| A New York Times Article on one of the two consultants working on Silvermine Avenue: Paul Graziano
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Paul Graziano worked on the Silvermine Center District and is currently working on the Silvermine Avenue National Historic District Nomination. He brings a lot of passion to his job. NASH thought you might enjoy hearing about his own house:
For 86 years the white colonial with the black trim on 32nd Avenue near 146th Street in Flushing, Queens, was known as the Bruce house. The two-story house had been built in 1923 by Thomas Atkinson, a master plasterer, and his son-in-law, John Bruce, a carpenter. John's son, John David, known universally as Bud, moved in with his parents as a child of 9. Bud Bruce worked for 30 years as a police officer, directing traffic. And in his off hours, he hardly lacked for diversions. Beginning in 1932, when the Flushing High School football team, of which he was captain, won the city championship, he was a local hero. As an adult he was a champion birder and wrestler and an avid hiker and artist; his watercolors of the Adirondacks still hang along the narrow, winding stairway of his house. He made stained glass in his basement workshop. Perhaps thanks to his father, who was Scottish, he played the bagpipes every day. He was married for 69 years to the former Anne McGrath, and the couple had three sons.
"He was one of the nicest people ever," said Paul Graziano, 39, the latest occupant of the Bruce house, who grew up next door and was practically a member of the family. "A traffic cop, but so much more. He was a superman. And a sweetheart to boot."
Mr. Bruce was also a world-class packrat who saved family possessions from five generations. By the end, his house was stuffed to the gills with more than three-quarters of a century's worth of what Mr. Graziano describes as a mix of "really cool stuff and outright junk."
"He literally never threw anything away," Mr. Graziano said. "It wasn't exactly the Collyer brothers, but close."
By 1997 Mr. Graziano was living with his parents, which proved fortunate for Mr. Bruce. After his wife died in 2006, he grew increasingly frail. His sons had long since moved away, and the house had become an obstacle course. With the approval of the sons, Mr. Graziano helped care for the older man, escorting him to doctors' appointments and taking him out so he wouldn't feel like a shut-in. And partly because of a wide-ranging career in historic preservation and urban planning, Mr. Graziano had always admired his neighbor's house. From 2007 to 2009 he served as president of the Historic Districts Council, a citywide organization whose focus is historic preservation. He works as a freelance consultant; his seven-page, single-spaced résumé, described as a "partial work history," lists nearly 70 projects.
A year after Mr. Bruce died in January 2009 at age 95, Mr. Graziano bought the house, along with its contents, for $407,000. "Before he died, he made it clear to his sons that he wanted me to have the house, and for a reasonable sum," Mr. Graziano said.
Even before he moved in last October Mr. Graziano had been working almost full time to clean and repair rooms that have sat untouched for decades.
Parts of the house are frozen in time, a modern-day Pompeii. In the kitchen, with its imitation pine paneling and period wallpaper, a collection of birds, bells, pitchers and other colored glass baubles sit on a shelf by the window, glinting in the morning sun. Mugs, many from the New York Athletic Club, where Mr. Bruce wrestled, hang on the opposite wall near a rotary telephone. In the dining room built-in cabinets holding sherry glasses, historical plates and other bric-a-brac frame a 50's-era dining table and Victorian-style chairs. Above a doorway on the second floor, the chin-up bar that Mr. Bruce used until he was 93 is still in place. Other rooms are so choked with stuff it's impossible to set foot in them. The front room is packed floor to ceiling with, among other items, thousands of pieces of vintage clothing; apparently Mr. Bruce was something of a clotheshorse. "There were Brooks Brothers suits, fur coats, everything from the really cool to the really horrible," said Mr. Graziano, who has already thrown away dozens of bags but whose work has only begun. He has already spent $7,000 in his effort to restore the house to the way it looked when it was built, with more to come. And the rooms where his handiwork is evident suggest that the Bruce house must have been a real beauty in its day. In the center hall, where over the years rubberized mats had melted into the stairs, he spent the month of July painting and scraping in 100-degree heat. The pine floors now gleam, as do the fir risers and the mahogany banister. Even more impressive is how Mr. Graziano has transformed a low-ceiling attic room. It was once the Bruces' bedroom and had creosote walls and only a subfloor. Mr. Graziano installed pine paneling on the walls, salvaged an 85-year-old oak floor from a house a mile away, and installed it himself.
"I'd never done that before," he said, clearly impressed by his handiwork. In its newly pristine state, the redone room echoes the one next door, which Mr. Bruce had outfitted to resemble a ship's cabin, to serve as a bedroom for two of his sons.
The large room on the second floor has proved something of an archaeological challenge. In removing the paneling that covered an entire wall Mr. Graziano discovered a window that had been hidden for more than half a century.
"The room was opened for the first time in 60 years," he said. "There was a bird's nest in the corner of the window." He also stripped seven coats of paint from the house's seven doors.
The part of the house least changed since Mr. Bruce's day is the basement, home to a miniature greenhouse and his father's carpentry workshop. "And I'm going to fix up the space under the porch to be a shotgun music studio," said Mr. Graziano, who writes music, plays half a dozen instruments and is in two bands, Snowwhat and the Worthy Few. "It's soundproof, and once it's cleaned up, it will be awesome." As Mr. Graziano strips, sands and paints, he is living as much in Mr. Bruce's world as in his own. Along with his work on the house, he is digitalizing some 6,000 historical and family photographs, including such haunting images as Mr. Bruce, at age 3, in a soldier's outfit, and age 9, astride a pony.
He often ponders his good fortune. "I'm not a religious person," he said. "I never intended to live here. It's a gift that dropped from - wherever. And also a place to play my music."
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