Henry Kissinger's Light Fixture

I wish I had taken a photo of it to show you.  Unfortunately, the day after I took it off the ceiling it was the ‘bulk pick up day’ and I threw it out before I thought of documenting it.   Regardless, I am sure you have seen a dozen just like it.  Oak frame, with an oak ‘egg crate’ patterned lens cover.  It took four fluorescent lamps and had a milky white Lexan lens.  Very popular in the 70’s and 80’s.  It matched the finish of the kitchen cabinets perfectly and if it was strictly up to me it would have been there for ever, but the kitchen belongs to the ‘little woman’ (in fact everything belongs to the ‘little woman’ while we ‘men’ fool ourselves into thinking we have possession, or control of anything at all!) and she has been on me about how ‘dated’ that fixture looks for so long that she finally wore me down.  It was easier to take it out, pay for new recessed lighting, open the sheet rock and rewire the ceiling, install the lighting, close the sheet rock, tape it, and repaint the entire ceiling than it was to listen to it any more!  I will admit-but please don’t tell her I said so-that the kitchen looks wonderful now.  But if I admit that I will end up replacing the countertops and all the appliances as well and I would rather die…

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, the light fixture.  I got it out of a demolition job at 1345 Avenue of the Americas.  It had been the offices of a large law firm and was soon to be the latest in a series of floors taken over by Sanwa Bank.  The bank was eating up space as soon as it became available in that building.   The competition for the space was keen and as fast as the old school American companies were going belly up the Japanese were taking up the slack. 

Right wingers across the continent were predicting the enslavement of the American working class and world domination by the Yellow Tide.  Japanese Trading companies, banks, automobile manufacturing companies, design/construction firms, you name it.  They were in the U.S. to do business and business in the U.S. meant a headquarters in New York City.  My life in construction was fifty per-cent trading floors for the U.S. stock traders (Smith Barney, Donaldson-Lufkin, First Boston, Alliance Capital…etc) and fifty per-cent Japanese banks.  Didn’t make any difference to me so long as the pay check was on time and I could keep on churning out the spaces.   I learned to bow to the architects at Takishimia and argue with the architects from Gensler.  Made no never mind.  Just keep on building.

So I was ripping out this law firm and in one of the offices I noticed the light fixture.  I had been spray painting the walls with a can of red paint to indicate which walls had to be taken out and which ones had to be left alone.  The demolition crew would be in the building in a few hours and I had to have it marked before they could start destroying.  If you didn’t have it properly marked it could be a disaster! You would not believe the mayhem once they started.  There were pipes in some of those walls.  There were live wires and telephone lines in some of them.  You had to read the plans carefully and mark the walls properly in order to literally avoid fire and flood.  These were the rules.

First you would identify the wall on the plan.  If it was slated for demo you would mark a red line all the way across it and in the middle of the wall paint the word “OUT”.   If it was supposed to be saved you would just write the word “STAY”… Nothing else!!!!  Very important!!!!  The laborers who did the demolition were all foreigners.  They worked for Italian Americans (for the most part) but they were usually little guys from Yucatan or Ecuador.   They didn’t speak any English and the only thing they understood was if it was 3 letters they had to destroy it.  If it had 4 they had to leave it alone.   You could have sprayed “YES” and that wall would be history.  If you painted “CRAP” they wouldn’t touch it.  That was the plan.  “OUT” or “STAY”.  Nothing else.   And when they started they were all ‘assholes and elbows’.  Sledgehammers, snips, an occasional Sawzall or a cutting torch-Simple tools and simple minds but man could they work!  I learned to appreciate the economy of motion and the systematic way they could dismantle two months of construction work in an evening.  Forty thousand square feet of office space in three or four nights.  Dirty, noisy, horrible work but they were wonderful at it. 

After spraying up the job I went back into the office and took the fixture out of the hung ceiling.  The Electricians had been through the space during the day and “safe’d off” both the  120 volt and the 277 volt power to the ceiling lights so I easily and safely disconnected the light.  I dragged it over to the freight elevator vestibule and thought to myself that I was lucky to find a fixture like this.  It was a perfect match for the cabinets I was hanging in the new house I was putting up for my family.  I would store it in my ‘shanty’ until I could find a way to get it home.  I had brought all kinds of things home on the subway but this was too big for that.  I would have to wait until I could drive in and pick it up.  While I was waiting for the freight elevator to get to the floor I noticed a tag glued to the fixture.  It said “H. Kissinger”.  I became curious.  After I dropped the fixture off in my little room in the basement I went back up to the floor and searched the office for any other indication that this might have been the office of Henry Kissinger.  Maybe I would find some memos alluding to the bombing of Cambodia or a note from Richard Nixon or a ping pong paddle signed by Chairman Mao Zedong.  If I was really lucky I might find a naked photo of him and Angie Dickenson or Bridget Bardot.  I once found the income tax filing for Raul Julia…so why not something cool on Henry Kissinger?  But, alas I never did find anything else of interest that night. 

The laborers came and by twelve midnight they were finished for the shift.  Piles of rubble were left where there had been offices only six hours before.  The next night they would finish the demo and the clean up and in eight weeks there would be a new batch of offices or an employee cafeteria serving sushi and pea soup.  I would pick up the fixture and eventually put it on my kitchen ceiling.  When the ‘little woman’ would complain about how dated it was and how wonderful it would be to have modern recessed lighting I would say, “but that was Henry Kissinger’s light fixture…It looks great” and we would both laugh and I knew I’d bought a little bit of time before I had to bite the bullet and give her what she wanted.