In tough times, the trades offer pride and a paycheck

To reach Black Dog Forge in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, you have to trek down a puddle-filled alley behind a Second Avenue art gallery and look for an ornate iron doorway.

Pull it open and all of a sudden, the hip edge of Belltown's club- and gallery-lined streets gives way to the workaday grittiness of one of the city's premier metalsmith shops, where Louie Raffloer and Mary Gioia turn out railings, gates, knobs and just about anything else that can be hammered into custom-designed forms.

Raffloer and Gioia are the type of skilled tradesmen honored by the motorized toils of the 48-foot-tall Hammering Man sculpture outside the Seattle Art Museum, "the doers, the makers of things" whom President Obama waxed poetic about in his inauguration speech, the workers conservative pundit Pat Buchanan worries about in his frequent invectives against the decline of America's manufacturing base.

We tend to romanticize physical labor, but these are not happy times for workers who use their hands for a living, be they furloughed Boeing machinists or laid-off homebuilders or independent blacksmiths clanging away on a Belltown backstreet.

Still, at Black Dog Forge and other work spaces in the area, there are signs of life, hints that trades with a storied past here may also have a place in our future, if for no other reason than handmade things and the mystique surrounding that kind of work never fully go out of fashion.

THE FIRST THING you notice across the room at Black Dog Forge is an open-ended refractory cement cylinder the size of a bread box whose insides pulse with a bright, hot-orange glow. That would be the 2,000-degree forge. Raffloer's 14-year-old black dog Duke died in April but up until then he could be found lazing on the hard floor nearby, quietly resigned to the hammering and wind-tunnel bluster of the gas-fed forge.

The marriage of brute force, finesse and aesthetic prowess involved in blacksmithing may elevate it to a high art, or high craft, if you will. But that doesn't necessarily make it a luxury that only the rich would splurge for.

Raffloer illustrates this point with a story about one of his recent projects. A middle-class couple ordered five metal brackets, at $75 a piece, for a kitchen island in the home they're building. It's not a glamour job, but often these are the most appreciative customers, he says.

Sure, the couple could have gone to a hardware store and spent $100 total on brackets mass-produced in a factory somewhere. A lot of people do just that.

But Raffloer says clients who come to Black Dog, regardless of socioeconomic status or the times, want something more: "They really want to treat themselves to the very best, something different, something handmade."

The projects at Black Dog range from the odd, like a pair of copper lightning rods that a homeowner wanted as yard ornaments, to the massive, as in the steel lever and fulcrum for a retractable skylight lid that Raffloer conceived and built himself.

"I've done thousands of things like this where the client had no clue at all how to do it," he huffs, piling all his weight on the lever to make it rise off the workshop floor.

When he finished making the piece, Raffloer says he didn't just feel proud. He felt clever.

"The shop teachers have a million ways of saying it, but I call it 'lifting with your brain,' " he says. "It's a problem-solving job."

Raffloer says he can understand how cubicle people want to get out. "But the self-employed craftsperson might want a day off, or a two-week vacation."

He stops himself. On the other hand . . .

"I wouldn't trade this for anything!"

Gioia, Raffloer's business partner, pulls a slender iron rod out of the sweltering forge and lays its softened, red-orange tip on the base of a huge, German-made pneumatic hammer. It looks like the world's biggest, meanest sewing machine, with a 75-pound piston that rains down 225 blows a minute, strikes so John Henry-like they shake you to the core.

After hammering the hot rod on all sides, Gioia, armed with leather glove and goggles, carries it to an anvil to pound the hot end flat, creating a leaf-like shape, then moves the piece to a vice grip, locks it in place and begins to "scroll" it.

She will use elbow and shoulder action to bend the rod ever-so-carefully to form a perfect curlicue flourish at the hot end. The piece could be used as an accent on a gate.

Using pliers, she sticks the piece back into the refracted heat of the forge to re-soften it, pulls it out and launches another barrage of blows with her own hammer, taking time out to brush away flecks of carbon that rise to the surface of the metal when it's agitated.

These scorching-hot flecks sometimes fly off and leave burn marks on Gioia's and Raffloer's exposed skin as they work.

"The worst is when you get one here," Gioia says, pointing to her lips. "You do have to be willing to suffer for your art," she adds. "Probably every square inch of my body has been burned at some point."

A former upholsterer, Gioia grew up around people who worked with their hands and says this job, strenuous as it can be sometimes, comes naturally to her.

Gioia and Raffloer both admit, however, this is not a lucrative field. "There's a great quote about blacksmiths: 'If you want to make a million bucks in blacksmithing, start with 2 million and work your way back,' " Raffloer says.

Still, "There's a giant amount of satisfaction at the end of the day," Gioia says. "You can look around at all this stuff you created."

If her muscles and joints start acting up, oh well. That's the price you pay for loving your job. "So I'll get a massage."

RIGHT NOW, you can visit any community college in the region that teaches trades and find classrooms overflowing with adults who've gone back to school to learn a skill, often these days because they've been laid off.

The lead welding instructor at Lake Washington Technical College, Michael Hayes, says he's seeing not just college-age students but people in their 40s and 50s. In his morning classes, two-thirds of the students are unemployed.

It used to be that nearly every high school and community college had a workshop focusing on vocational skills from welding to carpentry to auto mechanics, but as the nation grew more affluent and aspirations shifted more toward white-collar jobs, particularly in high tech, many of those programs were cut.

