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New salvation

Architectural salvagers take recycling to the retail market.

A curved iron window guard is transformed into attractive fencing. An Arts and Crafts-style cast-iron gate becomes a trellis. Pressed tin panels enliven a bare wall.

Today, creative consumers are buying up pieces of architectural salvage and recycling them in most inventive ways, often giving building parts a second life far removed from their first. Why use a limestone baluster around a balcony or patio when it makes such a fetching candle holder? Building stonework may never again adorn a stately edifice, since it makes such handsome garden ornaments.

Certainly, salvagers have rescued parts of beautiful old buildings for as long as people have admired fine craftsmanship. In recent years, ironically, much salvaging was done by the very wreckers who were tearing down buildings in the first place.

In the early 1950s, when Route 95 cut through Stamford, Connecticut, United House Wrecking retrieved what it could for its resale salvage yard, which to this day remains a popular stop for those seeking architectural artifacts, despite its out of the way location.

In Boston, Jorge Epstein was taking another tack. A nonwrecking salvager, in the late 1950's and early 1960's when Scollay Square and the West End of Boston were being leveled in the name of urban renewal, he saved the cornices, doors, and windows - some grand, some humble - storing them in rented warehouses. Eventually, he opened Old Mansions in Mattapan, the legendary business that took up a city block on Blue Hill Avenue. Everyone from do-it-yourself home renovators to upscale interior designers and architects would come to pick through his inventory of salvaged mantels, grill work, hardware, and other oddities.

More recently, a shrewd new group of salvagers have started businesses, often in locations friendly to retail trade. Unlike the wreckers who saw salvage as a sideline, these specialists consider it their stock-in-trade, taking full advantage of the burgeoning consumer demand. Indeed, most salvagers say business is brisk thanks to the current economy. Inventory moves rapidly through their stores, making finding new items their most daunting challenge.

RAY CLOUTIER is an example of this modern breed of salvager. He started ADMAC Salvage in Littleton, New Hampshire, as a part-time operation in 1995. He now employs four full-time and two part-time workers, and his 34,000-square-foot warehouse, a former tannery on a bank of the tumbling Ammonoosuc River, is a virtual museum of old house parts.

The building itself is an interesting sight - 192 feet long by 60 feet wide, it is three stories high and brightened by big 10-by-10 windows.

Recently, several wooden pews from a synagogue in nearby Bethlehem were carried into the large carpentry shop to be repaired and cleaned. They'll sell for $850 apiece. A century-old 12-foot, chestnut balustrade from the same building, priced at $3,250, stands guard at the front door.

In a nearby room, a set of forest-green crescent moon shutters leans against a wall. Brass doorknobs rest in a glass case near an ornately carved fireplace mantel. Stained-glass windows hang from the joists above. Another room is full of plumbing fixtures, including several soapstone sinks and a good selection of claw-foot bathtubs. Elsewhere, rooms are dedicated to window sashes, doors, stair railings, newel posts and balusters, brass lighting fixtures, and building hardware.

As with other antiques, the provenance of the merchandise is of interest to customers, and Cloutier can usually provide a story about where an item was found.

He recalls, for example, ripping 480 linear feet of 2-inch thick rock maple from a bowling alley, dulling a dozen carbide-tipped saw blades in the process. The maple was used to make tables and workbenches. "It was a lot of work - four people were needed to lift the wood," says Cloutier.

He tells how he used a battery-powered Sawzall to remove the corbels (or cornice brackets) from the Woolworth store in Berlin before it was pulled down. The temperature was 5 degrees below zero, and there was 2 feet of snow on top of the building.

Not everything Cloutier sells comes from demolitions. Sometimes, he simply buys from individuals or estates. One such excursion took him to an 1830 house in Bethlehem. The green barn across the road didn't look like much; in fact, it looked like it might fall down. As the afternoon sun poured into the interior through a large hole in the roof, Cloutier and his partner, Sarah Mike, started to rummage through the barn's contents. Cloutier spied a piece of soapstone that once served as a sink backsplash. He found several scythe handles in one corner, and five knotty-pine doors that he grabbed for the hardware attached to them. A heavy mop sink, bought for $50, made it into the back of the ADMAC truck, along with a not-so-antique iron stove and 12-foot lengths of unused cedar clapboard siding, for which he paid 10 cents a foot. Cloutier and Mike bought two iron grates for $5 each. Not a real exciting haul, but, says Cloutier, "These are materials that sell fast."

"The most profitable part of the business is high-end architectural antiques," he says. His best customers, he notes, are "creative-minded folks" who excel at adaptive reuse, and other dealers who come to ADMAC to purchase items that they will resell in urban retail stores.

