Articles Art House II By Ned Depew for Berkshire Home & Style May 2005
Those who are regular readers of this magazine may remember an article titled "Art House" in April of 2003 about the finding and dismantling of the David Winne House, an early-to-mid 18th century Dutch farmhouse in Bethlehem, NY, and its projected rebuilding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, as part of the American Wing.
For those who don't recall, a brief recap: in 2002 an excavating contractor bought a piece of land in Bethlehem, NY, a few miles south of Albany. He wanted to use the land for equipment and materials storage. It had an existing dwelling on it and he had to decide whether to renovate the building and rent it or to demolish it. He brought his lawyer, who had some experience with real estate, to take a look at it.   The lawyer was also the lawyer for building-reconstruction and preservation specialist J.M. "Mike" Kelley. From experiences visiting Kelley's projects, he had some appreciation of antique buildings and when he saw this place, bells went off. He put his clients in touch with one another and Kelley confirmed his impression that this was a very special structure.   But what to do with it? By coincidence one of Kelley's other clients was an antiquarian, Jonathan Trace, who happened to be one of the leading experts on the period of Dutch ascendancy in the Hudson Valley region. Kelley asked him about the building - who might be interested in preserving it? Trace was a friend of Peter Kenny, Curator of American Decorative Arts and Administrator of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, with whom he had often consulted. He mentioned the building to Kenny.   As fate would have it, the museum was in the process of planning the first major reconstruction of the American Wing's architectural section since its original installation in 1924. The idea of including a complete, authentic Dutch setting - something that the Museum had never had - that would support their collection of early Dutch artifacts, proved irresistible.   The upshot was that after thorough investigations and research by the museum, the decision was made to purchase the building. J.M. Kelley, Ltd. was contracted to dismantle it and reassemble it in the museum. The dismantling took place in the spring and summer of 2003. The parts were marked and catalogued, removed to a warehouse where they could be cleaned and fumigated (with Argon gas rather than chemical pesticides that would leave residues) to eliminate insects, molds and fungi, and stored until the museum was ready to receive them.   That time arrived this spring. About three weeks ago, preparations and renovations of the third-floor space where the Winne House was to be installed were ready. In mid-March, Kelley called LaGuardia Trucking, a company he regularly uses because of their careful attention to avoiding damage to antique materials. The J.M. Kelley crew began moving the pieces to Manhattan, where a local rigging crew that works regularly with the museum was prepared to move it inside.   The most spectacular and dramatic part of the operation lasted only a few days, for a project that has already run more than two years. Rigging the large, heavy, hardwood timbers securely together and lifting them over the building, to insert them delicately through a third-floor window was a visual "installation" - a short-term kinetic performance-art object in itself. If Christo and Jean-Claude had been orchestrating the process, it might have made the front page of the New York Times.   But for the Kelley crew and the riggers, it was all in a day's work, and when the curious gawkers and photographers left, there was still much more work to do. Where Kelley and his crew are accustomed to working out in the open, assembling the heavy timber frames with the aid of cranes and other heavy machinery, in this case they were building inside, using unfamiliar hydraulic lifts. As Kelly remembers, "I spent many sleepless nights puzzling over the best way to put the frame together in that confined space."   Working indoors, with new and different lifting tools, having to put the frame together and fit it within the rigid limitations of the existing building, made the project something very different from any of the Company's previous jobs. Kelley's biggest concern was the limitation of having to work from below.   With the ceiling limiting upward movement, fitting had to be done by lifting the horizontal elements into place, and then sliding the vertical elements into place beneath them. This is the opposite of Kelley's usual and preferred method where the vertical elements are erected and braced and the horizontal elements lifted into position - a method that is far safer, as workers are above the heavy timbers out of harm's way, rather than below them, should a piece of equipment or part of the rigging fail.   But, by adding extra layers of back-up safety support and working with extreme caution, Mike Kelley (through some more sleepless nights) devised a system that he felt would be both safe and efficient. In any event, it proved to be so. Kelley also got a few lucky breaks. His concerns about anchoring the framing for instance, were answered by the composition of the floor, which turned out to be an unusual low-density concrete that was soft enough for even the cut-nails he was using to penetrate without bending, yet had very good nail-holding qualities.   He is also fortunate, he says, to be working with the museum's staff. "I am amazed," he reports, "at the level of cooperation and assistance we have received. These are very busy people, at the top of their field, running one of the largest and most important museums in the entire world, yet they always have time to help us." And that co-operation extends throughout the entire staff, from the security guards and the cleaning staff to the curators and directors. "They've all bent over backwards to make our work easier." Continue to next page

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