This is an unpublished, original feature story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
ARTHUR WOOD remembers that he wanted to be president.
Not the kind that runs a nation and lives on Capitol Hill, but the kind of visionary president that runs a university of his own design and lives on a different kind of hill – Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Wood and I are sitting on the third floor of the library at the Pratt Institute, and I’m desperately trying to steer our conversation toward the subject of his own life. For a man with a neighborhood reputation as an outspoken rebel artist who has remarkable incompatibility with the status quo – and at times, the law – Wood really knows how to deflect questions about his private life. I begin to ask him a question about his childhood, but he abruptly cuts me off, the way the crack of a ruler against a desk straightens up a classroom full of slouching children.
“Listen,” he says, repositioning his plastic magenta sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. “A problem has three major steps. You know what you want to start with. Edison wanted to make electric light, and the end result was a light for everyone. But in between, he didn’t know how to do it.”
I can feel my conversational grip on Wood slipping again as he redirects the topic of our conversation toward his notorious home, Broken Angel. Over decades, the radically-designed four-story brick tenement of his construction became a neighborhood attraction and a City Hall irritation. But this is the way 76-year-old Wood speaks – in extended metaphor. I listen silently.
“Charlie Pratt, who designed Pratt Institute, made his money in kerosene and he wanted to establish an educational facility similar to Cooper Union,” he says. “So, this building was his main building, and it was designed to be a shoe factory if it failed. From the very beginning, he generated his own power. They still produce about a third of their own power right now.
“On the other hand, Peter Cooper, who started Cooper Union, was a visionary. For instance, he knew that someone would invent the elevator. Cooper Union has a round elevator because Peter Cooper thought it’d be round … the main hall at Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave a major address, the hall is filled with pillars, and the roof is held up with steel – the first use of steel in a major building. You could take every one of those pillars out and the roof wouldn’t fall down. He was cautious.”
At this point, I’m wondering how far Wood is going to take me off track. With a smirk, he continues.
“Cooper Union is free, and one thing I like about it is if you don’t maintain an 80 average, you’re out of there. Okay?” he says, slamming his notepad down on the table. “So what I wanted to do with Broken Angel was establish a post-graduate educational facility. So after you finish college with all of your beers and parties and drinking and carousing and wasting your parents’ money, you go out in the world, and you encompass the major problems in developing anything you’re trying to develop. So what you do is, you come to Broken Angel, and we will solve your problems.”
Now I’m starting to get it. Wood had previously mentioned over the phone that the Broken Angel house was just the beginning of something greater. Now, that something greater was his own alternative art school. But at this point, the fact that he recently had to dismantle his headline-grabbing house hasn’t even come up. At least not yet.
“I have methods of education and also my own personal methods, because I’m entirely self-taught, and I’ve invented a lot of things,” he says, gesturing toward a metal contraption sitting on the table between us that, inside, is a pocket-sized art studio, complete with tungsten carbide pencil, a 50 ft. roll of quadrille paper, watercolor and brush. “The process that I use is very logical. The best place to hide anything is right in front of you.”
I reach for solid ground. “So now we’re talking about Broken Angel.”
He looks up. “You said this wasn’t going to be about Broken Angel!”
FALLEN, BROKEN ANGEL
WOOD AND I are standing outside his hulking home at 4 Downing St., five blocks south of the Pratt campus. The Army veteran gestures toward his ramshackle “estate” – he owns the building next door, too – and tells me he’s been living in Clinton Hill since his days as a student at Pratt, class of 1953. Long before the crack epidemic that swept the Eighties and the gentrification boom that’s been sweeping the neighborhood since the Nineties, Wood moved in. A self-taught builder and designer, Wood had just quit working as a designer-for-hire so that he could become a full-time artist. Broken Angel, now draped in scaffolding and construction grime, was his studio.
“I took an ordinary, ghetto building – it was a little different, but it was still a ghetto building – and … I set out to build a building that was a little out of the ordinary,” Wood said.
Downing St. is unlike most streets in this area of Brooklyn, sandwiched between the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, because it doesn’t seem to stretch endlessly beyond the horizon. In fact, in an area where streets are snapped to a massive, invisible grid, Downing St. is only 1,000 ft. long, with Wood’s particular block spanning less than 250 ft. It’s Brooklyn’s quaint answer to Manhattan’s Gay St.
Rising from the dead-end, right angle intersection of Downing St. and Quincy St. is the Broken Angel house, a hive of intricate masonry and geometric ecstasy built upon the dilapidated former headquarters of the Brooklyn Trolley. The building’s positioning, towering above the rest of the buildings that line the street, serves as a pedestal for its radical style – one that Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz once described as “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.”
