RINGOLEVIO - 68 JAY STREET

As Dale Kaplan prepares to take the helm of Dumbo Direct, she looks back on her twenty-four years in the neighborhood.

Profile: Isaac Myers III - Photography: Emily Fishman.

Let’s say the weather is crisp and clear. It’s the middle of October, and Halloween is two weeks away. You’re not sure what you’d like to dress as for Halloween, or whether you’ll dress up at all. If you have children, you’re not sure what they’ll want to be for the holiday, or how much time and energy you’d like to expend to help them prepare.

You’re in a house on Fire Island and alone for a long weekend, and although it’s no longer peak season, you’re happy to be there, near the beach; and with the window near your bed slightly open, you can feel a soft breeze move across the island and into your bedroom. Outside the leaves have already started to change and fall, and although they’re not quite in the full stunning hues of red and orange, you know that those mornings are only a few weeks, if not days away.

It’s early, a few minutes before six, and the sun hasn’t quite found its place in the sky, though it will soon. And although you don’t have to be up and at a desk at any particular time today, you’d like to get up, and have a coffee, and take a look through the novella that you’ve been leafing through since you checked into the house two afternoons ago. But right now it’s Saturday, and more than anything, you’d like to blend the experience of being outside in the crisp and cool autumn air with the feeling of being inside and cozy, resting well and sipping coffee and reading while still in bed.

If the year were 1996, and if you had ever received or looked through a copy of Garnet Hill’s catalog, you would have noticed a solution to your slight quandary ––– wanting to be in bed and inside, while at the same time outside and amongst the trees and leaves. As you flipped through the catalog, Dale Kaplan’s work would have caught your interest. “I was the first person to use heat sublimation on sheeting,” Kaplan says, “and it made it look like somebody opened the window, and leaves and flowers fell onto the bed. It was a very new look.”

Heat sublimation, or heat transfers, is a straightforward process. Kaplan would take leaves and flowers and bring them into her studio, and place them in a color copier machine. At one point when we were sitting in Kaplan’s studio on the ninth floor of 68 Jay Street, I asked her what object she most enjoyed placing within her color copier machine. She told me that she loved to copy everything and anything. “I loved copying grass, all kinds of seeds, and leaves, and flowers. I loved copying thread, vintage textiles. Words. I made collages with words. I put everything in that machine. I put fruit in that machine.”

Although Garnet Hill was years away from being purchased by Home Shopping Network, by the mid-nineties the company had already gained a reputation as one of the premier curators and distributors of bedding, home furnishings, and sleepwear. Kaplan’s sister, Barbara, had been receiving Garnet Hill’s catalog at the time, and one day she approach Dale, and suggested that she show Garnet Hill some of her work. Kaplan liked the idea, and she sent her work to Garnet Hill in 1994. Not long thereafter, a representative reached out to her, and a few months later, she received her first order.

The order was for seventy-two thousand dollars, but in order to secure the work, a representative from Garnet Hill wanted to meet Kaplan, and to confirm that her production and manufacturing process could support a seventy-two thousand dollar order. “I told them that I had facilities in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey. I didn’t tell them that that these facilities were my apartment, my friend’s apartment, and the back of a tacky t-shirt store.” Ka- plan invited the representative to meet her at her facilities in Manhattan, at Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. “The owner of the store was a guy named David Louse. He let me do all of the production in the back of his store, and he called my sheets vegetarian sheets, because they looked very natural.”

Kaplan received the first order in September, and completed the work by that December. Overall, 1994 was a year that she’ll always remember, not just because it was the year that she received her first order from Garnet Hill, and truly began gaining traction with her textile business, but even more so, because it was the year that she started working in Dumbo, and in the same building where she still works today, 68 Jay Street.
Before she moved to Dumbo the first color copier machine that Kaplan worked with was located in Park Slope; specifically, it was inside of Park Slope Copy Shop on Seventh Avenue. Each morning Kaplan would have a coffee and go over to Park Slope Copy. “I would go over there everyday, and eventually they even gave me my own section to work out of. I would spend hours there.” She was living in Park Slope at the time, so the location was convenient. I asked her how she found her first studio in 68 Jay Street.

“The Park Slope Co-op had a listing that said there was studio space available in Dumbo, but I had never heard of Dumbo, so I said, Dumbo, what’s that?” Kaplan called the number on the listing and Heather Hutchinson, a visual artist who pays very close attention to natural light, answered. Hutchinson’s studio was on the fifth floor.

“She’s a really good artist. She showed me a lot, and when I asked her how to get to Dumbo, she told me, ‘Well, you get off of the F Train and you walk toward the river.” Hutchinson is from Arizona and was working with beeswax at the time that Kaplan moved in to the shared studio. “The studio always smelled so good,” Kaplan recalled. I asked here where people went for lunch in Dumbo in 1994. Her answer was that basically, they went to Brooklyn Heights. “I used to go up to Henry Street. Or I would go to the Clark Street Diner, or Cranberry’s.”

