ART DECO GRANDEUR RESTORED The walls of the billiard room at the Beacon, a condo conversion in Jersey City, are encircled by a frieze called ?From Myth to Medicine.?





The former grand theater area has been turned into an event and movie-screening space for residents.

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Condos With Deco in the Details

By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
The New York Times
January 13, 2008

CONSIDER the process involved in the historical restoration of just one detail ? the gilding on beams and moldings in the theater ? at the former medical center here, now being transformed into the Beacon residential complex.

?Paint ages over time, and it discolors,? said Ulana Zakalak, a restoration specialist who is a consultant on the project.

Because the eight Art Deco buildings at the complex are designated landmarks, and the developer, Metrovest Equities, is applying for historic preservation tax credits, it was essential to discern and reproduce precisely the original colors and sheens, Ms. Zakalak said.

"For every surface, an X-Acto blade was used to carve out a small sliver of paint, down to the wood,? she said. ?The paint sample was pasted in Lucite and filed down to the edge to get a stratification of the layers. The cross section was put under a microscope to examine every paint layer, and matched to a color guide for modern paints.?

?The gilding was the most tricky to match,? Ms. Zakalak said, because it was not true gold leaf, but some sort of alloy.

The towering medical center buildings were built during the Depression ? at the behest of the legendary Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, who leaned on his ?good friend,? Franklin D. Roosevelt ? at a time when gold was too precious to use as mere d?cor.

The paint and plaster foreman, Johnny Hilares of Evergreen Studios, experimented for weeks with various mixtures and glazes before he hit on the right formula, Ms. Zakalak said.

Meanwhile, the chipped and crumbling plaster moldings on the theater?s ceilings and walls each had to be repaired or reproduced, and the bronze Deco light fixtures ? some painted over and covered with globs of melted plastic that had replaced the original glass ? had to be cleaned, reglazed and rewired.

Today, the theater looks resplendent ? as it did 70 years ago, Ms. Zakalak said. Beacon residents use the once bedraggled space, which served as a makeshift triage center after Sept. 11, for community events.

Two hundred people are now living in the first building restored at the complex, set atop the Palisades ridge near Journal Square. Seventy more have signed purchase agreements for condominiums in the building, which is 90 percent sold, according to Metrovest?s chief executive, George Filopoulos. Sales are to open soon for a second building.

Eventually, 1,100 units will be created inside the tall stone structures ? some of them rentals ? and 80,000 square feet of retail space will be added. This makes the Beacon the largest historic renovation project currently under way in the country, according to officials with the National Park Service, which oversees the federal tax credit program.

?The project is both monumental in size and intricately detailed,? said Mr. Filopoulos, whose company began the restoration effort four years ago. ?It can be overwhelming at times.?

But, in the words of Ms. Zakalak, who bought a condo at the first building shortly after she began working on it, ?it gets under your skin.?

She and Mr. Filopoulos imagine this must have been the case for the workers and artisans who created the original buildings.

A magnificent bas-relief frieze, circling the walls near the ceiling of what is now the Beacon?s billiard room, was recently cleaned and restored.

The sculpture, called ?From Myth to Medicine,? has hand-carved images ranging from cavemen to Pandora opening her box, from the grim reaper to the foo dog, from the Native American medicine man to the hospital surgeon.

Fashioned by out-of-work artists hired through the federal Works Progress Administration, the bas-relief was evidently unsigned ? as was the custom with W.P.A. work.

?It is such an incredible piece, though, we constantly looked for a name,? Ms. Zakalak said. ?All during the cleaning process, over four years, we looked.?

Then, literally at the last moment ? 8 p.m. on a Friday, when the work was being given a final dusting because of a public event scheduled the next day, and Mr. Hilares was up on a lift checking for errant specks ? he spotted a minuscule signature carved in script at the edge of the image of a cloud: Allen George Newman.

Mr. Newman was a prominent sculptor in the 1920s and ?30s. He created the Henry Hudson monument that stands at the corner of 72nd Street and Riverside Drive in New York City, as well as various war memorial statues for cities around the country.

?Obviously,? Ms. Zakalak said, ?he put his heart and soul into this project ? done in anonymity, too.?

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