At one time, a five-story web of glass and lumber grew from Broken Angel’s red brick base, reaching toward the sky. But earlier this year, the city ordered Wood to dismantle his contraption. All that’s left of the original is its signature arched, blood-red wooden door, tattooed with a human-sized number “4” and the name “Broken Angel” across its top in snaking white letters. It’s as if Wood took the Feng Shui concept of a welcoming red door and twisted it in a demonic gesture.
“The ongoing joke with my father is that the house is a chick magnet,” said his son, Chris, 32, a stone carver for B&H Art-in-Architecture who spent his childhood in Broken Angel. “There are always beautiful women standing out in front of the house wondering about it. More so than any Lamborghini or Ferrari.”
Broken Angel is, arguably, in command of the entire street – and Arthur Wood is at the helm.
The crude building that gave Wood his home for 28 years – and his relative fame – has received its fair share of celebrity. Its bottle-glass windows have previously appeared in articles in city newspapers and its sculptures have made a cameo in a short documentary in the Sundance Film Festival. Its exposed framework even served as the backdrop to comedian and native son Dave Chappelle’s concert film “Block Party.” But when an Oct. 2006 fire charred much of the building’s upper structure, his architectural efforts drew the ire of the city.
City officials cited numerous building code violations. Wood and his wife, Cynthia, were ordered to vacate. The pair refused. They were taken from their home in handcuffs.
Wood had to dismantle his creation or face demolition.
The war over Broken Angel erupted.
“Broken Angel is again broken, and I’m putting it back together again,” Wood said.
Earlier this year, Wood struck a deal with local developer Shahn Andersen to reconfigure the madcap manor and adjacent building – “The Sunflower House,” Wood calls it, after the sunflower that adorns the building in his blueprints – into condominiums draped in the angular lines and spirit of the original Angel. He’s been hard at work ever since.
“He just said, I’m going to build something ‘great, beautiful and insane,’ ” Andersen, 32, said. “It’s my job to make ‘great, beautiful and insane’ shoehorn into the building code.
“He’s great to work with. He keeps challenging me. He tries to outdo me in the crazy department.”
If it’s a ground-breaking alternative art school Wood wants, then he can at least say that he’s starting with a dormitory.
“There’s a possibility that it can be grander than it was before, within the code,” Wood said. “The idea is to figure out how to do it.”
Wood could say that Brooklyn has high expectations for him.
BIG MAN ON CAMPUS
ARTHUR WOOD is not exactly a picture-perfect example of a university president.
His worn fingernails are caked with dirt and graphite, his oversized sweatshirt hangs off his diminutive frame, and his wiry white hair looks as if it is desperately trying to escape from the woven skullcap restraining it. The press has called him a “mad scientist,” and seated in the Pratt Institute library, studiously scrawling his vision for a Brooklyn art school on a scrap of lined notebook paper, you might be inclined to believe them. Wood is laying out the land that surrounds his tucked-away Downing St. home on a bleached piece of paper, digging into its fibers with the tip of his ballpoint pen in his nervous excitement.
On the sheet’s rudimentary map, a series of boxes, indicating plots of land, surround 4 and 8 Downing St., the two properties that Wood owns that make up the Broken Angel compound. Wood has marked off nearby properties on Quincy St. and Lexington Ave., which parallels Quincy St. to the north. Blue-ink X’s are scattered across the page. Several indicate properties that “Ritchie” and “Myron,” decades-old friends, own. Others mark properties like the enormous, long-standing Salvation Army depot that occupies most of the block.
Wood said he sees these properties as possible lots that, in his opinion, he can expect to make successful offers for in the future. The purpose? To create the campus that Broken Angel could potentially occupy.
He just hasn’t said anything to his neighbors yet. And none of the properties are currently up for sale.
“[Many neighbors] refuse to sell anything,” Wood said. “But [some] certainly would over market value.”
If Wood were to somehow, in some way procure these patches of Brooklyn earth – steadily rising in value as gentrification sweeps past Classon Ave. – he would have the very beginnings of a brick-and-mortar institution.
“There’s a potential for a campus,” Wood said.
But it all begins with the Broken Angel house – the keystone to the project, and an “Old Main” for a school that he said would take tradition, thrash it to pieces and weld it together into cobbled-together structures that signify a new way to study art, architecture, science and music. Wood said the school’s application would be a single, Mensa-style visual puzzle, challenging aspiring artists to slice a round layer cake in six pieces with only three cuts. He also said he wants the crowning monument of the school’s principal building to be an actual Sikorsky Sea King helicopter, repurposed as a glorious, campus-topping sculpture called the “Spining Whale.”