I asked Kaplan what Dumbo felt like in 1994, when she stepped off of the F train for the first time at York Street, and started walking toward the East River. “I loved it. I fell so in love with it. It was so quiet and felt like the urban wilderness. It was so quiet and so raw and the views were beautiful.”

__________________

“When I went to this party, there was Dale, and I’ll tell you why I fell in love with Dale,” Goodman offered, “Dale said, ‘I don’t have an air conditioner, but what I do is, I put my sheets in the freezer about three hours before I go to bed, and then I put them in front of the fan with me while I sleep.’ And I just thought, that’s it, and I was hooked on Dale. And then when I found out that Dale was in the house, I was so happy.”

__________________

Kaplan’s love for the her color copier machine is unfailing. I asked her how the love affair began. “I leased one for many years, and then my favorite machine finally broke. It was a Cannon, but I had so much luck, because someone actually gave me a machine that I could use as a replacement,” she explained. “One evening when I was at a party, on the fifth floor of 68 Jay Street, this guy who was leasing color copiers walked in, and we met. He said he wanted to get rid of this old machine, and I told him about my work, and he just offered it to me. It was a few years old at that point, but it was probably a thirty thousand dollar machine when it was brand new.”

She first came across the idea of working solely with a color copier machine, and without a computer when she was working within the architecture and interior design field.

She started in 1985. “I was working at this company called Bonsignore, Brignati and Mazzota. It was a really great place, and it was where I got my design education. I was in charge of a library that had all of the materials that you put into a building: wood, marble, textiles, furni- ture. So then when the architects and the interior designers were putting together a space, I would recommend certain materials, and I would help them with the color scheme. I used to write a newsletter about all of the different materials in the architecture and design industry.”

Kaplan remembers being impressed right away by the work of Lesley Schiff, who she met while working at Bonsignore, Brignati, and Mazzota. “There were people from all around the world there. And part of my job there was to meet artists, who would show me their work and see if there was a way for the firm to work with them. I met with Lesley one day, and she showed me how she worked with a color copier. And I liked her, and I liked her work.” A few years later Kaplan would leave the firm, and when she began working with textiles again, and doing illustrative work, she thought of Schiff. “I just started putting all of this stuff into the color copier. But it was really Lesley who inspired me to do this. I’d slice up bananas and put them on the color copier, vegetables, tin-foil. I put everything in the color copier.”

__________________

Dale Kaplan is sixty-two. She stands at five feet two inches, and often wears her sandy and wavy blonde hair above her, or pulled back behind her with a sizable red or yellow clip (made by Goodman), a habit that’s an outgrowth of not wanting to have her locks obstruct the heat transfers and color copies that’s she’s spent the last twenty-five years working with. Her father served in World War II, and she grew up in Midwood Brooklyn –––– less than a block away from Brooklyn College.

Her sister, Barbara, is two years and three days older than her, and was there as a help- less on-looker when Kaplan nearly lost her life. Kaplan was eight months old at the time. “My mother took me to a little park near Brooklyn College, and my sister was two and a half, and she was playing outside the park,” Kaplan recalled.

“My mother was outside of the gate with me in a carriage, and it got very windy, so she went to get my sister and to take her home. And the breaks from my carriage unlocked, and the carriage rolled into the middle of Bedford Avenue,” Kaplan recounted the details, as her mother must have told her throughout the years. “My mother was behind the gate and as she was seeing all of this, she was frantic. And then a college student ran into the middle of the street and saved my life.” After Kaplan shared this story with me, she spoke with a grin and a shrug: “And that’s how I started my life on Bedford Avenue.”

Her family lived in a seven bedroom apartment off of Kings Highway, near East Thirty-fifth Street and Avenue M. The dining room, living room and kitchen were all connect- ed, and you could stretch out within them. There were three bedrooms, a finished basement, and a backyard with three cherry-trees. The place had its own two car garage, and as their landlord didn’t drive, Kaplan’s parents could make use of both parking spots. The house had a porch that looked out over the Kings Highway circle. “There would always be traffic acci- dents, and we’d be in the house and hear the crashes, and then in the summer –––– with my father, we used to barbecue on the front porch, and everybody in the neighborhood would sit on the stoop. It was real old-school Brooklyn.”

The rent was one-hundred and thirty dollars a month, and didn’t change for the entire twenty-three years that her parents lived there, from 1959 through 1982. Their landlord’s son in law was the owner of Jennifer Dale’s, the clothing and sleepwear company. “Every year for my birthday I would get the most amazing gifts from our landlord, Mr. Judeleson. Sleeping bags, and nightgowns, and pajamas.” Perhaps these gifts were her first introduction to what it means and feels like to sleep comfortably, and eventually, paved the way for her interest in textiles.

