Chris Hauke, proprietor of St. Nicholas Carving & Gilding, is my neighbor in an apartment complex along the 1000-block of N. Front Street, near the Harvey Taylor Bridge.
Hauke works out of a small first floor unit, and, from my parking spot in the rear of the building, I can see him in his woodshop, under a trolley of overhead lights, sanding or gilding one of his signs. Sometimes his cockatiel, Big Boy, is perching on the window. His landscaped grounds, which he dutifully designs and plants each year, seem incongruous beside the potholed alleys and the shabby backs of buildings nearby. Besides the occasional exchange about books we’re reading, Hauke and I rarely speak. As far as his trade is concerned, I am mostly a voyeur.
Chris is 62 years old, a lean man who sports a white mustache, his lanky arms and workman’s hands almost hairless. He dresses plainly, in a blue polo and khakis. He’s loquacious, has a brash, Brooklynesque accent and is prone to jump off the tracks with his stories.
When I ask him how he developed his passion for woodworking, he tells me about his grandfather.
“He was trained in tinsmithing at a Philadelphia Technical School, and went on to run a bar in Allentown. In his cavernous cellar underneath the bar, he held cabinets, chests, workbenches, vises, racks of tools,” Hauke says.
“When he passed away, I was there that Sunday. The first thing I did was go down to the cellar and box all the tools I wanted.” He starts to laugh. “I was very taken by the planes, the chisels, anything that looked well-used.” (Hauke still uses his grandfather’s patinated, wood-handled tools, which are prominently displayed in his shop.)
He follows up with backstory about his father managing the bar in Allentown after his grandfather’s passing, and then: “What was the question again?”
In a way, his own query seemed rhetorical after spending three hours with him, because Chris’s anecdotes are immersive and his folk aesthetic is bent toward spitting out sagas, whether discussing his extensive self-education in playing the fiddle while attaining a comprehensive appreciation for violins and their makers or his capacity to learn portrait painting. For him, exchange is not relegated to my pithy questions.
“My father was absolutely helpless when it came to home upkeep, construction. I think he might have been able to change a sink washer out.”
“The crux of this thing is how strange to me life is in the sense that my father was totally unable to instruct me in any woodlore…and my grandfather never bothered too, which is why my father never did.” Grandfather William F. Hauke, however, passed on his mechanical inclination to his youngest grandson.
Hauke depended on his treasure trove of tools for years, working in many industrial trades: tree surgery, surveying, framing and steel puddling. He joined the U.S. Navy Construction Battalion for a five-year tour, learning plumbing, pipefitting and air conditioning. Despite his apparent predilection for the blue collar, he describes himself as “an academic boy.”
In September of 1982, Hauke entered Penn State Harrisburg’s Structural Engineering class, which he ultimately left after a frustrating bout with “calculus, Newtonian mechanics and the Fortran-based computer.”
Hauke then pushed a hot dog cart downtown while taking night courses in portraiture from Leo Gilroy, an educator with the Art Association of Harrisburg, and enrolling in two carving classes with Dick Koontz, a blue ribbonist during the 1976 National Woodcarvers annual competition.
“I always had a love for letters, calligraphy, layouts, justification, distribution of weight and stylistic nuances, and how they fit historical periods, how they evoke the feel for that [era],” Hauke said.
His epiphanic moment came during a trip to Boston Bay, where ship carving and gilded signs are ubiquitous. He made his way to Paul McCarthy’s sign shop, resting on a jetty overhanging Scituate Bay.
“Large chunks flew from the biting gouges, a razor sharp knife smoothed the turn of a letter ‘P,’ the bandsaw buzzed on its lathe—I was infected!”
He returned and did some kitschy production work for a local purveyor, “carving bunnies, that sort of stuff.” But he was eager to do original work, so he spent time at libraries studying the history of carving.
In 1986, he registered St. Nicholas Carving & Gilding. Since then, the business has been housed in multiple buildings throughout the city. One of these, the old Lawton Street Garage, caved in following the blizzard of ’94, and, afterwards, Hauke relocated his shop to its present home, at 1011 N. Front St. His home business is modest, but the 12-foot ceilings are sufficiently high for the mounting of display samples, and the basement of the apartment allows for dirty work and heavy machinery. The front entryway is closed off where a tight hallway contains his design studio: a computer with his go-to program, Adobe Illustrator, and a large format printer.
After you enter through the hallway, an immediate left takes you to a cupboard, which Chris refers to as “Buddy’s Apartment.” His workspace is defined by a bench under a parallel beam carrying a track of halogen spotlights. On the wall behind him hangs 80 chisels and gouges on magnetic strips and a Swedish grinder for maintaining the tools’ sharp edges. Cases holding additional tools, as well as a reference library, line the wall underneath the sample pieces. Currently, an 8-foot-by-18-inch sign for Cordier Auctions lies protected under a linen cloth, set up for gilding, a process by which he lightly hammers gold leafing into the letters. He shows me the Giusto Manetti 23-carat gold leaf sheets—delicate wafers resembling sushi wrap—that arrive in containers resembling jewelry boxes.
I ask Chris to give me a quick lesson in his process. “It starts with good design,” he says. Then he takes into consideration the time period, the chosen text and the intended location of the building or grounds. Sizing the piece, picking out the wood—cedar or redwood—and planing the wood completes the preliminary production work. As for the rest of the process—Hauke wouldn’t go into detail.
His pieces can be seen around the city: Sunken Gardens, Italian Lake and his favorite, St. Patrick’s Cathedral Gate, a 16-foot-wide masterpiece.
“That was a work of everything—designing, sculpting, carving, carpentry, a few skilled helpers,” Hauke says. It took him four months to complete. He doesn’t limit himself just to the Harrisburg region; he has signs all over the east coast, leaving lasting impressions in Delaware, Myrtle Beach, Long Island and other locales.
This autodidact is a Renaissance man yet a solid realist, and, while he might have dispelled all my silly notions of woodworking, in a way, it doesn’t take away from his craftsmanship and the beauty of the formal artifacts he’s sprinkled around Harrisburg.
St. Nicholas Carving & Gilding
Location: 1011 N. Front St., Parking Located in the rear and on Herr and Boas Streets
Website: www.stnichsigns.com
Phone:: 717-234-1776
E: hauke@epix.net
