Angel Escobar makes his way to the Stoneyard
As a boy growing up in East Harlem, Angel Escobar would look across 112th Street at the looming structure rising on Morningside Heights to the West. “When I was small, I used to wonder what that big thing was,” he said. A few years later, he would pick up a mallet and chisel to help build the tower at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “I never thought I would be working at the church,” Angel adds.
“I was hanging out a lot on the streets by the time I was in my teens. My mother had died and I dropped out of school,” Angel remembers. “I had to do for myself.”
“Me, I didn’t like being in the street. So when I heard the Renegades had given up their chains and stopped fighting to do something for the community, I found out about it,” Angel continues.
A New York Times article reported, “a youth gang called the Renegades (sometimes spelled Renigades) is using city loan funds and their own labor to create new homes for their families out of a battered and abandoned East Harlem tenement.” This was the beginning of “sweat equity” or “urban homesteading” and Angel started learning the building trades. The outfit he was working for went out of business and the owner recommended that Angel apply to the Cathedral’s Stoneyard program. Coincidentally, the same NYT article also stated “the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine announced plans to support sweat‐equity rehabilitations over the next two years that would involve 200 abandoned slum buildings that contain 3,000 apartments.”
Angel would now be working at the big church on top of the hill.
As a trainee, the soft spoken and introverted Angel moved limestone blocks around the machinery shop and drove the crane and forklift that transported finished stones from the cutting shed to the stacks by the side of the Cathedral for the first two years.
Angel would occasionally be treated to homemade lunch brought to the Stoneyard by his wife Maritza and oldest daughter Angela, who remembers walking through the Cathedral to get to the Stoneyard. As a 5-year-old, “I was afraid of the huge stone statues,” she said.
Initially, Angel was intimidated by Master Mason Alan Bird, the primary instructor for the apprentices, and was reluctant to move into stone cutting. “I was scared to be a stonecutter,” he said, “because Alan was so strict, you made a mistake he’d get on your case. I didn’t want to cut stone; I was scared to cut it. I didn’t want to make mistakes.”
Angel credits Ruben Gibson, a fellow apprentice who started shortly after Angel, for helping him overcome his fears. “Ruben put it in me, he put confidence in me. He made me a stonecutter. He believed in me. I loved Ruben,” Angel said.
Once Angel started working as a banker mason, he got help from others.
Timothy Smith recalls that Angel could cut his stones exactly up to the zinc template measurements – but Angel needed some lessons in fractions. At first, Angel had trouble understanding that the larger the number of the fraction, the smaller the measurement actually was. Timothy gave Angel a tutorial on a whiteboard: ½ inch is larger than ¼ inch and 1/64 inch is smaller than 1/32 inch. Angel caught on quickly.
Eddie Pizarro, another stonecutter from East Harlem, compliments Angel’s cutting skills: “To me, Angel had the best boasting pattern. Very neat. All his finished stones looked the same. He always had a steady hand for boasting the stone.”
Angel also got direction from José Tapia. “He taught me a lot,” he reminisces.
Angel refers to José as “my brother” because José lived with Angel’s family after José’s parents died in an auto accident in Puerto Rico. Angel’s mother and José’s mother were sisters, so Angel’s mother “took him (José) in, a cousin, but raised by my family,” Angel explains.
José also brought in another member of the extended family to the Stoneyard when Eddie Pizarro, another cousin, came on board. All three share the same paternal grandparents who were from Ponce, PR.
According to Eddie, the cousins “all had different opinions; we were raised to use what you are good at and make a living in the construction field. The Stoneyard united us and Angel kept us focused,” he said. “I remember (Angel) telling us we are here (at the Stoneyard) to make history and we will always be remembered and, to this day, it is true.”
As Angel’s skills and confidence grew cutting intricate blocks in the cutting shed, another opportunity came up and, once again, Ruben Gibson provided the necessary push.
The Cathedral program needed to start training some apprentice stonecutters in the art of stone carving. Following a blind carving competition, Master Carver Nicholas Fairplay, recognizing Angel’s potential, named him a candidate for the carving program.
“I was scared to do carving, but then again Ruben came in and put confidence in me and started teaching me. It was kind of easy for me because I used to draw faces on the stones and Ruben picked up on that. Ruben had a way of getting to me,” Angel said. “The way Ruben explained stuff, he made it seem easy. Ruben wanted me in the (carving) shed bad!”
However, Angel was not ready to give up working in the cutting shed so he moved between cutting and carving as the needs dictated. Angel could just as easily cut a springer or tracery stone as he could carve foliage on a crocket or create a unique Gothic face on a cornice stone. Angel must have been very happy to work in the carving shed when his mentor Ruben became lead carver.
In the summer months when construction on the tower was the focus, Angel occasionally worked topside moving stones from below to the construction floor or helping to set stones. This may have been his least favorite job: “I’m afraid of heights,” he confessed.
There was significant upheaval in the Stoneyard towards the end of the 1980s when funding for the tower construction dried up. Dean James Parks Morton invited David M. Teitelbaum, a real estate developer with an interest in urban preservation, to expand the Stoneyard. The partnership, Cathedral Stoneworks, worked on outside jobs, such as the Jewish Museum, with part of the profits to be plowed back into the cathedral and allow tower construction to resume.
During the years of Cathedral Stoneworks, Angel took on new responsibilities. The reluctant stonecutter and the hesitant stonecarver stepped up. In a promotional brochure Angel said, “Now I’m lead cutter, teaching the apprentices and still learning.”
Teitelbaum invested heavily in advanced machinery but a real estate crash in 1990 devastated financing for cathedral building and outside building projects, forcing him to close the shop around 1993.
Afterwards, Angel worked briefly at a downtown antiques gallery installing fireplaces but he did not stay long. It was a “pretty nice job, but it wasn’t like the Stoneyard,” he recalls. He moved on to freelance construction jobs but no more stone cutting.
Looking back over his 13-year career at the Cathedral, Angel would have loved teaching the next generation of stonecutters if the program had continued, a role he saw for himself. “It’s a skill that you never forget,” he said.
Asked if he thought the Cathedral would ever resume rebuilding, Angel ponders, “perhaps…that’s the way churches work.”
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- New York Times – January 25, 1974
- New York Times – February 23, 2001
- Cathedral Stoneworks brochure
One reply on ““EVERY TIME I FINISH A STONE, IT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD””
Apart from being one of the nicest guys you could hope to work with, Angel could always be relied upon to turn out a first rate, crisp and neat piece of finished work. Even the visiting French artisans of the Compagnons were impressed by his skill.