__________________

They would go on walks through the hills and country roads and trails of Oneonta, discussing art and art history, and gradually growing closer to each other as the semester and the school year drew to its close. “One day I went to a party out in the country at Oneonta,” Kaplan remembered, “And my friends had kind of left me alone, and I ended up twisting my ankle. And so he called me up, and he said, ‘I’ll come over. Let’s go take a walk or something.” They went walking toward a park toward the top of hill with a clear view of the night’s sky. There was a lunar eclipse that evening, and the moon turned red. “That was the first time he kissed me. He took me home, and he was a real gentleman. He didn’t even want to stay over, which was good. And then from then on we fell in love, and we were together.” Although they’re no longer together, and haven’t been since 1991, Kaplan thinks of Stokolosa as the love of her life. “He changed my life. He got me into art. He got me into film. We were a cute couple. I was Jewish and from Brooklyn, and he was Italian and from Queens.”

Kaplan was candid when she spoke about what it was like seeing him for the first time at a mutual friend’s funeral, over twenty years after they had broken up. “It was the saddest day for me, because I had lost my best friend, but also because for twenty years I was fantasizing that I was going to see my big love, and I saw him at this funeral.” For months and weeks leading up to the funeral in Westchester, Kaplan started having a recurring dream.

“I kept dreaming that I was going to see him, with his wife, and that it was going to be a dark place, and that he was going to mostly ignore me, and it pretty much came true.” Within the German psychologist and philosopher’s Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm puts forth an idea that Kaplan can relate to, when describing her love for and with Stokolosa. “If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.”

She offered that after she saw Stokolosa at the funeral, her interest in her textile business began to wane. “I started my textile business after a big break-up in love. I think all of the creative energy that I expressed with the textiles was an expression of love that I couldn’t ex- press because Peter had left. It was just that I had all of this love, and this was how I expressed it. And then after I saw him at the funeral, I started to lose interest in my work, and eventually I felt as though I had said all that I needed to say about textiles.”

__________________

The New York Times wrote about Kaplan as part of their Personal Shopper column in May of 2001, “Dumbo Stands for Offbeat Furniture Heaven.”

“Kaplan Text, 68 Jay Street, Room 608 . . . Dale Kaplan creates cotton bedding and curtain panels patterned with multicolor photo transfers, many from nature. Some patterns reproduce 18th-century graphics. Her work is in the Garnet Hill catalog and ABC Carpet & Home. A cotton queen-size sheeet is $200 to $250; a baby duvet cover and pillowcase, $99; curtain panels, $65 to $80. Custom work available.A sample sale is set for this weekend.”

Approximately four decades before the Times article, Kaplan’s sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Fishman, told Kaplan’s mother that Dale would be up the creek by junior high. When I asked Kaplan what it felt like, for her work to be featured in the Times, she thought back to Mrs. Fishman. “It made me feel really good, because I was never artistic. I always wanted to be an artist, but I never really developed my artistic ability until I was twenty years old. And when I read the New York Times article, it felt great ––– it just felt like, This one is for my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Fishman, who told me I would never amount to anything.”

Kaplan resists referring to herself as an artist, and instead, leans toward the “creative worker” moniker. “I don’t consider my work fine art, because I haven’t had the training in art.”

When you ask her to describe her work with textiles she keeps it simple. “Basically my art is a color copier, scissors, glue, and a heat transfer machine. And that’s the only medium that I’ve been using for the last twenty-five years.”

Kaplan spoke about the excitement that she felt when she would step off of the 2 train at Clark Street, head North down Henry Street, and make her way to Dumbo in the mornings. “I just couldn’t wait to get to work, and to experiment with new ideas. There wasn’t one day where I had a creative lull.”

Goodman describes Kaplan’s work as layered, or not quite as simple as the untrained eye might assume. “Dale’s work is very sophisticated. Although some of the work is made for children, it appeals to their parents because of its sophistication.”

 _____________________ 

No one else in the nineties and the aughts was designing linens quite like Kaplan’s. “Garnet Hill loved my work because I was revolutionizing bed linens, because no one else was using heat transfers on bed linens. Everyone else was using heat transfers on t-shirts, so it was a completely new look.” Even with a new look and a unique product, Kaplan knew that she needed a business partner and an investor to help her with production costs. “I was running a manufacturing business without financing, so I was living hand to mouth.”

In order to run a successful textile design business, in addition to the costs of manufacturing, you also have to factor in the costs of getting your work in front of people. Garnet Hill and ABC Carpet & Home jump-started Kaplan’s career and brought the level of acclaim and notoriety that lead to the piece in Times in 2001; however, by the time the aughts had ar- rived, Kaplan’s business, along with the textiles industry across the board was changing. “I did okay until 2001. And then right after 9/11, I met with a representative of ABC Carpet to show some of my work, and she said, ‘Dale, your stuff is too happy,’” Kaplan recalled, “I felt bad.