It doesn't take much to get Shepherd Siegel started on the probable wrong-headedness of that shift. As manager for career and technical education for the 45,000-student-strong Seattle Public Schools, it's his job to be a passionate advocate for the trades, especially given recent trends. He cites as an example that the district once had seven auto-mechanic shops, but now has three. On the other hand, the district is involved with two youth apprenticeship programs, including the largest of its kind in the state that is run out of South Seattle Community College's Georgetown neighborhood campus, with training in pouring concrete, carpentry, painting and other trades. The woodshops at Franklin and West Seattle high schools also have been popular in recent years.

Yet overall, things don't bode well for ushering a new generation of eager workers into the trades, he says.

Siegel thinks we need to adjust our attitudes about this type of work, as well as our priorities.

"There is a hunger in kids to do this," he says. "But in our concern about (academic) test scores, we have dropped these programs . . . I'm hoping that the economy is a wake-up call to go back to them."

In Siegel's view, the basics students learn in the classroom, like math and science, are only reinforced in the workshop with hands-on projects.

"The pride of accomplishment that the students take in building that cabinet, for example, is as important as the math skills they learn," he says.

It's not just about academics vs. trades, though.

"I can make myself blue in the face talking about all the money you can make," Siegel says, "but people won't hear it if the culture is saying that this kind of work is second-class.

"Dignity is something a society bestows, and they should do it in this case. That's the change that our culture needs to make. There is dignity in this work."

RICH HOSS breaks it down this way: "In school, it's like, 'Do you wanna make Bill Gates money or do you wanna work with your hands?' "

That can be a false choice.

He should know. Hoss is co-owner of A.W. Hoss & Son, a North Seattle custom-furniture and upholstery business that was started in 1936 by his grandfather, Amos W. Hoss.

Like the metalsmiths at Black Dog Forge, Hoss does not, in fact, make "Bill Gates money," but there is something to be said for keeping a family business in operation, and largely successful, for three-quarters of a century.

Still, "When I put a job posting out there, I just don't get the calls," he says.

"Maybe people don't want a good middle-class job."

He's joking, of course, but there is some truth to the paradox of a society nearing 10 percent unemployment with job openings that can't be filled for lack of workers with the proper skills.

We value handmade things, but perhaps not enough to encourage our kids to choose hands-on jobs as a career.

One way to keep the trades alive is to pass skills down the family line, the way it has been done at Hoss. The current generation of owners — Rich and his twin brother, Larry, who are 38, and their sister, Susie Hoss, 32 — hung out in the shop and worked there as kids.

"My father would always tell you, 'You have to learn a skill. You need to learn how to do something,' " Susie Hoss recalls. "He wanted us to learn to do something with our hands that you couldn't find anywhere else. His thinking was, 'If you can build something, you'll always have a job.' "

The kids all left the family business after high school, attended college and planned to do different things. But all three eventually made their way back to the factory.

"It's being part of a legacy," says Susie, who returned seven years ago after studying pre-med in Kentucky. "And it's a community here."

She's obviously proud to be part of a longstanding family business with examples of its work all over, from the W Hotel in Seattle to The Getty Center in Los Angeles.

But there's also a pride in the craft of furniture-making itself.

"If you open a piece of our furniture, you won't find anything that we didn't produce," says Susie, who works more on the marketing side of the business.

Brother Rich pulls the fabric cover off a seat to show the intricate web of jute-cord ropes that support rows of coil springs.

"Every knot is tied by hand — a machine could never do it," Susie says. It can take eight hours of tedious handiwork to stretch the ropes and tie them to the coils in a perfectly-spaced, interlocking pattern. One sofa can take 30 hours to make.

This rope-and-coil technique produces a far more durable seat, one that will retain its shape and strength for several decades. Don't get the Hosses going on comparisons between their work and furniture sold at big-box stores.

Customers increasingly wary of quality-control issues in our globalized economy demand the family's kind of meticulous production. A common question when people visit the showroom: Is this made in China?

"They will pay more money if it's domestic," Susie says. "And they can walk back here and see what we're doing."

The furniture business, like just about every other durable-goods business, has suffered a steep decline in the recession — but that has meant more customers coming to Hoss to restore pieces they already own, Susie Hoss says.

It's a good thing the Hoss family has mastered these age-old techniques, given how tough it is to find skilled workers.

"You can look for two or three years before you can find someone who can sew at the level we need," Susie Hoss says. "It's a dying art. Nobody's using their hands anymore."

Maybe that's why, even though desk jobs represent the chosen path to success and happiness for most of us today, we are so fascinated by skills for which dexterity is the key to mastery, to say nothing of quality.

AT HING LOON Chinese Restaurant in Seattle's Chinatown International District, a little window cut into the dining-room wall gives patrons a peek into the kitchen where, if you time it right, you can watch the chef and crew make rice noodles from scratch.

They pluck bits of white rice-flour dough from baseball-size rounds and, with the flattened palms of their hands, roll the pieces on a table until they stretch into identical, 3-inch-long noodles. They go one noodle at a time, until there's a heaping pile big enough to steam and then stir-fry one customer's meal. Hundreds of noodles go into a half-pound order.

It's a ridiculously tedious process, but the Southern Chinese have been doing it this way, usually as a group affair among housewives, for centuries.

In Seattle, only a handful of chefs are trained to make these and the more labor-intensive egg noodles that are common in Northern China.

At Hing Loon, the tiny crew must split the duty, often making noodles after the dinner rush and before opening in the morning.

"It's easy," chef Paul Fung says blithely, after he serves up a plate of noodles fried with egg, bean sprouts, meat and shrimp.

Not really. But the masterful hand can make it look that way.

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.