“My reactions to my father are often, ‘Oh my God, you’re crazy,’ ” his son, Chris, said. “But then he actually makes it happen. He constantly amazes me with what he’s able to do and accomplish.”
“If he had $30 million in his pocket, a lot of people would take his school consideration more seriously.”
Wood said he wants the six ton chopper to represent the ability to fly high and achieve. But really, the helicopter is a vehicle into the life and times of a man who’d rather fly a bit differently than the rest of the world around him.
BEGINNINGS
NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Arthur Wood made his first appearance in New York City much like many of his fellow New Yorkers: without papers. The Saratoga Springs, N.Y. native – “It’s a gambling town, and we considered New Yorkers yokels,” he said, chuckling – showed up on the Pratt Institute campus in 1950 without any invitation to step foot on its lush, brick-lined lawns. Just weeks earlier, Wood had been flat-out rejected from the private art school, but he was determined to take the advice of his father – an interior decorator who said not to “mess with lower beings” – and make his case to whoever he could. He chose to take the trip to Brooklyn and start the appeal process in the dean’s office – without an appointment.
“He says, ‘You’ve been rejected.’ I says, ‘How unfortunate,’ ” Wood said, noting his younger self’s sarcasm. “He says, ‘You know? I like you. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to override this and put you in a class. Don’t let me down.’ And I says, ‘That’s inconceivable.’ ”
Three years later, Wood walked away from Pratt a graduate, a bronze dean’s medal in hand. While the ink was still drying on his diploma for illustration – and the Korean War simmered overseas – Wood made the impulsive decision to take an Air Force test to be a jet pilot.
“I just took it to see if I could pass it,” he said. “I got a hundred.”
Wood was admitted to the Army as an engineer for the Air Force, and sent to Missouri and California to train in disarming high explosives. At just under 5 ft. 2 in., his ultimate mission was to crawl under machine gun fire to dig up mines in South Korea. With little to gain from coming back in pieces, Wood said he did everything he could during training to disrupt progress that would lead to a trip overseas.
“The object [of the training exercise] was to disarm them, and what I did was, I set them all off,” he said. “My unit came in last [place]…a hundred men came up to me one by one and thanked me,” noting that many of his fellow soldiers didn’t want to go to Korea, either.
But the war overseas was losing steam. A plane crash at the base killed the majority of his fellow trainees before deployment. Wood was assigned to a deactivated company.
He would never go to Korea.
“I did as much as I could to stay safe,” he said. “Maybe I should have gone and have had my head blown off. I didn’t trust someone else’s ability to dig up mines right next to me.”
If the armed forces nearly killed Wood while he served, it would nourish him with a college education afterward. Freshly released from service in California in 1955, Wood made his triumphant return to New York City and the arts behind the force of the G.I. Bill. Wood enrolled to study lithography at Teachers College of Columbia University and signed on as a staff designer for Wedgwood, the British pottery firm, at $140 per week. It was there, and not Pratt, where he really learned how to draw, Wood said.
“I learned to draw with a pen as an engraver,” he said. “I did commemorative plates of colleges, so I drew approximately 500 buildings. Each building was reproduced at least 3,000 times, so there’s five million pieces of my drawings [in] china, which is going to last longer than my paintings anyway.”
Wood said he also made models for Tiffany and Co., including a footing for a Paul Revere bowl that became one of the longest in-stock items the company ever had.
“I wasn’t allowed to sign it, but I did,” he said. “I signed that, and I signed everything at Wedgwood, too.”
Wood’s son, Chris, said Wood left more than just a name engraved in his work.
“He would etch little love messages in the plates to my mother,” he said. “Those are probably not even known by Wedgwood to even exist.” The couple married in 1959.
But underneath it all, the unsettled Wood really wanted to become a full-time painter, so he quit his job and began assembling a scheme that would help him subsist without an income. Wood said he went to the Pratt and Columbia cafeterias for food, dumpster-dived at Pratt for discarded oil paint tubes, made rounds at mailboxes and newsstands for rubber bands and wire and asked the New York Daily News press boss for newsprint end-runs that he could cut up and use as pads.
“I spent the next 46 years without spending any money,” he said. “I could tell you how to live in New York without money.”