I can’t do unhappy stuff. My stuff is about happiness, hope, beauty, joy, and love. I’m a hippie. I’ll always be a hippie at heart.”

If she couldn’t depend on Garnet Hill, ABC Carpet, or other catalogs and show rooms who wanted to show her work, she always felt that she could rely on her extended fam- ily for support. She had an uncle, who she asked that I refer to as Uncle Y, who had loaned her five thousand dollars to start her business in 1994, and had previously promised to help her with the business if things ever slowed down.

After the initial five-thousand-dollar loan, Kaplan paid him back within six months, with interest. “Every time I would see him –––– at weddings or bar mitzvahs, he would always say, ‘Your credit is good with me.’ It’s kind of a sad story. And then my mother got sick, and he told my mother, ‘Don’t worry, I’m doing to help Dale’. And I was really glad to hear that, because this was right after 9/11, when things were getting really difficult for me.”

Uncle Y was living with his daughter, who was living in the Upper East Side, on Park Avenue near Ninety-third Street. Kaplan remembered going up to their apartment on a spring afternoon in 2002, to ask him for the help that he had already promised. “I go up there, all optimistic, and I get up there, and the daughter had a maid, and the maid was ironing my cousin’s husband’s underwear, and I just thought, Shit, this is crazy, right?” The image has a way of sticking with you. “I just remember thinking, They must really have a lot of money if they get their underwear ironed,” Kaplan recalled, “It was just a weird visual.”

Once she started talking with Uncle Y, she didn’t hear what she thought she would hear. “I had hardly opened my mouth when he said, ‘Your business isn’t going anywhere, I’m not giving you any money,’” Kaplan recalled, “And I was shocked. He had told my mother ––– who was sick, and who had had a stroke ––– that she was going to help me, and then when I actually needed help, he just completely shut me down.”

With almost twenty years of hindsight from that afternoon, Kaplan was able to make connections and see things that hadn’t crossed her mind at that time. “I think it goes back to the fact that I was a woman. I think that mattered a lot more in those days. If I were a male cousin, or a nephew, it might have been different.”

Even with seeing that afternoon and Uncle Y’s ruthlessness through a different lens, she was forthright when I asked her about what it felt like to hear those words from family. “It took me years to get over it. I might have gone into shock. Because I was under this impression that I was surrounded by a lot of love, and that I had a big family who cared about me, and who would always help me, or anyone else within the family who needed support.” Although she was surprised by Uncle Y’s decision, she offered that through the years she did have cousins and other extended family members who helped her here and there. Most notably, she offered that her sister, Barbara, was always there for her.

If you can’t rely on the help of family, then you start looking other places. Daniel Ga- bay owned a artisanal sheets store in Soho. One afternoon in 2004 Kaplan walked by the store, and the two started talking. “I was telling him about what I do, and he said, ‘You should really tell people about it.’ And he always loved my work.”

Gabay offered to help, and to make an initial investment of six thousand dollars. He didn’t offer a contract. And as the weeks and months passed without Gabay actually sending the initial investment to Kaplan, it became clear that something was off. “It was horrible, because I didn’t have enough to money to make the merchandise,” Kaplan recalled, “But I went to talk with my sister, and she said, ‘Go get the money, so that you can feel relaxed, and continue with your business.’” Finally, after six months, Gabay gave Kaplan the investment money ––– in all cash. “He gave me six thousand dollars in cash. And I hid it in the back of my color copy machine. That was probably a big mistake ––– what if the machine caught fire? But I just left it there.” She remembers telling herself not to accept the money from Gabay,
as there wasn’t a contract, and because he had kept stringing her along. “But I was so stressed out, and my mother had just died. I needed the cash.”

Less than six months later the partnership that Kaplan and Gabay had formed had ended. They met at Pearl River Café, which stood at the corner of Canal and Broadway back then. “He cut the contract short, even though we didn’t have a contract,” Kaplan recalled, “That’s when he threatened me, and said that if I didn’t give him money from one of the orders, I would never work again.”

I asked Kaplan whether she remembered specifically what she did after she met with Gabay at Pearl River for the last time. “Every time I had a problem in business the first thing I did was call my sister, Barbara” she offered. Kaplan started working on her own again. And with enough faith and determination she was sure that she could make it work. “No matter how bad it got, the thought of giving it up or doing something else never occurred to me. It just wasn’t going through my head.”

 _____________________ 

Kaplan has friends of all ages, many of whom live all around the world –––Italy, France; England, Hungary, Greece, Mexico, Spain, Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, and Trinidad, nearly all of whom she met in Dumbo in the nineties and early aughts, and who at one point or another worked within 68 Jay Street. When I asked Kaplan what it felt like to belong to a community of artists who were working with- in 68 Jay Street in the nineties and early aughts, she told me an anecdote about how she met the Italian artist Federico Solmi. “He had come from Bologna, and his father was working as butcher back home, but his father had passed away, and Federico moved to New York. He had a roommate at the time, and the roommate was hitting on him, although Federico wasn’t gay, and he was having a lot of problems, he was really a wreck,” Kaplan recalled.

