Mike Weatherly, one of the craftsman at David Gage String Instrument Repair on Walker St.
BY MICHAEL LYDON | Walker St. between Broadway and Church St., two short blocks below Canal, looks like Tribeca before it became Tribeca: battered loft buildings with dusty windows, a couple of unobtrusive art galleries, a semi-fancy restaurant at the Church St. corner, and one textile company left over from the days when this block was the bustling home to New York’s cloth market.
Number 36 Walker, despite the aging coat of red paint around its front door, blends in with its gray-faced neighbors: five weather-beaten floors, three tall windows per floor, and a few old air conditioners clinging precariously to the sills. Come close and you can read the small oval sign that’s made the building known and loved by musicians all around the world: “David Gage String Instrument Repair.”
Step inside the scarred door, say hello to the shop’s two cats, Luna and Oscar, and you’ll see why this no-frills address is so beloved: in our digital age when reality gets reduced to bits and bytes, David Gage String Instrument Repair (davidgage.com) is a true craftsman’s workshop. Since the craft is preserving wooden musical instruments that haven’t changed in centuries, the Gage shop has a timeless quality, its quiet broken only by the rasp of files on wood and mellow jazz playing softly on the radio. The pungent perfume of sawdust and glue, wood oils and varnishes, add to the old-timey atmosphere. Shelves that climb eight feet up the walls are jam-packed with pots and paintbrushes, saws and sandpaper, clamps and carving knives, vises and planes and rags and rulers.
One recent afternoon, in an alcove to the left of the door, Mike Weatherly, a gray-bearded fellow with an amiable smile checked the horsehair for a bass’ bow. Where did the horsehair come from?
David Gage, below, owns the bass repair shop. Above, Sprocket Royer, left, and Mike Weatherly hard at work.
“From horsetails in China and Mongolia,” said Weatherly. “We pay $300 a pound for the hair, but women in China have so carefully cleaned and sorted it that I can use every strand in a hank.”
Beside him, Sprocket Royer studied a bass balalaika — what could he do to get a better sound from its three thick strings?
Deeper into the shop, Manny Salvador gently pushed a sharp knife under the pick guard on the beige soundboard of a vintage Martin guitar. “Plastic pick guards shrink over time,” he explained, “and tug at the wood. That made this crack” — and he pointed to a hairline gap near the guitar’s bridge. “Ah,” he said with a soft smile, “now the wood’s relaxing, but I’ll give it more time.”
At the shop’s reception area, dozens of black and white photos of renowned bassists — Charlie Hayden, Charles Mingus, Christian McBride — smiled down on friendly Aileen Marcantonio selling strings and picks, bows and bow cases, and taking payment for repair jobs from a gaggle of customers.
Just past her, David Gage’s black-bearded nephew, Simon Propert, fitted a new neck on an old bass. The fresh piece of wood looked virginally white beside the bass’ timeworn brown body. “But,” said Propert, “after I stain it, only an expert could tell the neck is new.”
On a workbench deep into the shop, David Gage is bent over a bass with its belly open to his prying eyes. At a dozen or more points, he had glued small wooden tabs to indicate spots that needed care.
“Most instrument shops put their show room on the first floor,” said Gage, a tall, slender man with graying hair and an informal but serious manner, “and hide the repair benches upstairs, the nuts and bolts they don’t want the customers to see. But we have no elevator, and we couldn’t ask the repair guys to lug their instruments and tools up and down the flights of stairs. So we put the benches out front, and it turned out that musicians love seeing the craftsmen at work, seeing all we do to help them make beautiful music.”
The shop repairs and restores all kinds of string instruments, but specializes in basses. David Gage, a New Englander, began playing bass in his teens, then studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and with Bill Blossom of the New York Philharmonic.
While playing jazz gigs in the Big Apple, he began building and repairing basses with master luthiers Chuck Traeger and Lou DiLeone, opening his first shop on Chambers St. in 1978, then moving to Walker St. in 1990.
“The landlord made us a generous offer we couldn’t refuse,” Gage said with a grin. “We started on the ground floor, now we’re renting the whole building. Luckily, our landlord likes our handicraft work, so he’s kept the rent reasonable. And we don’t bug him about repairs — if the roof leaks, we fix it.”
Like Gage, the seven luthiers in the shop emphasized that they learned their craft from generations of masters. Salvador, who’s been at Gage for 20 years, apprenticed with Miguel Luciano in Greenwich Village. Weatherly studied bow making with Lynn Hannings and George Rubino, and now makes his own line of bows. Dan Theisen, the shop’s violin specialist, got a diploma in violin repair at a Minnesota technical college, but, he said, “Years earlier, when I first set foot in Robert Young and Jason Viseltear’s East Village violin shop, that’s when I found my calling in life.”
The store sells as well as repairs string instruments. In the shop’s long high-ceilinged second floor showroom, 100 or more basses and nearly that many cellos rest in their stands like rotund brown men conversing peacefully among themselves.
“Look closely and you’ll see that no two basses are exactly alike,” said sales manager Sam Finlay. “See, this one mimics the vigorous curves of a violin body, that one the smoother curves of the viola da gamba. Some have rounded backs, some flat. The most valued basses, like the most valued violins, come from Italy, but there are no million dollar basses as there are million dollar Stradivari.”
The basses there, nearly all on consignment, top out at about $30,000, and bows get as high as $5,000, but Gage also carries instruments and bows in the $3,000 to $4,000 range.
“We also rent inexpensive instruments to students and beginners,” said Finlay, “and fine ones to travelling orchestras who want to save the stress of taking their own instruments on tour.”
Not everything at Gage is old school. Since the 1980s, the shop has sold an airplane-safe bass and cello case that’s both sturdy and lightweight. “It’s great,” famed jazz bassist Ray Brown has said. Another travel-friendly product, the “Czech- Ease Road Bass,” is a full-sounding bass with an abbreviated body designed by Gage and made in the Czech Republic.” For that,” said Finlay, “we use the slogan, ‘The Czech Ease Bass — it’s easy to check!’ ”
On the shop’s third floor, Jason Borisoff sat with a soldering iron in his hand at a workbench assembling one of Gage’s newest and most popular products, a small sheet of copper foil called the Realist transducer, an electronic pickup for string instruments.
“Most electric guitar pickups create a sound unlike an acoustic guitar,” said Borisoff. “Our goal is to amplify the instrument and to be accurate to its original sound.”
Gage now makes Realist pickups designed for basses and violins and other instruments that use bridges to carry the strings’ vibration to a soundboard. A Realist violin that comes with the pickup built in has become so popular — “over 600 sold” says Finlay — that Gage is renovating the fourth floor to create more space for developing the Realist line.
Back on the ground floor, the age-old craft work went on. Weatherly took a new hank of horsehair from a cabinet and ran a few strands between thumb and finger — “hmm,” said his expression, “that’ll do fine.” Royer kept studying the balalaika with a puzzled look on his face. Propert put the new neck on the old bass, took it off, made a tiny adjustment, then put it on again.
“String instruments are high maintenance creatures, no doubt,” Gage said in a resigned tone, one hand resting affectionately on his latest patient. “Heat, humidity and handling — that’s what we call the Three H’s from Hell. One bass in one town in one year can go through huge humidity changes. The change from wet to dry, that’s what makes them crack.”
“But we love our work,” he added, looking over the shop. “Our clients are orchestral musicians, jazz cats, rock ‘n’ rollers, country and world music performers, pros and amateurs. We pride ourselves on the attention we give each player, each instrument…You’re only as good as the people you work with, and I work with the best.”
