The Gilder

THE NEW YORKER · April 18, 1994 · By Jonas Merrill

THE NEW YORKER · April 18, 1994 · By Jonas Merrill

The old opera house on Curtis Street has been dark since the Depression, but if you cut through the alley after midnight you will sometimes see a light moving behind the third-floor glass. It belongs to Emil Sandoval, who is seventy-one and one of perhaps four men in the West still trained in water gilding, and who is spending his retirement restoring a room almost no one will ever be permitted to see. He was hired by letter. His employer, a preservation trust, pays every Friday in cash and prefers, he was told, to remain a private benefactor; in nine months he has spoken to no one but its lawyer.

The work itself would not raise an eyebrow at the landmarks commission — there are a dozen such quiet restorations around the country, heirs and foundations pouring fortunes into buildings they mean to sit on. What stays with Sandoval is the exactness.

The instructions specify a single year, 1902, and return everything to it: the later mirrors in the lobby were photographed, crated, and carried off, logged as "1921 additions," and no one has said where they went. "Most people who hire this kind of work, they want it to look old," he told me. "These people want it to look like a particular night." He said it without drama, the way a craftsman describes a demanding client, and then he went back up the ladder, because he is paid until dawn and does not like to waste the dark.