She remembered meeting him in front of 68 Jay Street. “I said, ‘Just wait here, don’t leave. In an hour I’m going to find you a studio and a place to live.’” Solmi didn’t move, and then an hour later, Kaplan returned. “I found him a studio –––– 1001, with a great view, and he lived and worked there for years.” Solmi’s work has been shown all around the world: Beijing, Frankfurt, Spain, Israel, Chile, and of course, Italy and the United States. It’s difficult to say what would have happened if he had not met Kaplan. Even if Kaplan had trouble finding a business partner, or a place to show her work, since 1994, she’s always had a place to work, and that place has always been 68 Jay Street. “It was really a struggle. I was very naïve about people and money, and generosity” Kaplan explained, “But I found so much generosity in this building. This was really where the generosity came from. Everybody in this building took me in.”

____________________

Ringolevio is a children’s game, the rules of which vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. It’s best described by comparing it to Capture the Flag. All of those kids are on one team (the hunters), and all of the other kids are on the other team (the hunted), though sometimes both teams can be hunters at the same time. When one of the hunters catches one of the hunted, the hunter has to grab hold of the hunter and cry out, “Ringolevio 1-2-3!” in order to cement the capture.

The idea is for one team to catch all of the members of the other team; however, unlike Capture the Flag, wherein the games would start and end over one afternoon, Ringo- levio is unique, as the games would be played over multiple days, and weeks –––– and at times, over distances and between neighborhoods spanning several miles. If you started a game on a Sunday afternoon and a winner hadn’t been declared by sunset, often the game would pick up again (right where it had left off) after you returned home from school the next day.

One of the reasons why the games would have trouble drawing themselves to a close related to the fact that even if you were caught by a member of the other team, and brought into their jail, someone from your own team could still find a way to distract, demystify, and wriggle around the person guarding the opposing team’s fort ––– infiltrate the opposing fort, and then set you free again by tagging you back in. “All of the kids in my neighborhood would play, and it would be groups of all ages, say seven-year-olds up to fourteen-year-olds,” Kaplan explained.

Success at Ringolevio requires a certain intuitiveness. If you’ve been caught and you’re in the opposing team’s jail, waiting for someone to tag you back in, then you have to know how to bide your time while your teammates make their way toward you. And if you’ve already been tagged back in, or even better yet, haven’t been caught yet, then you have to know when it makes more sense to try to capture members of the other team, or instead, to expend more efforts trying to tag your own teammates back in.

It’s a kids game and like any kids game that’s worth playing, it carries real life implications, as it helps build life-skills that come in handy as children move into adulthood. It helps to be quick, agile, and light on your feet, so that you can avoid being captured, and also in or- der to successfully infiltrate the other team’s jail. But even more important than those physical attributes, in order for a team to succeed at Ringolevio, each individual player has to be able to strategize, to know their teammates, and to figure out ways to keep the game going.

Working as an artist in Dumbo and particularly in 68 Jay Street in the aughts required not only intuition, but also ––– meeting and knowing people. “In those days everybody in
the building knew each other. By the time I got to my studio, after I got off of the subway I would kiss four people, including the UPS man,” Kaplan recalled. “People really knew each other.” Kaplan met a Mexican photographer when she was working in her studio on the sixth floor of 68 Jay Street. His name was Pedro Rosenbluth, and he had an idea for a directory, a hub, a central space online and also in print, where those who were working in the neighborhood could find, support and collaborate with each other. Rosenbluth’s manifesto for the project is still online.

“Dumb. . .art?

A neighborhood that’s filled with artists is bound to be the least common of communities – considering that, even though the arts are all about communication or at least some sort of self-expression, the ways, pace and ideas behind each individual approach are –by need or at least attitude-meant to be rather unique, self-contained, and even mutually exclusive. Actually, being so close to the next artist will most likely propel one to emphasize those differences and distances. So why would artists choose to end up living so close to each other –I mean beside the obvious financial considerations?

Maybe the subtly rebellious reassurance which one gets as that scary sculptor or that prowling painter greet us grouchily if not groucholy across the street. Maybe the warming sense of shared isolation as we cross each other’s path quickly and silently... Yes, an artists community is that unique kind of a collective where the parts are more important the whole and where groupiness and sociability are not necessarily the most desirable traits. An area where the fervently freaky or the coolly collected may find themselves without being found out and where they may drift now freely and now fully... charged. A place where the absent-minded can present themselves without being either minded nor misrepresented, that is an art com- munity that is worth its canvases –and brushes... with anything it chooses... to convey –with or without pay... or uses.