Moving into an $8-per-week studio apartment on Seventh Ave. between 54th and 55th streets, Wood began an early trial run at pushing the limits, literally, of a New York property. Wood said he built the apartment out over the roof of his building for more space, without permission from his landlord. When his building superintendent finally inquired a month later, noticing darkness coming from the attic window that Wood had covered up, Wood was quick to come up with a reason: that a bulb had blown out.
“What I did was I had to associate it with maintenance, so it would become a maintenance problem,” he said, adding it could be months before the maintenance staff fixed anything. “I took over the entire roof of the building ‘cause nobody else was up there.”
Meanwhile, Wood started to sell his paintings by the bunch to galleries, such as the Louis K. Meisel Gallery on Prince St.
“The first year alone, I made $10,000,” he said. “I painted approximately 7,000 paintings, and then I decided I wanted to become a ‘painter’s painter’…so alternately, I’m either very rich, or very poor.”
With extra time on his hands, Wood spent his hours at Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village, observing his contemporaries of the day: Jackson Pollack, who always came into the bar with paint-splattered shoes; Franz Kline, who regularly a ring of smoke around his head; and Willem de Kooning, who was never far from a buxom blonde, he said.
“I used to go there with a red scarf like a bohemian,” Wood said. “I was mainly checking out the scene, seeing what happens and what artist life was about.”
Motivated by his competition – Wood said he liked to challenge others that the backs of his paintings were more attractive than the fronts of theirs – Wood soon moved his business to art dealers, who took his paintings 25 or 30 at a time – or as many as he could carry, Wood said. “I once had a one-man show in Cannes without even knowing it,” he said.
“Some old movies, you’ll actually see his paintings in them,” his son, Chris, said. “Flop houses bought them. One of his posters for an art show showed up at the Salvation Army.”
But the industry soon became tiresome. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1968. His son Christopher was born seven years later. Wood said he decided to put down his paintbrush and pick up a camera, regularly shooting models in his studio through the Seventies and Eighties, including a then-unknown Madonna Ciccone.
“He was a bit of a womanizer,” his son, Chris, said. “I used to ask him what was going on in a picture, and he used to say, ‘Oh, art project.’
“[His life] kind of reminds me a lot of the movie ‘Big Fish’ – it’s kind of half-true, but in the end, it’s all true.”
By 1979, Wood and his family went searching for a new home in Clinton Hill. They found it at 4 Downing St.
DRAFTING BLUEPRINTS
It’s 4 a.m., and Brooklyn is asleep. The G train rumbles deep underground, a gale of wind softly blows a page from the Village Voice down Grand St., and the sun has not yet begun to stretch beyond the horizon. But Arthur Wood is awake. A moment ago, he came inside his temporary residence, having fed and taken out the dogs, and now he’s treating himself to bacon, eggs, toast and coffee. Usually, Wood eats oatmeal with banana stirred into it, but every fourth day, he likes to make the change.
By 6:30, Wood’s construction boots are laced and his hardhat is in hand. He’s back at Broken Angel, looking over the building before the twelve construction workers that he’s hired will arrive to begin their day’s work. His day is hectic, and while workers paint and hammer and grunt with sweat, Wood is busy scrawling furiously on a piece of paper. As a part of the renovation deal, he’s been asked to design one of the apartments, and he’s hard at work putting the final touches on his signature contribution to Broken Angel’s new life.
“I want people to come to the head of Quincy St. and say, ‘Wow,’ ” he said. “They’re going to do that when the building is finished.”
Wood is anxious to see progress. He gets a unit of his choosing in the new Broken Angel and the entire building next door, a two-family unit at 8 Downing St. that sits atop what he’s planned as a “Broken Angel museum.” Wood said it will display memorabilia from the house and his artwork.
“If I don’t ever get to do what I want to do,” he said, noting his age, “[the museum] will be there.”
In the meantime, Wood isn’t watching the clock. He’s moving forward at breakneck speed, eager to return to living in his rehabilitated creation and plan his next move toward creating an alternative art institute that would be known only as “Broken Angel.” Wood has drafted the blueprints in his head. All he needs is a little momentum.
“I think he’s really courageous,” said neighbor Danny Simmons, brother of hip-hop mogul Russell and arts philanthropist who lives and owns a gallery on Grand St. “It was his heart and soul in a piece of art. That kind of dedication to the arts is very rare.”
And if the possibility arrives that Wood may not see his college to completion, he’s prepared to cede control of his vision to a successor – with one caveat, of course: a bronze bust of himself to be placed in a conspicuous place on campus.
“I’d be shown pointing my finger in the sky,” Wood said, chuckling. “Pointing to another bust of me.”
