiscing:

Here’s a list of J words that I discovered during my artist Abecedarium:NYC residency at the McDowell Colony. I spent two weeks reading the dictionary, looking for words that sparked my curiosity, sent my brain into a reeling spin, or simply sounded good when read out loud. A few of my favorites in this list include: jejune, jackstone and joey. With all of the ramshackle building going on in New York right now, there seemed to be no choice other than “jerrybuild” if we wanted to reflect the zeitgeist of the day. LS

Click the image to enlarge it for an easier read.

Here is an example of Jerry-build in Long Island City. I have watched the progression of this building from the platform of Queensboro Plaza station when waiting for the 7 train.

I’ve lived in South Park Slope for five years now. Over the time I’ve been here, the neighborhood has changed drastically. When I arrived, there were only dollar stores, local laundry spots, and little salvadorian and mexican restaurants. The markets held tons of specialty goods for the many latino families who lived in the area.

But now - everything is changing. Two coffee shops, a bagel place, a wine bar and an organic health food store have moved in within the past year - and now that Bloomberg has helped his developer friends to rezone this area of Brooklyn, what used to be a low-rise little town, has become the final frontier for 6 story and higher apartment buildings.

The structures go up in record time with shoddy materials. Most contractors pay undocumented workers 10 bucks an hour for hard labor - some of the men go without hard hats.

One of my friends bought an apartment in one of the newly constructed buildings. Within a year, she ripped out her cheaply made bathroom, and had the whole thing redone (to her standards.)

Besides pushing rent rates up, the haphazard construction of 20 unit buildings clogs up the area with more traffic. It also pushes out lower-income families who have called this area home for over 20 years. I look forward to the day when there are no more lots left, and the noise of drills and hammers moves further down 4th avenue which I know it inevitably will…

More info on this topic here:

• http://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com/2007/03/sunset-park-to-get-eventual-rezone.html

• http://www.workingimmigrants.com/archives.html

Jerry-Built

Meaning: Built in a makeshift and insubstantial manner.

Origin: The phrase has been around since at least 1869, when it was defined in the Lonsdale Glossary:

“Jerry-built, slightly, or unsubstantially built.”

By 1901, the term began to be used figuratively - a sure sign of acceptance into the general language. For example, The Daily Chronicle, in August that year printed this opinion:

“In an age of jerry-built books it is refreshing to come across a volume that has taken forty years to compile.”

The derivation is unknown. What we do know is that the term has nothing to do with the UK slang term for German - Jerry/Gerry. This is of WWI origin and the citations above pre-date that. As always when a phrase’s origin is unknown people like to guess, so here goes. It is possible that the term derives from the slang term jerrycummumble or jerrymumble. This was defined in the 1811 version of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

“JERRYCUMMUMBLE. To shake, towzle, or tumble about.”

Some other guesses, although none of them appear to have any substantiating evidence, place the origin as:

• The cheap, flimsy constructs of Jerry Brothers - a Liverpool building firm. (Note: I’ve not been able to confirm the existence of this company).
• The walls of Jericho which, as everyone knows ‘came tumbling down’.
• A corruption of ‘jury-rig’ - although if that were the case we might expect to see some printed reference to ‘jury-built’ or ‘jerry-rigged’. The former is unknown and citations of the latter all date from the 20th century.

Source: The Phrase Finder: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/211600.html