That’s not so dumb... eh?”

Rosenbluth named the project the Dumbo Direct, and almost immediately it took off. Perhaps its success lies within the fact that it was a hub created by artists, but that it wasn’t just for artists. Rosenbluth’s Dumbo Direct features listings for one hundred and seven different business categories, which are arranged alphabetically, with the most categories appearing with- in the letter C: Cafes, Car Services, Caterers, Ceramics, Check Cashing, Chocolate, Churches, Ci- gars, Cleaners (Dry Cleaners), Closets, Clubs, Comics, Commercial Sculptors, Communications, Community, Computer, Convenience Stores, Costume, Curators; though my favorite is the collection of categories within the letter L: Laundromats, Lighting, Locksmiths, Lomography, Lounges.

Rosenbluth started Dumbo Direct out of his studio on the sixth floor of 68 Jay Street. Kaplan first met Rosenbluth when she was working out of her studio on the same floor. And as she was continuing to figure out how to maintain her textile business, and looking for other sources of income in between orders, she benefited directly from Rosenbluth’s Dumbo Direct. “I got a job with my sister at the 9/11 Environmental Action Outreach program, which was helping everyone who was in Dumbo in 2001,” Kaplan explained, “And the only reason that I got that job was because I had a copy of the Dumbo Direct.”

Even if she wasn’t aware of it, the day that Kaplan moved into 68 Jay Street in 1994, and began working alongside Heather Hutchinson, she began her own game of Ringolevio. Ex- cept the course wasn’t the entire neighborhood of Dumbo, but instead, was only played within the confines of 68 Jay Street.

From 1994 through the present date the mortgage for 68 Jay Street has been assigned or refinanced upwards of ten times, with the leases and corresponding rents transferred almost as often. As the neighborhood changed, the value that the owners of the building placed upon its studio spaces fluctuated accordingly –––– and as the years passed ––– only went up. Then in August of 2009, the City Counsel, approved a plan to rezone a portion of Dumbo spanning twelve blocks (along Jay and Bridge Street).

City Planning officials at the time estimated that the rezoning would bring around nine hundred new residential apartments to the neighborhood, as the blocks were converted from industry, manufacturing, and commercial use to mixed-use, which allows for residential buildings. These changes to the neighborhood and to the value that was placed on offices and art studios within 68 Jay Street often made it difficult for tenants within 68 Jay Street to keep up, including Kaplan. In Ringolevio, if you’re caught and can’t escape your opponent’s grasp within the time that he or she calls out, “Ringolevio 1-2-3!,” then you’re brought into their jail.

In Dumbo, and more specifically, in 68 Jay Street in the late nineties and aughts, if you were leasing an arts studio, office, or commercial space, and your rent became slightly too steep as your production costs and sales leveled off, then you were caught if you had to look at the numbers, and decide to look for a space somewhere else. Even after twenty-four years, Dale Kaplan has never been caught, and by the kindness and generosity of the people she has met, friendships she has made, and relationships that she has built within 68 Jay Street, even when she’s been brought into the other team’s jail, someone has always infiltrated, and tagged her back in.

I asked her to take me through each of the spaces that she’s worked out of within the building, after leaving the first studio that she shared with Heather Hutchinson. “I had a huge studio on the sixth floor,” she recalled, “Suite 608. I was there from 1995 through 2010.” I asked her why she moved out of the studio that she shared with Hutchinson. “My business was doing well. I was doing hand-printed duvet covers and curtains, and so I needed big tables. I was doing manufacturing, and at one point I had seven part-time people working for me,” she recalled.

From 1994, when she received her first order from Garnet Hill, through 2010, she was consistently earning six figures annually from her textile business, with the worst year floating around one-hundred-thousand dollars, and the best closer to the two-hundred-and- fifty-thousand dollar range. In addition to having Garnet Hill as her main client, she also placed her work with ABC Carpet & Home, Bloomingdales, Barney’s, Land of Nod, various small boutiques across the United States, as well as places in Canada and Japan. More locally,

she had placed her work with retailers in Dumbo, including, though not limited to, Mel en Stel, Modern Anthology, and Stewart Stand. However, in 2010, things changed when Garnet Hill asked her for the exclusive right to market and sell a collection of pillows that Kaplan had created, with words and phrases stitched upon them such as “Sunshine,” “Peanut,” and “Sweetpea.” This was Kaplan’s best selling work at the time.

The Garnet Hill representative who Kaplan was working and speaking with at the time requested the exclusive in April of 2010 –––– Kaplan agreed to the proposal, and shortly thereafter began work on the pillow collection. By June 2010, she hadn’t heard anything from the representative, and followed-up with Garnet Hill. “They told me everything was solid, and that the agreement was still in place, and set in stone.” By September she still hadn’t heard anything, and she grew more concerned, as for the previous seventeen years, she had confirmed her order with Garnet Hill before the end of September.