The President of Clinton Hill
This is an unpublished, original feature story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
ARTHUR WOOD remembers that he wanted to be president.
Not the kind that runs a nation and lives on Capitol Hill, but the kind of visionary president that runs a university of his own design and lives on a different kind of hill – Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Wood and I are sitting on the third floor of the library at the Pratt Institute, and I’m desperately trying to steer our conversation toward the subject of his own life. For a man with a neighborhood reputation as an outspoken rebel artist who has remarkable incompatibility with the status quo – and at times, the law – Wood really knows how to deflect questions about his private life. I begin to ask him a question about his childhood, but he abruptly cuts me off, the way the crack of a ruler against a desk straightens up a classroom full of slouching children.
“Listen,” he says, repositioning his plastic magenta sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. “A problem has three major steps. You know what you want to start with. Edison wanted to make electric light, and the end result was a light for everyone. But in between, he didn’t know how to do it.”
I can feel my conversational grip on Wood slipping again as he redirects the topic of our conversation toward his notorious home, Broken Angel. Over decades, the radically-designed four-story brick tenement of his construction became a neighborhood attraction and a City Hall irritation. But this is the way 76-year-old Wood speaks – in extended metaphor. I listen silently.
“Charlie Pratt, who designed Pratt Institute, made his money in kerosene and he wanted to establish an educational facility similar to Cooper Union,” he says. “So, this building was his main building, and it was designed to be a shoe factory if it failed. From the very beginning, he generated his own power. They still produce about a third of their own power right now.
“On the other hand, Peter Cooper, who started Cooper Union, was a visionary. For instance, he knew that someone would invent the elevator. Cooper Union has a round elevator because Peter Cooper thought it’d be round … the main hall at Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave a major address, the hall is filled with pillars, and the roof is held up with steel – the first use of steel in a major building. You could take every one of those pillars out and the roof wouldn’t fall down. He was cautious.”
At this point, I’m wondering how far Wood is going to take me off track. With a smirk, he continues.
“Cooper Union is free, and one thing I like about it is if you don’t maintain an 80 average, you’re out of there. Okay?” he says, slamming his notepad down on the table. “So what I wanted to do with Broken Angel was establish a post-graduate educational facility. So after you finish college with all of your beers and parties and drinking and carousing and wasting your parents’ money, you go out in the world, and you encompass the major problems in developing anything you’re trying to develop. So what you do is, you come to Broken Angel, and we will solve your problems.”
Now I’m starting to get it. Wood had previously mentioned over the phone that the Broken Angel house was just the beginning of something greater. Now, that something greater was his own alternative art school. But at this point, the fact that he recently had to dismantle his headline-grabbing house hasn’t even come up. At least not yet.
“I have methods of education and also my own personal methods, because I’m entirely self-taught, and I’ve invented a lot of things,” he says, gesturing toward a metal contraption sitting on the table between us that, inside, is a pocket-sized art studio, complete with tungsten carbide pencil, a 50 ft. roll of quadrille paper, watercolor and brush. “The process that I use is very logical. The best place to hide anything is right in front of you.”
I reach for solid ground. “So now we’re talking about Broken Angel.”
He looks up. “You said this wasn’t going to be about Broken Angel!”
FALLEN, BROKEN ANGEL
WOOD AND I are standing outside his hulking home at 4 Downing St., five blocks south of the Pratt campus. The Army veteran gestures toward his ramshackle “estate” – he owns the building next door, too – and tells me he’s been living in Clinton Hill since his days as a student at Pratt, class of 1953. Long before the crack epidemic that swept the Eighties and the gentrification boom that’s been sweeping the neighborhood since the Nineties, Wood moved in. A self-taught builder and designer, Wood had just quit working as a designer-for-hire so that he could become a full-time artist. Broken Angel, now draped in scaffolding and construction grime, was his studio.
“I took an ordinary, ghetto building – it was a little different, but it was still a ghetto building – and … I set out to build a building that was a little out of the ordinary,” Wood said.
Downing St. is unlike most streets in this area of Brooklyn, sandwiched between the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, because it doesn’t seem to stretch endlessly beyond the horizon. In fact, in an area where streets are snapped to a massive, invisible grid, Downing St. is only 1,000 ft. long, with Wood’s particular block spanning less than 250 ft. It’s Brooklyn’s quaint answer to Manhattan’s Gay St.
Rising from the dead-end, right angle intersection of Downing St. and Quincy St. is the Broken Angel house, a hive of intricate masonry and geometric ecstasy built upon the dilapidated former headquarters of the Brooklyn Trolley. The building’s positioning, towering above the rest of the buildings that line the street, serves as a pedestal for its radical style – one that Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz once described as “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.”
