Cool beans. I'm gonna sip my coffee and enjoy some BitTorrent goodies.

gosh... I'm slavering over the fabric descriptions - and the sewing machine. Which is stupid, because I just don't have the sewing gene, which I covet. Sad. For me.

For you, a day off! Whee!

Some of the velvets were absolutely incredible -- one was a deep blue with an intricate paisley-like pattern pressed into it -- and there were all these silks with a shimmery two-color effect, I forget what it's called, from one angle it's red with a greenish highlight and from the opposite, green with reddish tinge, or maybe blue on blue, catch my drift? Not moire, but something else French. Oh, and there were silk lining materials with black-on-black patterns, and some almost transparent pink material with hand-printed flowers in yellows, greens, and blues that the designer had taken the time to do herself, something like thirty yards of it. She was a textile designer before doing dresses; when they closed down the Rhode Island mill she designed for, the owners sent her to Paris so she wouldn't be around for the announcement; they knew she would be just devastated and that breaking the news to her over the phone in a chic Paris hotel would soften the blow. She was nearly in tears telling me about it, and abruptly ended the story, "I don't want to talk, to think about it anymore now."

PS I really recommend the NYT profile of my landlady, linked to the word "landlady" above, in case anyone skipped it. She's amazing.

Oh, hell. It seems like I've registered with the NYT a hundred times, but none of my expected-to-work log-ins are working as expected. I guess I haven't logged in since the new notebook. I'll have a look later from V.'s laptop, unless you see a "print version" url that might work.

Yes, that's a wonderful profile of your landlady. I like the image of the doorway into a fairyland....

I do envy the lucky person who will end up with that sewing machine. Mine, alas has a broken part and is no longer useful. If I was closer to your fair city, I'd jump for the chance at a heavy-duty machine!

And, I also agree with the good feeling that comes from physical work. Of late, I've been building a big shed to replace the broken down one. As it's a weekend project, it takes a while, but it's so very satisfying to look back at the end of the day and see progress. And also, to sleep deeply because the body is tired and the mind is satisfied.

Here's a link to the print version, taz.

Hell, I'll do one better (of course, if this is verboten, which I believe it is, please feel free to edit it out of this comment. Not, of course, before reading or copying the text yourself):

New York Times
April 16, 2006
Urban Tactics
A Chateau of Her Own
By OLIVER BROUDY

≡ Click to see image ≡

THE British singer-songwriter Natasha Bedingfield watched herself in an antique mirror as her stylist hovered behind her, tweezing and fluffing her blond hair with the concentration of a maestro. "Usually the hair and makeup's the longest part," confided Lois Najarian, Ms. Bedingfield's publicist, who was one of a crew of 30 on this photo shoot. "It's about two, two and a half hours." A few more stabs of the comb, and Ms. Bedingfield was free to proceed to wardrobe.

The chair she had been sitting in, upholstered in green velvet, was also an antique, one of more than 2,000 pieces of furniture stored in this refurbished factory building in Long Island City, Queens, and part of the reason the building has become such a favorite with commercial photographers. They like the props.

In the last six months, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale's and Bergdorf Goodman have all shot catalogs there. A few weeks ago, the Sopranos filed in to pose for publicity photos that have been seen around New York.

This is heavy company for a building that sits across the street from Craig Envelope and shares the block with an elevator repair service. And yet, the Metropolitan Building, as it has been known since it was built in 1909, has also in the past year become a hot spot for hipster weddings. Christopher Karloff, a member of the British pop band Kasabian, was married there in November, and other eager couples have claimed dates through next October.

For city dwellers who feel little connection to the spired churches and lakeside pavilions one finds in wedding magazines, the unlikely setting is part of the charm.

"People got out in front of the Metropolitan Building and they were like, what is this place?" said Kristin Arnesen, a 20-something actress from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, recalling her marriage last June to Radoslaw Konopka, an audio technician. "They thought, well, maybe it's a mistake."

But when people stepped inside, their dismay evaporated. "I think all night long we just heard everyone talking about the space," Ms. Arnesen said. "Everyone was just blown away."

With five floors, four exposures and 45,000 square feet of usable space, this once-decayed factory building has found a glossy second life. It was, however, a transformation that almost didn't happen. In 1982, a German-born interior designer named Eleanor Ambos was looking for a place to store her vast collection of furniture after a Manhattan landlord quadrupled her rent. One day she passed the building and noticed a for-sale sign reading Greiner-Maltz, the name of a local real estate broker.

"I read it as Maltz-Greiner," Ms. Ambos said, "which was a German coffee factory when I was a child. And so I thought: A German coffee factory with broken windows? Not possible. There must be something wrong." The next day she called.

"There were 1,800 broken windows," Ms. Ambos remembered. The roof gaped with holes, the elevator was broken, and two inches of water from a broken sprinkler main stood in the basement. Vandals had stripped the place, including the toilet fixtures.

"It took me only 15 minutes to decide," Ms. Ambos said. "Everything, everything, everything was broken, so I didn't need any experts to tell me, 'You need this, and you need that.' I needed everything."

She paid $92,000 and devoted 20 years of effort and untold amounts of to money fixing up the building. This year, someone offered her $19 million for the building. She said no.

One of Ms. Ambos's many skills seems to be to surround herself with interesting people. She met Richard Wrightman, who rents space in the basement for his furniture design company, at a workshop on pre-Renaissance instrument making. Neither is a musician, but they shared a curiosity about the subject. Another artist in residence is Benno Klandt, who documents the building's interiors, which change with each event. He met Ms. Ambos when he was teaching her to play the drums.

"She's like a diamond in this city because she knows so many things," Mr. Klandt said. "And people come here. It's like a church. People want to marry here not because of all of the space, but because of her."