When she contacted Garnet Hill again, their representative told her that they wouldn’t be moving forward with her work that year. “They were my biggest customer for seventeen years. I depended on them, and they asked me for an exclusive, so I wasn’t looking for any other customers. I trusted them. It really made things difficult.”

A few months later, Kaplan was looking through the Garnet Hill catalog for the Autumn 2010 season and noticed a pillow collection that looked eerily similar to her own work. “Even the description was almost the same as how they had previously described my work; except the artist was ‘Made in India.”

Garnet Hill’s request of an exclusive, failure to follow through, and then subsequent severing of their working relationship with Kaplan changed everything with her business, and made it difficult for her to stay within her own studio within 68 Jay Street. “This was happening with a lot of people in the textile business at the time. Companies and catalogs were sending a lot of working overseas, things that were previously made locally,” Kaplan explained.

“Also, Garnet Hill started out as a small company, but when they were bought by Home Shopping Network, a lot of things changed there, and the way that they did business and worked with artists took a turn for the worst,” Kaplan explained. “When the suits take over, it’s time to run.”

I asked Kaplan where she went when she realized that she’d have to give up her own studio, and who tagged her back in, so as to allow her to keep working out of 68 Jay Street. “There was film maker named Daniel Kenneth, who also had a studio on the sixth floor. He had a big space, and het let me work out of there for a while.” While Kaplan was working out of Kenneth’s studio, she made a man from Trinidad named Junior, who manufactured ties, and they decided to give it a go together, and to share a studio space within the building. “He was the greatest guy. He had a tie factory, and he never charged enough, and he always had a good heart. He would always have a little cart that he would push around the building with his ties,” Kaplan remembered. “He made ties for the Gap and Banana Republic.”

Kaplan and Junior worked out of the same studio for a little less than a year, and it helped that the both were in the textile and manufacturing industry, and specifically for Kaplan, it helped that Junior was often able to help with repairs to her color copier machine. Just before 2011, Junior’s business faced the same fate that had recently befallen Kaplan’s, and although he wanted to continue to share a space with Kaplan, he had to give up his space.

I asked Kaplan where she went next, and who tagged her back in. “Allan Hagdad,” she recalled, “He had a company called Debi-Belt, and he was a master designer of leather accessories. He did work for Marc Jacobs, Vera Wang, Derrick Lam, Jill Sander, and other top notch designers; the top of the top.”

Eventually Hagdad’s work slowed down, and he too had to decide to move away from 68 Jay Street, and find a different space. “A lot of the work that he was doing was being sent to China,” Kaplan recalled, “He had a lot of materials, and maybe seven or eight workers, and huge machinery, tons of leather and fabrics.”

I asked Kaplan how she met Hagdad. “Everybody knew each other in this building, people would meet in the elevator, or in 68 Jay Street Bar, we all just knew each other,” she explained, “And in those days it was mostly one person per studio, so it was easier to see who was going in and coming out, and who was working where.”

I asked Kaplan where she went next, and who tagged her back in. “I moved to the Chabad House, and the rabbi there let me work out of a space on the second floor,” Kaplan recalled, “This was in 2014, and I think I was there for two years.” I asked her what made her leave the Chabad house, and begin looking for space again. “It was just difficult, because I had my sheets and curtains and everything, and there wasn’t quite enough space for me.”

I asked Kaplan where she went next, and who tagged her back in. “Jason Stevens, the owner of Rebar,” she recalled, “It’s a sad story, they did weddings there, and he ended up going to jail for tax fraud, but even he gave me a space to work out of, in the employee lunch room.” Rebar closed in a dramatic, sudden, and lamentable fashion, though Kaplan remem- bers leaving the space before that happened. “I just felt like I didn’t want to bug him anymore.”

I asked Kaplan where she went next, and who tagged her back in. “Josh Wolfe,” Kaplan recalled, “he was working as climate change photographer at the time, and he had this huge space on the fifth floor, Suite 516.” She told me about her time working out of Wolfe’s studio with striking detail. “This was around the holidays when I met Josh, and I asked him, ‘Can I leave my stuff with you through Thanksgiving and New Years, and then start looking for a space?’ And he said, ‘Yes, just bring your things in.” The holidays passed, and Kaplan re- called planning to ask Wolfe for a few more weeks to find a new space. “I said to Josh, ‘I think a need another week because nobody is around. And he said to me, ‘Oh, Dale, forget it. You’ll be our artist in residence. Just stay here and I’m not going to charge you.” Kaplan stayed there for two and half years. “He was so generous. I couldn’t believe it.”