Cloutier, 52, who progressed from house painting to carpentry and contracting and teaching, finds this enjoyable work. "I surprise myself all the time," he says, "Every day is like Christmas."

But for Cloutier, who started ADMAC so that he would have time to care for his wife, who was suffering from a terminal illness (the acroym ADMAC comes from the name of his adopted daughter, Addie, and Mary Ann Cloutier's initials), this work is "a way to get connected to what is real." Saving pieces of architecture helps the environment. "Eighty percent of what is sold at Wal-Mart will be in the landfill next year," he says.

WHILE ADMAC is thriving in its bucolic location, Bill Raymer, the owner of Restoration Resources, has found success in Boston's South End. "This is an urban business," says Raymer, whose company is housed in an old redbrick warehouse on narrow Thayer Street in a densely packed neighborhood not far from the Big Dig and the Florentine tower of the Pine Street Inn. A former carpenter, architectural graphics company co-owner, and home renovator, Raymer started his reclamation and resale business in 1988 in Quincy, moved to Newton in 1991, and, in 1993, settled into his current (and he believes best) location.

Raymer shares Cloutier's enthusiasm for the business. "You don't know what you are going to find," he says. But for Raymer, it goes beyond the hunt: "To see these rare items reused, to see them enhance and beautify a space, that is the purpose. We are recycling a unique product. These things are not being made today, and they won't be made tomorrow. It is a shame when they are trashed and thrown away."

Raymer's rather dark, crowded showrooms are a treasure house. A vitreous china pedestal sink, which seems to glow, greets the visitor. A sizable room off to the side is stocked with hundreds of items of cleaned and polished hardware: door knobs, pulls, knockers, push plates, and hinges.

Raymer shows a visitor a massive 13-foot-tall carved limestone fireplace mantel (selling for $20,000) taken from a home on Beacon Street, then points to a stack of the original copper Art Deco panels removed from the New England Power Building on Stuart Street in downtown Boston. (They were duplicated and replaced in the renovation of the building). In the basement sit a tabernacle, an altar, and a set of plaster winged cherubs retrieved from the former Church of the Ascension in East Cambridge.

In the warehouse across the alley, Raymer displays a skylight with intricate curved glazing bars taken from the Amory house on Park Street, along with iron railings with spear-shaped railing heads from a home on Commonwealth Avenue.

FOR A GLIMPSE into the origins of architectural salvage, visit Associated Building Wreckers in Springfield, Massachusetts, a family business in operation since 1932.

From a distance, the 4-acre yard at ABW looks like a weedy dump, but on closer inspection, it is a surprisingly fun place to explore.

Zane Mirkin, who owns ABW with his son, Andrew, works out of a busy office filled with items rescued from his backhoes and grapples. One odd gem, a Foot Ease machine, which, for a penny, vibrates your feet, has a place of honor in the office.

When ABW tears down a building, explains company vice president Strati Patrakis, all the components are sorted according to material type. Wooden parts are sent either to a Wilbraham recycling yard to be chipped or are recut in a Virginia sawmill. Concrete, brick, asphalt, and stone is crushed and mixed with dirt to serve as a base for roadbeds. Much of what's left, the salvageable building parts, end up in the treeless, sundrenched yard.

There, a red and yellow sign advertising the "Tavern Inn" sits atop a large steel container. Massive stone lion's heads peer out from under shelving in a dark warehouse. Strewn in all directions are steel radiators, porch columns, cinder blocks, chain-link fencing, iron grills, bathtubs, sinks, plastic piping, manhole covers, granite curbing, and Belgian block cobblestones. Windows and doors are stored in large shipping containers. Three-by-7-inch mahogany beams are stacked in a neat pile, while trailers hold 60-foot steel I-beams.

A rare massive flat chunk of blue stone, rough at the edges, is selling for $700. The company also stocks used roof and blackboard slate, which is cut into pieces and sold as flooring.

Rodney Hogan, the yard manager, recalls the customer who needed a 23-foot telephone pole - and found it here. Need solid glass blocks for an odd wall in your home? There's a stack of them, at just $3 apiece. And several chunks of finely carved marble from a razed church that would add a decorative touch to a formal garden.

About 30 years ago, when his company first brought in $1 million, 40 percent of the revenue came from the salvage yard, and the rest from the demolition business, says Mirkin. The salvage business is now a much smaller percentage of his total income. "My father got a kick out of it," Mirkin says.

And while Mirkin is less intrigued by the salvage work, he, too, finds some delight in it, especially since building parts are not the only items saved. With a smile, he points to a 4-cylinder Kawasaki motorcycle awaiting a buyer who'll restore it.