At one time, a five-story web of glass and lumber grew from Broken Angel’s red brick base, reaching toward the sky. But earlier this year, the city ordered Wood to dismantle his contraption. All that’s left of the original is its signature arched, blood-red wooden door, tattooed with a human-sized number “4” and the name “Broken Angel” across its top in snaking white letters. It’s as if Wood took the Feng Shui concept of a welcoming red door and twisted it in a demonic gesture.
“The ongoing joke with my father is that the house is a chick magnet,” said his son, Chris, 32, a stone carver for B&H Art-in-Architecture who spent his childhood in Broken Angel. “There are always beautiful women standing out in front of the house wondering about it. More so than any Lamborghini or Ferrari.”
Broken Angel is, arguably, in command of the entire street – and Arthur Wood is at the helm.
The crude building that gave Wood his home for 28 years – and his relative fame – has received its fair share of celebrity. Its bottle-glass windows have previously appeared in articles in city newspapers and its sculptures have made a cameo in a short documentary in the Sundance Film Festival. Its exposed framework even served as the backdrop to comedian and native son Dave Chappelle’s concert film “Block Party.” But when an Oct. 2006 fire charred much of the building’s upper structure, his architectural efforts drew the ire of the city.
City officials cited numerous building code violations. Wood and his wife, Cynthia, were ordered to vacate. The pair refused. They were taken from their home in handcuffs.
Wood had to dismantle his creation or face demolition.
The war over Broken Angel erupted.
“Broken Angel is again broken, and I’m putting it back together again,” Wood said.
Earlier this year, Wood struck a deal with local developer Shahn Andersen to reconfigure the madcap manor and adjacent building – “The Sunflower House,” Wood calls it, after the sunflower that adorns the building in his blueprints – into condominiums draped in the angular lines and spirit of the original Angel. He’s been hard at work ever since.
“He just said, I’m going to build something ‘great, beautiful and insane,’ ” Andersen, 32, said. “It’s my job to make ‘great, beautiful and insane’ shoehorn into the building code.
“He’s great to work with. He keeps challenging me. He tries to outdo me in the crazy department.”
If it’s a ground-breaking alternative art school Wood wants, then he can at least say that he’s starting with a dormitory.
“There’s a possibility that it can be grander than it was before, within the code,” Wood said. “The idea is to figure out how to do it.”
Wood could say that Brooklyn has high expectations for him.
BIG MAN ON CAMPUS
ARTHUR WOOD is not exactly a picture-perfect example of a university president.
His worn fingernails are caked with dirt and graphite, his oversized sweatshirt hangs off his diminutive frame, and his wiry white hair looks as if it is desperately trying to escape from the woven skullcap restraining it. The press has called him a “mad scientist,” and seated in the Pratt Institute library, studiously scrawling his vision for a Brooklyn art school on a scrap of lined notebook paper, you might be inclined to believe them. Wood is laying out the land that surrounds his tucked-away Downing St. home on a bleached piece of paper, digging into its fibers with the tip of his ballpoint pen in his nervous excitement.
On the sheet’s rudimentary map, a series of boxes, indicating plots of land, surround 4 and 8 Downing St., the two properties that Wood owns that make up the Broken Angel compound. Wood has marked off nearby properties on Quincy St. and Lexington Ave., which parallels Quincy St. to the north. Blue-ink X’s are scattered across the page. Several indicate properties that “Ritchie” and “Myron,” decades-old friends, own. Others mark properties like the enormous, long-standing Salvation Army depot that occupies most of the block.
Wood said he sees these properties as possible lots that, in his opinion, he can expect to make successful offers for in the future. The purpose? To create the campus that Broken Angel could potentially occupy.
He just hasn’t said anything to his neighbors yet. And none of the properties are currently up for sale.
“[Many neighbors] refuse to sell anything,” Wood said. “But [some] certainly would over market value.”
If Wood were to somehow, in some way procure these patches of Brooklyn earth – steadily rising in value as gentrification sweeps past Classon Ave. – he would have the very beginnings of a brick-and-mortar institution.
“There’s a potential for a campus,” Wood said.
But it all begins with the Broken Angel house – the keystone to the project, and an “Old Main” for a school that he said would take tradition, thrash it to pieces and weld it together into cobbled-together structures that signify a new way to study art, architecture, science and music. Wood said the school’s application would be a single, Mensa-style visual puzzle, challenging aspiring artists to slice a round layer cake in six pieces with only three cuts. He also said he wants the crowning monument of the school’s principal building to be an actual Sikorsky Sea King helicopter, repurposed as a glorious, campus-topping sculpture called the “Spining Whale.”
