Fancy Lamps

Photograph © Tom Maday

From the street, the factory housing the Frederick Cooper Lamp Company is not as ugly as most. The building was originally a ladies undergarment plant, built around 1900; it has a courtyard and windows, luxuries that would later be dispensed with in most factories. The four-storey brick building, with a square tower double that height, is a reminder that a factory was once the centrepiece of a neighbourhood, second only to the local church. The tower, like a steeple, catches the eye; it advertises the product with a sign informing the 260,000 cars that pass every day along the Kennedy Expressway leading out of Chicago that Cooper produces LAMPS OF ELEGANCE.

'Elegance' can be taken as an euphemism for 'costliness' and Cooper lamps are indeed expensive. The lamps are made of brass and copper, maple and marble, bronze and china, silverplate and gold leaf. No one has any idea how many different styles they make and the number keeps changing. The cheapest costs $200, and from there prices soar into the thousands for crystal chandeliers.

None of the luxury of Cooper's product extends to the factory itself. The entrance is through a single flight of narrow stairs leading to a small, not particularly clean, reception area. This was last decorated, from the look of it, in the early 1970s: pea green carpeting, and fake wood-panelled walls. A few well-tended plants, a carved eagle and some handmade sparkly butterflies on the bulletin board save the room from dreariness.

The public face of Cooper Lamp is more attractive: Suzanne Lauren, an energetic woman whose dangly bracelets bear an uncanny resemblance to decorative elements of certain Cooper lamps. She has worked at Cooper for twenty-three years and is now the vice president of design. She is accompanied by her dog, Cooper, a German shepherd that has the run of the front office, a room as cluttered as the reception area is bare. One wall is given over to manila folders; the desks are piled high with catalogues and promotional materials; lamps in various stages of assembly crouch in the corner as if they have wandered off the factory floor.

A lamp is divided into four parts. First is the shade—a screen of paper or cloth that softens the harshness of a bare bulb. Second is the electrical socket that receives the light bulb. Third, holding the socket aloft, is the base which is often decorative. Anything can be used for a lamp base—bowling balls, football helmets, toy trains—but given Cooper's high-end market, the bases tend to be brass urns, china vases as well as an eclectic range of objects that seem designed to appeal to wealthy widows: brass elephants, bronze bulldogs, Chinese horses, verdigris dancing frogs, copper Nepalese horns, metal palm trees. Floor lamps tend to be more uniform because of their larger size, their bases simple brass poles or turned wooden posts.

Under the base is the part that most non-lamp people never consider: the mounting. This is a little circle of wood or stone or, in less expensive lamps, plastic, that acts as a buffer between base and table top. The mounting is like a pedestal for a statue. Without it, a lamp looks unfinished, like an urn with a lampshade on top.

In practice a lamp has many more pieces than just these four main components; each part consists of many more parts. A mounting might be three circles of wood, each a bit smaller than the one below. A base might be an urn that is assembled out of a dozen various rings and handles and curving sections. An electrical socket includes a cord threaded through a metal channel and a plug and a harp (the loop of brass that holds the shade). A shade can be a complex confection of cloth, metal, cardboard, or even a decorative fringe consisting of one hundred inch-long threads, each one holding a colourful glass bead.

This multitude of parts—wooden feet, stone discs, copper tubes, glass beads, porcelain dogs, brass finials, tin pineapples—dictates the set-up of the 240,000 square foot Cooper factory. Most of the plant is given over to rows of shelves and bins and tables to hold the thousands of dusty parts. The pieces are stored where they are made since the Cooper plant consists of a series of shops. This makes the factory unusual in this age. The typical modern factory either makes something—forging steel rods, moulding rubber tires, dipping chrome plating; or it assembles something—putting together bicycles. But Cooper does both, out of necessity.

'All the small businesses in the Chicago area stopped—wood carving, plating, metal forming and casting,' says Frederick Gershanov, who owns Cooper Lamp with his older brother Peter. 'So all those operations we took into our company.'

Cooper has an enormous woodshop where rough planks of maple are turned into lamp bases. While there are numerous electric tools—planers and sanders and band saws and radial saws—there are also plenty of hand tools, some with wooden handles: chisels and augers and mallets. A plywood board displays cutting-wheel bits at the ready. They are objects of surprising beauty, resembling little steel suns and crosses and starfish.

Bedpost-shaped lamp bases are common and the lathe work for such bases is done here. The really time-consuming part is not turning the wood but setting the cutting knives on the lathe to produce a particular pattern of curves and bulges and ripples. So, rather than keep changing the settings on the lathe bits, the knives are kept in place and locked into the machines when needed. Dozens of the pointy, yard-long assemblages are stored leaning upright on a rack, in a kind of library; an example of the post each set of lathes produces is placed in front of the knives that produce it.

This is a very old fashioned way of doing things—no bar codes, no computerized imaging of the lamp bases, just the objects themselves guiding workers to the lathe set-ups they need. This is typical of the overall Cooper system; a person new to Cooper would have no way of locating a particular bolt of leopard-print cloth for a particular lampshade. There is no general system tracking where things are, other than the memories of the workers, several of whom have been here for almost forty years.

The average vista that presents itself, as you walk through Cooper Lamp, is completely inert—lifeless rows of parts, on shelves, or in large, square, heavily scarred wooden bins on iron wheels. 'I saw one at an antique store, selling for a thousand dollars,' Lauren says.

The factory is surprisingly quiet and dim; lights are kept low to save money. Occasionally you will hear the whine of a saw, or the low murmur of Mexican or Polish or Korean music a certain worker is listening to on an ethnic radio station. Cooper has 150 employees. Workers are usually by themselves when you encounter them: you typically meet an older person, sitting on a stool at a workbench, in a small pool of light, bringing a hand tool to bear upon one of the dozen or so lamps spread out before them, all in a uniform degree of partial completeness. There are no conveyor, belts, no quotas. Nobody seems in a hurry.

'You can't use anything sharp because it will scour the pieces,' Richard Beitler explains. He is standing at a table and using steel wool to burnish fifteen swan-handled urns, each of which has been assembled from seventeen different pieces. 'You rub on it, rub on it, it's glossy and you want it matte, you change the direction from a buffing motion to a rubbing sideways in the opposite direction. See how it flattens the colour out? How it dulls it?'

He wears cotton gloves—once white, now deep black except for the cuffs. He is working his way through a batch of a hundred of these urns. He says that buffing each urn should take about twenty minutes if you do it properly.

'That's if you're God,' he says. 'I can do it in fifteen.'

Beitler has worked here for ten years, and says you can tell at once when a lamp has been rubbed by hand. Machined lamps, Beitler says, are 'very uniform, very glossy. When you do a hand finish, it looks like its been sitting around. It has a warmth to it, a nice texture, tone, patina. The bronze hand finish looks great. You can't do it on a machine. It has a very nice antique look. It's very beautiful.'