Fancy Lamps

Cooper Lamps was founded by Leo Gershanov, the father of the current owner. He was born in Russia, was drafted into the Tsar’s army and captured by the Hungarians during the First World War. He jumped off a train in Slovakia, and worked his way, first to England and then the United States, where he started all sorts of businesses. He was selling eggnog when he saw in the Chicago Sun an advertisement to buy the studios of Frederick Cooper. Cooper had been an artist and sculptor whose work, popular in the 1920s, was often incorporated into lamps. When Gershanov responded to the ad, he met another man also interested in the studios, Benjamin Markle, and rather than bid against each other, they bought the studio together and went into business.

It was a good time to start making decorative lamps.

Frederick Gershanov explained that after the Second World War there was a huge demand for lamps. The copper needed for the electrical cords and sockets had been in very short supply. ‘So there was a huge pent-up demand, because of the new housing, and they turned some of the statuary they were making into lamps.’ What we think of as garish, late 1940s lamps — your basic hula girl statuette lamp — are the result of desperate lamp makers turning whatever decorative objects they could find into lamps.

In recent years, however, it is all Cooper can do to stay afloat. The loss of American manufacturing jobs is not merely a story of cheap foreign wages. Soaring real estate prices are part of the problem, too. One by one, the children of the founders of vast suburban furniture stores realized that they could make more money selling the land under their stores than they made selling furniture.

‘High-end stores that were our best customers, these high-end stores had lots of land in the suburbs, or in the downtown area,’ Gershanov said. ‘Their founders retired or their kids said, “Hey, I can sell this land and make as much money as working seven days a week.”’

Fewer fancy furniture stores mean fewer fancy lamps.

‘There are just a certain number of tables in furniture stores that can take lamps,’ said Lauren. ‘Competitive is an understatement.’

The greatest harm low price imports cause to a place such as Cooper Lamp is not the fact that they encourage people to buy cheap lamps. It’s that, as the years go by, cheap lamps are the only lamps they know, and the whole idea of a well-made lamp begins to seem exotic and even ridiculous. Or they never find their way to a furniture store because they buy their lamps at the supermarket. A person who might have fallen in love with the metal palm fronds and faux-marble painted wooden base of Cooper Style # R625 (the Tropical Palm lamp, designed by Raymond Waites) and might have decided to pay the freight costs, never stops to look at it because they’ve already bought their lamps at Target.

‘Everybody’s got lamps now,’ said Gershanov. ‘Drug stores sell lamps. So it’s a very difficult environment.’

We have come to accept low quality goods, if they’re cheap enough, as standard, and this drives up the price of high quality goods even further. There was time when a humble office worker would visit a tailor and buy a suit; now handmade suits are a luxury of the wealthy. The average person can't conceive of paying $500 for a lamp in any circumstances. Even Cooper has found that there aren't enough well-to-do people to justify trying to sell its most labour-intensive products, such as lamps with intricate inlaid wood designs. ‘We used to do beautiful, beautiful, beautiful marquetry, but unfortunately there’s no market for it,’ said Lauren. ‘It’s gone. Very minimal demand.’

Once a product requiring a highly specialized skill is phased out, it is almost impossible to bring it back, even if the demand for it were to resurface. Professions vanish. Cooper won’t be able to sell inlaid lamps again because they won't be able to find anyone with the skills to make them. To the owners of Cooper Lamp, it can seem, on bad days, that no matter how hard they work, it is only a question of time before their factory goes the way of Dad’s Root Beer across the street: yet another manufacturing shell to be turned into lofts for young professionals.

‘There’s no market for our goods,’ said Gershanov, in a gravelly tone. ‘There’s no market…’ and here his voice trailed off to a whisper, ‘for our goods’.

On February 9 2005, just as this issue of Granta went to press, the Frederick Cooper Lamp Company announced it was to close on June 30. There are reports that a buyer has already been found for the building and intends to convert the factory into lofts. Fred Gershanov told the Chicago Sun-Times: ‘I hope it gets the best possible use. It’s a beautiful building.’