“My reactions to my father are often, ‘Oh my God, you’re crazy,’ ” his son, Chris, said. “But then he actually makes it happen. He constantly amazes me with what he’s able to do and accomplish.”
“If he had $30 million in his pocket, a lot of people would take his school consideration more seriously.”
Wood said he wants the six ton chopper to represent the ability to fly high and achieve. But really, the helicopter is a vehicle into the life and times of a man who’d rather fly a bit differently than the rest of the world around him.
BEGINNINGS
NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Arthur Wood made his first appearance in New York City much like many of his fellow New Yorkers: without papers. The Saratoga Springs, N.Y. native – “It’s a gambling town, and we considered New Yorkers yokels,” he said, chuckling – showed up on the Pratt Institute campus in 1950 without any invitation to step foot on its lush, brick-lined lawns. Just weeks earlier, Wood had been flat-out rejected from the private art school, but he was determined to take the advice of his father – an interior decorator who said not to “mess with lower beings” – and make his case to whoever he could. He chose to take the trip to Brooklyn and start the appeal process in the dean’s office – without an appointment.
“He says, ‘You’ve been rejected.’ I says, ‘How unfortunate,’ ” Wood said, noting his younger self’s sarcasm. “He says, ‘You know? I like you. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to override this and put you in a class. Don’t let me down.’ And I says, ‘That’s inconceivable.’ ”
Three years later, Wood walked away from Pratt a graduate, a bronze dean’s medal in hand. While the ink was still drying on his diploma for illustration – and the Korean War simmered overseas – Wood made the impulsive decision to take an Air Force test to be a jet pilot.
“I just took it to see if I could pass it,” he said. “I got a hundred.”
Wood was admitted to the Army as an engineer for the Air Force, and sent to Missouri and California to train in disarming high explosives. At just under 5 ft. 2 in., his ultimate mission was to crawl under machine gun fire to dig up mines in South Korea. With little to gain from coming back in pieces, Wood said he did everything he could during training to disrupt progress that would lead to a trip overseas.
“The object [of the training exercise] was to disarm them, and what I did was, I set them all off,” he said. “My unit came in last [place]…a hundred men came up to me one by one and thanked me,” noting that many of his fellow soldiers didn’t want to go to Korea, either.
But the war overseas was losing steam. A plane crash at the base killed the majority of his fellow trainees before deployment. Wood was assigned to a deactivated company.
He would never go to Korea.
“I did as much as I could to stay safe,” he said. “Maybe I should have gone and have had my head blown off. I didn’t trust someone else’s ability to dig up mines right next to me.”
If the armed forces nearly killed Wood while he served, it would nourish him with a college education afterward. Freshly released from service in California in 1955, Wood made his triumphant return to New York City and the arts behind the force of the G.I. Bill. Wood enrolled to study lithography at Teachers College of Columbia University and signed on as a staff designer for Wedgwood, the British pottery firm, at $140 per week. It was there, and not Pratt, where he really learned how to draw, Wood said.
“I learned to draw with a pen as an engraver,” he said. “I did commemorative plates of colleges, so I drew approximately 500 buildings. Each building was reproduced at least 3,000 times, so there’s five million pieces of my drawings [in] china, which is going to last longer than my paintings anyway.”
Wood said he also made models for Tiffany and Co., including a footing for a Paul Revere bowl that became one of the longest in-stock items the company ever had.
“I wasn’t allowed to sign it, but I did,” he said. “I signed that, and I signed everything at Wedgwood, too.”
Wood’s son, Chris, said Wood left more than just a name engraved in his work.
“He would etch little love messages in the plates to my mother,” he said. “Those are probably not even known by Wedgwood to even exist.” The couple married in 1959.
But underneath it all, the unsettled Wood really wanted to become a full-time painter, so he quit his job and began assembling a scheme that would help him subsist without an income. Wood said he went to the Pratt and Columbia cafeterias for food, dumpster-dived at Pratt for discarded oil paint tubes, made rounds at mailboxes and newsstands for rubber bands and wire and asked the New York Daily News press boss for newsprint end-runs that he could cut up and use as pads.
“I spent the next 46 years without spending any money,” he said. “I could tell you how to live in New York without money.”
