I was pleased to locate one of these 65# cast iron City charter seals like the ones I had in the 1970s and was able to buy it just now, there were 5 different designs and I have 2 of them, now this 3rd one. I used to have a few complete sets of them. They were made around 1928-1934 to decorate the sides of the old elevated Wes t Side Highway that ran along the Western edge of Manhattan. The artwork was designed by noted sculptor Rene Chambellan,though these seals had to be very specific, already made designs, so he had little leeway or say on the actual designs,…

Now there’s a mystery! I looked up the location on Google maps where I removed one of these around 1977- 99th St 2nd ave and much to my surprise the building is still there! but even more surprising is, none of the lion keystones is missing, nor are their patches in the wall where the holes were! As I zoomed in on the facades, nothing looks like anything had been replaced, yet in my 1977 photo I can clearly see 4 holes in the wall over the fire escapes, I only remember removing one because it was way up in Harlem and quite a bike ride up there, the window…

I decided  some time ago to “phase out” concrete for several reasons, some include the fact the material is not stocked by any local outfits to me, which always meant having to drive to another town whose building supply/lumber yard stocks it-  an18 mile drive each way. It also tends to be a seasonal product since nobody pours concrete here when it’s 10 degrees outside, so if they have any bags of Portland cement at that lumberyard in the winter or early spring it’s been sitting in their unheated warehouse for months absorbing moisture which causes lumps and poor curing. I never used enough of it to use up whole…

With remodeling the basement studio and installing new shelving, I kept having to move this large model from 2013 which is still unfired, very fragile clay, and has not been molded yet, so I started looking at it again with an eye to making changes to it. I decided to finally do something to it, and that was to remove the large projecting cornice section and flatten the top surface. It included beefing up the ears a bit as well, but now with that change, pressed terracotta of it would fit in my kiln at least, so the goal now is to finish patching the top edge now,  and then…

I have been working behind the scenes on revamping my web sites and old page content, including removing the old forum and links to the gallery building which was sold several years ago. I’ve also been working on  a new store layout with WordPress and Woocommerce, more to do to it yet, but it should be a big improvement. Some links may have changed, some older ones may not work, and some pages have been changed as well.

After some 17 years with Ebay, it’s become obvious over the last few years that the entire site has deteriorated considerably into an abyss of the same spammy cluttering garbage made worse by their changing the format from having to pay for the listings and renewing them every 10 days, to making them free to list and perpetual listings until the item sells. As a result, peoples’ junk  and garage sale finds sits up there now for weeks, months, even YEARS just stagnating and wasting space and gaming the search. Now if you just “browse” a category you might be looking at “page 1 of 8,923 pages” and if you…

I have another of these keystones out of the kiln and she looks great! Unforttunately this keystone is just large enough I can’t really fit anything else in the kiln with it, so it winds up being the only sculpture in the firing cycle. Now I have about 3 of each terracotta design on hand in inventory, so clients won’t have to wait several weeks for one to be made. I have all the old wood shelving replaced with these nice metal rack shelving units I’m very happy with!  

Fresh out of the kiln, now I have three of them on hand ready to ship.