Ms. Ambos is a ruddy-faced woman in her 70's whose work attire consists of a white muslin shirt, a black vest embroidered with flowers, loose cotton pants and mukluks. On the wall of her office, a calendar displays the next six months. Whenever someone calls to reserve the space for a wedding, Ms. Ambos places a small red heart on the requested day. The calendar is studded with red hearts.

Her circuitous journey to the Metropolitan Building began in the 1930's with her childhood in Germany, under the Nazi regime, which, though she was ignorant of politics, she loathed instinctively. "When you were 16, you might have smoked dope or smoked pot or cigarettes," she said, "Well, I learned French."

After coming to America in 1947, she attended Barnard College and then Bryn Mawr, but not until she was 30, visiting friends in France, did she realize what she wanted to do with her life.

Her host was a gentleman farmer, living in a 13th-century chateau. Ms. Ambos still recalls walking to the window and looking out:

"There were gladiolas planted in the back. But pigs lived right next to it. And we opened these French windows — it was the month of May, I think. And I look out — I'm getting the chills now — and what I saw looked like exactly like the Fragonard paintings in the Frick Collection." For Ms. Ambos, the moment crystallized an aesthetic ideal, in which beauty has a natural place in everyday life. It was then that she decided to pursue a career in interior design. "Everybody should live in a French chateau," she maintained, "or the local equivalent thereof."

With an Indian diplomat as her first client, her business flourished, although she can still recall the early days, when she once moved two mattresses across town in a bus. In time, she began designing furniture and building it, as well as decorating. Her dream was to have everything under one roof.

THE Metropolitan Building afforded her this opportunity, although it was in such a state of disrepair when she discovered it that restoring the place became a full-time job.

Then, in 1993, something happened that altered the direction of her life yet again. Ms. Ambos was approached by a decorator who wanted to use the fourth floor for a party. The decorator went in and redid the space.

"It was a complete wonderland," Ms. Ambos recalled. Not until later did she learn that the host of the party was Bill Cosby, who had been looking for an unlikely site so as to better surprise his wife on her birthday, and that the guest list included Miles Davis and Lena Horne.

The party could not have more perfectly expressed Ms. Ambos's unusual aesthetic. "I dislike nothing more than empty appearances and facades with nothing behind it," she said. "I like it the other way.

"I think it was childhood's dream, when I always wanted to be in a really bad neighborhood, and there would be a wall, and there would be a door. And you would open the door through some fairy tale — this was tiny childhood — and there would be a long corridor, with nothing, very little, and then you would arrive in paradise."

Oliver Broudy is a former managing editor of The Paris Review.

The loss of jobs to China stops when people begin to take notice of the country of origin. A 'bargain' is not the indirect closing of another free countries industry.

I worked as a mover for two years. A third of the gross paid as cash in hand, damn wholesome.

Some outdoor fleece is made in the U.S. Some is made in China. Read the tag, a few dollars more to save a job is not unlike buying a bond in 1943.

Thanks! She seems like a pretty fabulous person to have as a landlady, and friend. And it also seems like a kind of magical work environment.

I'll delete the text of the article a bit later

Yep, buzzman, that's absolutely right. A close friend was married in November, and part of the couple's registry choice process was determining what items were made in China, and registering for other things to support other places. They don't own anything made in China, mostly over Tibet in the beginning, but now over economics. It's hard to be poor and not buy Chinese, though, the way it's hard to be poor and not get fat eating at McDonalds and Taco Bell.

I have friends who will interject into any discussion of the Quaker U.S. President Richard Nixon (oh, the irony) that no matter what horrible things he may have done, he made great foreign policy strides in opening up China to trade. How's that working out for us? Fucking dick Nixon, asshole nonpareil. Wrong, wrong, a thousand times wrong.

I figured as much, taz, but I hate registering again and again at newspapers, too. NYT sucks that way, as does WaPo, but the LA Times is the worst, absolutely rock-bottom. And yes, Eleanor is an amazinf landlady and friend. She drops the science in several languages at once. A sparkling gem.

You can generate registration-free links to NYT articles by using this nifty site.

Bookmarked; thanks, mudpuppie!

You are so lucky to live in such a place. I'm with you on the fabrics, but it is not just the Chinese who are to blame -- it is the lack of time/skills/inclination/effort to make one's own clothes anymore. When I visited John Lewis last year, always one of my favorite fabric stores, I was really disappointed in the selection. An assistant, who had been with the store for 20 years, told me that hardly anyone sews any more. She said that the only real demand is for "craft" fabrics. So I am treasuring my own private stash, built up over a long time, against the day when I get enough leisure time to sew again ... :-) In the meantime, there is always Liberty.

Hugh, it's called changeant here in NL. Maybe that's the word you were looking for?

When I went to replace my crappy sewing machine a few years ago my number one concern was that it not be made in China. That made choosing easy, because there was one, maybe two, new machine(s) I could afford that weren't. Mine was made in Sweden.

I do feel bad for the dying industry, but I also really hate industry-only textiles, wallpaper, beauty supply products, etc. So some irrational part of me likes to believe if those industries were democratized maybe they wouldn't be dying. But I also know that's not true, that nobody, no matter how elitist or democratic, can compete with China. And to that end I'd like to add a fucking dick Clinton along with Nixon.

I have a fashion designer/cosplayer friend who lives in Queens who might jump at the chance to have an awesome heavy-duty sewing machine. Can you please shoot me details to my @gmail addy?

I don't have details yet, since I didn't work today; it's possible she has a buyer lined up but I doubt it. I'll talk to her tomorrow morning and then I'll drop you the skinny. It might need to be picked up, either from Mercer St. before the 30th or in LIC sometime afterwards. I don't really know.

That is, if I don't decide to buy it myself (tee hee, what a temptation; I could use it to sew my balls to my forehead).