They
paid the Feds $12 a month rent and a $500 move in fee. Their homes
were 1920 Bauhaus, flat roofs, cinderblock ranchers, with floor to
ceiling windows, on half-acre lots. According to their local
historian, Michael Tichtin, their planning ideal derived from the
British Garden City movement. Alas, because they could often make
more money in the New York factories than in gardens off season,
outsiders tended to move in to replace them on the farm lots. Their
planned on site farm and factory ideal flopped after three years.
The
great Social Realist painter Ben Shahn was their most famous
citizen. Ben immigrated from Lithuania, aged 7, in 1906. He grew up
in Brooklyn, where he apprenticed as a lithographer, studied
painting, and early became the lefty with pro-labor beliefs that so
influenced his mature work. He first visited the experimental
Roosevelt, N.J. in 1937 because he was commissioned to paint a mural
for the community center for all those unemployed Jewish
needleworkers in New York.
Alas by 1939, the idealistic experiment
had flopped, Ben and his wife Bernada were antsy in their crowded
Brooklyn apartment, so they rented one empty house for $14 a month
(inflation moves!) but Ben warned Bernada, "just for a year because,
you know, these towns can eat you up!” They stayed till he died.
Ben
had a creative architecture pal Nakashima who lived in nearby New
Hope, Pa. Jonathan recalls that his father gave him a go-ahead, “Do
what you want, but don’t spend too much.” It was a oneser! He
built another house on top of the one they had at first
rented—designed by Nakashima! Mira, Nakashima’s daughter, laughed
,”the only second-story addition on a Louis Kahn base in the
history of architecture.” Fresh out of Penn with his architectural
degrees, Louie would build anything legal.
The
two storey retreat created stories of his own, as Ben invited the
heavy hitters of American art to visit him, The likes of Alexander
Calder, that third generation Philly sculptor who was knocking ‘em
out in Paris with his 3-D circus, and the great photographer Dorothea
Lange. Even Albert Einstein had the neighbors buzzing! And Ben had a
great eye for furniture so their simple little idiosyncratic home was
further enhanced by the Nakashima bed and dining room table they
bought on their first visit.
Mira loved to tell the story about how the impulsive Ben wanted to drag the bed and table straight to Roosevelt, even though their car was a convertible. They flipped the roof down—in the depth of winter—and sped home, after George had given Bernada an old woolen hat—and both of them a slug of whiskey. Ben used to say the table was cold for three weeks! Those warm walls were never cold, grace by Ben’s and Bernada’s art, not to forget the art of Rauschenberg, Tamayo et alia on their walls. In 2010 Jonathan and his wife Jeb had the sad experience of auctioning off all this Shahniana. (Vicki Hyman/Newark Star-Ledger, 11/13/2010.)
Indeed,
his sculptor son Jonathan had come back to live there after a
globally roaming artistic education- living for a time in Italy. He
talked the unsuccessful factory brass into renting him gallery space
. The factory has housed a variety of businesses besides Jonathan’s
gallery: a packaging machinery firm, a T-shirt printer, hat and
button manufacturers, even a parts entrepot for the geodesic domes
erected in the vicinity. Jonathan
also created the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in the village’s
amphitheater.
His other works include a display celebrating the life
and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the NJ Transit
Authority in Jersey City. His creations are also in the D.C National
Portrait Gallery, the Vatican and Princeton Art Museums. He now
teaches sculpture at the Art Students League in New York City.
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