Published in Salt Magazine March 2017
Story & Illustrations by Isabel Zermani
Watching my city change isn’t easy. Mainly, I no longer can give accurate directions. And, as people flood in, I can no longer refer to “the old” or “the new” something without eliciting that dazed look.
Not a total luddite, I, too, celebrate progress — God knows, we need it after a recession that lasted much longer than we were told there was a recession — but what that means is giving something up, taking a risk, and enduring the hallway between the shutting door and the opening door. What that looks like in Wilmington is construction.
We are a boomtown again.
But some of the boomers are doing something really smart: a combination of historic preservation, art patronage, and
There’s something utilitarian about wire art. It captures just the gesture. Each piece is formed and then tied around the joining piece, binding beginning and end.
For artist Michael Van Hout, it all started with pine straw. Bundles of pine straw wrapped in bailing wire. It was the 70s and he was listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and working as a groundskeeper on NC State’s campus, having dropped out after studying forestry. Landscaping the campus wasn’t exactly forestry and it wasn’t exactly art, but it was something that would serendipitously forge his career as an artist.
There was something about the bailing wire.
He started bending it like a kind of contour drawing, making faces. He started with Dylan. “I never thought about going to art school,” says Van Hout in his Acme Art Studio with taped-up fingers black from bending wire, but some friends encouraged him to go to UNC Greensboro. There, along with sculpture, he studied painting and woodcuts, but “I always went back to the wire.” The love of the line runs deep.
Well known around town for his animal sculptures, his current project is the largest wire mural he’s ever done. Commissioned by Mark Maynard Jr. for the entryway of South Front’s Phase II redevelopment, creating the former Block Shirt Factory into apartments, Van Hout’s 2-D mural ties the present to the past. The lineage of the space provides the subject matter and utilitarian wire, the medium.
To draw something is to know something. To distill it to essence. In this work, Van Hout traces the round faces and bouffants of the female factory workers in the 1960s. You can almost hear The Shirelles playing in the background except that the humming of the machines and puffs from air hoses would’ve drown out the music. Van Hout’s wire lines trace the rectangular shirt packages and the triangles of the shirt collars. Like a distant memory, only the outlines are there.
A triptych, the three panels show the exterior factory, the shirts in-process inside and the final product in the store window. The final panel shows each proud shirt at a jaunty angle. A slice of life from the 1960s, the history of Block Shirts reaches back much further.
William Block was only 13 years old in 1890 when he immigrated from Riga, Latvia, where his mother operated a shirt making business, to Baltimore. He got into the underwear manufacturing business — everyone needs underwear, right? — rose in the industry, married and had four children. His son Nathan would travel south to Wilmington for the beauty and the cotton mills with 25 sewing machines to expand the family business. He met his bride, Sadie — the daughter of the Jewish clothier Hymen Stadiem — in nearby Kinston. The growing Block family gathered together in Wilmington, bought the house right next to the temple, and rose to prominence.
According to local author (and family member), Susan Taylor Block, in Tales of a Shirtmaker: A Jewish Upbringing in North Carolina, a salesman gave the Block’s some sage advice: “There’s no money in underwear.” So, they switched to back to the family trade: shirts.
Prodigious advice, by 1937, they were the largest manufacturer of shirts in the south producing 24 thousand shirts per week and employing 350 people. Block Shirt’s other moniker, “Southland Manufacturing Corp.”, nods at their expanse. After a few locations on the north side, including one lost to fire, they found their permanent home, the large brick buildings between 3rd and Front Streets on Greenfield Street where they operated until 1992. “The block-long home of the famous Block shirts” reads the old slogans advertising their signature “Can’t Fade” shirts. The ones Van Hout sculpts at a jaunty angle.
Block Shirts would reach world-wide, far beyond this block of downtown Wilmington, opening factories in the “Far East” in the global 1980s, grossing over $100 million a year, and had shirts stocked in ten thousand retailers. Not bad for a shirtmaker from Riga.
Once centers of industry, these buildings are now hip apartments with a modern industrial aesthetic. American industry may be going way of the dinosaur, but the contours of a memory are sketched out, tied together, recalling what can’t and shouldn’t fade.