Edge Making

Who are the makers? What are they making? What did they used to make? Who makes them now?

Bicycles, Wonder Bread, microbrew, fine furniture, hit records, quiches, rubber stamps, carriages, paintings, all have been or currently are made in the Edge. Who made the streets? Who baked the bread?

I am interested in the history of manufacturing in the Edge neighborhood. It makes sense that some of the void left behind when average manufacturing moved over seas has been filled by high-end artisan shops.

I am also thinking about the connection between shops that manufactured carriages or rubber stamps and what happened at Sun Studios. While on the one hand hammering wood and carving spokes for a carriage wheel feels drastically different from strumming a guitar and crooning into a microphone, both are forms of creating things, both produce commodities, drive cities and for a time defined America.

We romanticize manufacturing, but there is so much manufacturing that is soulless production of crap that has the briefest of pauses between raw materials and landfill.

I am reminded of a beautiful, built-in entertainment center that a friend who is a high-end furniture-maker lovingly crafted out of bright white maple, shaping, sanding, lacquering, perfecting and then a visiting friend intended to complement, saying “Wow! You made that? It looks like something that they would sell at Ikea! I can’t believe you made it!” I could see Niclas cringing.

This ties into the Brooklynification of every city, where we have new businesses dedicated to selling artisan olive oils, or a store that is all soap, beautiful blocks of marbled swirly soap, wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine. Memphis is starting to have those kinds of places popping up.

Somehow this all relates to how our world is changing, how work is no longer necessary (Jeremy Rifkin’s “The End of Work”). Somehow it also relates to the idea that our nation has to have 5% growth or the economy falls apart. So there are new Starbucks, new Dollar General, new Shoe Carnivals popping up in new strip malls with a Panera bakery all in what was a sleepy town of orchards in rural S. Carolina but now features a dozen new businesses, all with free WiFi. So I ask myself regularly, can we really keep going like this? Can we keep building?

So I thought about Elvis recording “That’s Alright Momma” when just blocks away Big Momma Thorton, Memphis Minnie, and the like were playing their songs down on Beale. I thought of making a sign that would say “Is that alright?” I imagined those words surrounding a cotton ball with TCB inside of it. I thought of the patchwork nature of Memphis, one block of affluent houses and then the next street over: shotgun houses. I was told that this was so that the rich people in the big houses could have their servants staying nearby.

I would like to make a census of makers in the Edge. Maybe sandblast images of the goods into the sidewalk outside of where the thing was made, with text?

Heidelberg Project, Detroit

Heidelberg Project, Detroit

Heidelberg Project, Detroit

Heidelberg Project, Detroit

Heidelberg Project, Detroit

Benedict Radcliffe

Julius Knipl a comic series by Ben Katchor

Javanese woodcarvers making a lifesized replica of a sports car, a commission from an American millionaire.