I asked her where she went next, and even though she wasn’t exactly out, whether there was anyone who tagged her back in. “This was when I met my husband, Allen Klayminc, who is my patron of the arts,” she offered. This was in June of 2011. “He knows nothing about art, but he wants to see me succeed, and he wants to help me continue my creative work.” She met Klayminc through a mutual friend who she went to high school with, Darlene Ozeri, who thought that Kaplan and Klayminc should meet. “We met at a party in Mill Basin and Allen was quite eccentric. And I thought he was very friendly, but not my type at all.” Kaplan offered. “We were just from two completely different worlds.” Klayminc is a re- tired teacher who taught junior high school in Midwood, Brooklyn for over twenty-five years. He taught math, but when people ask him what teaches, or taught, he always would say and still says, Love and understanding.

I asked Kaplan how they found common ground, and what eventually drew them together. “We’re both very passionate and we actually have a very similar sense of humor. ” Kaplan offered. “And we both like to discuss the absurdity of life.” One thing that Kaplan emphasized was that she could and still can always trust Klaymnic, and that he’s always on her side. “I needed him, as a grounding force. Both of my parents had passed, and he’s really helped me.”

With a newfound resiliency, and the support of Klayminc, she stared looking for her own space again. “One day I was coming into the building and I saw that on the fifth floor, they were making the tiniest little space available, right off of the elevator,” Kaplan recalled. “This space was so tiny, it was sixty-six square feet, but I knew that I need my own space again, and so I moved into there.”

This is where I met Dale, in the fall of 2015. A few months later Kaplan moved out of this small space on the fifth floor, as she had trouble concentrating in a space that was only a little larger than her color copier machine. “All I did was drink coffee and go get snacks. I couldn’t do anything in there.” The space is now used for storage.

I asked her where she went next. “That’s when I asked our landlord about this space where I am now, on the ninth floor.” Nearly every time we spoke, Kaplan mentioned the generosity and sprit of the people who she’s met within 68 Jay Street. “It’s just interesting how, by some miracle of the universe, I’ve been able to stay in this neighborhood.”

__________________ 

One afternoon in March of 2017 Kaplan was walking out of 68 Jay when she was

stopped dead in her tracks. She couldn’t believe it. Pedro Rosenbluth was standing right in front of her. “I feel like there’s a reason why I was able to get through all of those hardships and hard times, and people being really generous, because out of nowhere, I ran into Pedro, and he told me, ‘You have to bring back Dumbo Direct. You’re the right person to do it,” Ka- plan recalled. Although she was interested, and flattered by the idea and the offer, she wasn’t completely certain that she was the right person to re-light the Dumbo Direct torch. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she had already been wanting to try something new. “For the last year, as my interest in textiles was waning, I had been thinking that I wanted to document the history of artists who have worked in Dumbo, so my passion was already leading me toward that direction,” Kaplan explained. “So when I saw Rosenbluth again, it made me realize that bringing back the Dumbo Direct would be a way that I could connect the old with the new.”

Once Kaplan realized that re-launching Dumbo Direct was the next logical step in her career, she realized that she couldn’t take on the project alone, as she had mostly been working analog and without a computer while within the textile industry. She had already known the graphic designer, Joseph Setton, who was born in Paris, and moved to New York in 1995. They had met in 2014 on the fifth floor of 68 Jay Street, when Kaplan was working as the artist in residence with Josh Wolfe, whose office was also on the fifth floor. One afternoon Kaplan asked Joseph whether he was interested in helping her with Dumbo Direct. “I told him the idea, but I said that I needed a designer,” Kaplan explained. “He just said, ‘I’m in.’ He didn’t even have to think about it.”

Presently the Dumbo Direct re-launch website describes the endeavor as an “engaging platform and comprehensive directory designed to empower creatives and companies alike in connecting, collaborating, and showcasing the products, projects, and services of Dumbo’s thriving community.” When I asked Kaplan how to summarize this mission she offered something slightly more succinct. “There’s a lot of creative people doing interesting things in Dumbo, and they should know each other.” Presently Kaplan and Setton have one hundred and four businesses signed up for the new Dumbo Direct. They expect to launch in October. Kaplan and Setton decided to shake on the deal for working together on Dumbo Direct on the day of the solar eclipse on August 21st, 2017. They finalized their agreement on the ninth floor roof of 68 Jay Street.

A few weeks before Kaplan and Setton had finalized how they’d work together, Ka- plan had taken a ferry from Williamsburg back to Dumbo.

“A long time ago I went to a psychic ––– after my big love affair –––– and she read my cards, and she said, ‘You’re going to be very successful, you’re going to have diamonds in the sky.’ And so it never happened –––– I had good years, bad years, and some years where I really struggled. Then one day I took a ferry from Williamsburg right up to Dumbo, and I’m not usually on that side of Dumbo, where you can see all of the development. But then as I was walking down Front Street, and heading toward Jay, and noticing all of the changes to the neighborhood, I was looking up, and I started to remember the psychic who was talking about ‘diamonds in the sky,’ and I said to myself, ‘These are my diamonds. Dumbo is my diamond.’”