It was love at front sight. One day five years ago, Mario Rodriguez, a woodworking teacher, was driving on a rural road in Orange County toward a house he had been told was for sale. What he saw was a wooden doorway unlike anything he had ever seen before.
There, on the modest frame building, was a Federal-period front doorway whose dimensions alone distinguished it. It was 9 feet tall and 6 feet wide, punctuated by a glass transom at the top and glass sidelights.
But the Greek chorus of statuesque carved wooden decorations on the old door were raising a call for help.
The call went through. Rodriguez and his wife, Judy, were looking for a house to buy. The 180-year-old doorway carried him across the threshold.
The Booth family, which was selling the house, had helped spare the period work with 60 years of proud Yankee frugality. Nothing had been damaged or removed.
Rodriguez, who teaches in the woodwork restoration program at Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and also offers classes in 18th Century hand-woodworking techniques at his own studio in Warwick, made a wise decision.
To preserve what he could of the original doorway, he carefully removed it and retired it from active service. To replace it, he created a replica to within a 16th of an inch. There were more than 100 parts, from the four pilasters supporting four fluted urns to the stacked frieze of shelf moldings on top.
Though Rodriguez had been a woodworker for 20 years, taking the doorway apart taught him much about traditional technique.
“In working, I found myself making the same decisions that yielded the same exact results of the original,” he said. “What you experience is this immediate connection between you and an 18th Century woodworker.”
Like a man trying to identify an ancestor, Rodriguez called on the Warwick Historical Society to find out more about his house. Built in the late 18th Century by a family of prosperous Dutch farmers, the original cabinlike house was added to early in the 19th Century by Isaac Dolson. Dolson was a climber; he built a large drawing room in front of the cabin with bedrooms above, and on one side, an entry hall with a stairway .
The imposing door capped Dolson’s social ambitions. If a front door is a house’s best foot forward, Dolson’s doorway was designed to trip passersby on the road. It looked more like a fine breakfront than architecture. Built in 1812, it is an early example of Greek Revival style.
After removing the decaying doorway and laying it out piece by piece in his workshop, Rodriguez employed hand planes and chisels to make the hundred-odd parts. He had to invent many of his own tools to reproduce the parts and motifs of the original, which was largely made with one-of-a-kind tools that the original craftsmen designed.
The four fluted urns break the architectural constraint of the doorway’s design. They also posed the greatest challenge to the carver.
“Because of the urn shape, the flutes wind as they go down,” Rodriguez said of the linelike gouge cuts produced by the chisel. “The grain of the wood is constantly changing. It looks simple, but it requires a lot of control.”
Mistakes make firewood; freehand carving can’t be corrected.
Like the gaze of a portrait, the doorway obsessed him. “I’d wake up at midnight, and say, `Let me make a note of that,’ and make a sketch and race downstairs,” he recalled.