Moving into an $8-per-week studio apartment on Seventh Ave. between 54th and 55th streets, Wood began an early trial run at pushing the limits, literally, of a New York property. Wood said he built the apartment out over the roof of his building for more space, without permission from his landlord. When his building superintendent finally inquired a month later, noticing darkness coming from the attic window that Wood had covered up, Wood was quick to come up with a reason: that a bulb had blown out.
“What I did was I had to associate it with maintenance, so it would become a maintenance problem,” he said, adding it could be months before the maintenance staff fixed anything. “I took over the entire roof of the building ‘cause nobody else was up there.”
Meanwhile, Wood started to sell his paintings by the bunch to galleries, such as the Louis K. Meisel Gallery on Prince St.
“The first year alone, I made $10,000,” he said. “I painted approximately 7,000 paintings, and then I decided I wanted to become a ‘painter’s painter’…so alternately, I’m either very rich, or very poor.”
With extra time on his hands, Wood spent his hours at Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village, observing his contemporaries of the day: Jackson Pollack, who always came into the bar with paint-splattered shoes; Franz Kline, who regularly a ring of smoke around his head; and Willem de Kooning, who was never far from a buxom blonde, he said.
“I used to go there with a red scarf like a bohemian,” Wood said. “I was mainly checking out the scene, seeing what happens and what artist life was about.”
Motivated by his competition – Wood said he liked to challenge others that the backs of his paintings were more attractive than the fronts of theirs – Wood soon moved his business to art dealers, who took his paintings 25 or 30 at a time – or as many as he could carry, Wood said. “I once had a one-man show in Cannes without even knowing it,” he said.
“Some old movies, you’ll actually see his paintings in them,” his son, Chris, said. “Flop houses bought them. One of his posters for an art show showed up at the Salvation Army.”
But the industry soon became tiresome. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1968. His son Christopher was born seven years later. Wood said he decided to put down his paintbrush and pick up a camera, regularly shooting models in his studio through the Seventies and Eighties, including a then-unknown Madonna Ciccone.
“He was a bit of a womanizer,” his son, Chris, said. “I used to ask him what was going on in a picture, and he used to say, ‘Oh, art project.’
“[His life] kind of reminds me a lot of the movie ‘Big Fish’ – it’s kind of half-true, but in the end, it’s all true.”
By 1979, Wood and his family went searching for a new home in Clinton Hill. They found it at 4 Downing St.
DRAFTING BLUEPRINTS
It’s 4 a.m., and Brooklyn is asleep. The G train rumbles deep underground, a gale of wind softly blows a page from the Village Voice down Grand St., and the sun has not yet begun to stretch beyond the horizon. But Arthur Wood is awake. A moment ago, he came inside his temporary residence, having fed and taken out the dogs, and now he’s treating himself to bacon, eggs, toast and coffee. Usually, Wood eats oatmeal with banana stirred into it, but every fourth day, he likes to make the change.
By 6:30, Wood’s construction boots are laced and his hardhat is in hand. He’s back at Broken Angel, looking over the building before the twelve construction workers that he’s hired will arrive to begin their day’s work. His day is hectic, and while workers paint and hammer and grunt with sweat, Wood is busy scrawling furiously on a piece of paper. As a part of the renovation deal, he’s been asked to design one of the apartments, and he’s hard at work putting the final touches on his signature contribution to Broken Angel’s new life.
“I want people to come to the head of Quincy St. and say, ‘Wow,’ ” he said. “They’re going to do that when the building is finished.”
Wood is anxious to see progress. He gets a unit of his choosing in the new Broken Angel and the entire building next door, a two-family unit at 8 Downing St. that sits atop what he’s planned as a “Broken Angel museum.” Wood said it will display memorabilia from the house and his artwork.
“If I don’t ever get to do what I want to do,” he said, noting his age, “[the museum] will be there.”
In the meantime, Wood isn’t watching the clock. He’s moving forward at breakneck speed, eager to return to living in his rehabilitated creation and plan his next move toward creating an alternative art institute that would be known only as “Broken Angel.” Wood has drafted the blueprints in his head. All he needs is a little momentum.
“I think he’s really courageous,” said neighbor Danny Simmons, brother of hip-hop mogul Russell and arts philanthropist who lives and owns a gallery on Grand St. “It was his heart and soul in a piece of art. That kind of dedication to the arts is very rare.”
And if the possibility arrives that Wood may not see his college to completion, he’s prepared to cede control of his vision to a successor – with one caveat, of course: a bronze bust of himself to be placed in a conspicuous place on campus.
“I’d be shown pointing my finger in the sky,” Wood said, chuckling. “Pointing to another bust of me.”