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Photo: Carole Braden

NEXT EVENT
Wed May 1, 2024 at 6pm – 9pm

Westbeth Inner Courtyard
Old Pre-school Room
55 Bethune St
NY NY 10014

More Info:westbethconservation@gmail.com

Village Sun Article
By Carole Braden

“Sandra Kingsbury walked into the Fixers Night with a jumble of blown glass, milk glass and metal pieces. She left with a beautiful, working table lamp.

“We were ready to throw it away,” said Kingsbury, a resident at Westbeth Artists Housing, at 55 Bethune St. She had no idea what the tiered vintage piece should look like, but that didn’t slow down retired science teacher and repair guru Joe Holdner. He intuitively stacked components around a new center wire and turned the switch, sparking a literal lightbulb moment.

Posters pinned to bulletin boards around the Westbeth campus said, “Something broken? Don’t trash it. Repair it.” They invited residents to a pop-up tinkering session with the Fixers Collective, which Holdner helped found and has been part of for 14 years. The group, which has met monthly at Hack Manhattan on 37th Street for nearly a decade, is setting up a new neighborhood residency here at the West Village’s “home of the arts.”

The next repair salon at Westbeth will occur on Wed., May 1, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

On that night in early March, Holdner was joined by Fixers Collective artists Vincent Lai and John Murphy, who unpacked implements and took places at power strip-equipped folding tables. Scheduled guests arrived with disabled objects and onlookers peeked into the brightly lit room wondering what was happening.

“It smells like fire,” said Charlotte Leist, a seventh-grader who wielded a soldering iron under Murphy’s supervision. She was installing new capacitators in her own mini makeup fridge, which had stopped chilling without warning. Empowered by making her “Swiftie” sticker-emblazoned plastic appliance cool again, she also gained a lesson: We can outsmart planned obsolescence.
The Fixers Night pilot and other neighborhood repair events have the power to reignite a long-burning zeitgeist, growing awareness about climate change and consumerism’s role in it while providing welcome services. The Westbeth Artists Residents Council (WARC) and its Conservation Committee (which, full disclosure, this reporter leads) sponsored the three-hour event. Visitors brought a rollator — a walker on wheels — with bad brakes, a non-spinning CD player and five lamps, in addition to Kingsbury’s, plus more. Volunteers weighed and tallied 156 pounds of junk that went back to work instead of to the landfill.

Debra Rapoport, a found-metal jewelry and repurposed-textile artist, came with a nonworking 1960s Luxo gooseneck lamp. Holdner fixed the chrome light’s derelict switch by simply tightening a screw. Rapoport, a proud trash picker, was overjoyed.

“The concept of conservation and repairing and reusing,” she said, “is what I’m all about.”

Read the complete Sun Article here which includes photos. Village Sun