photo by Eric Ryan Anderson
Joe Amrhein stands in the glare of a floodlight and surveys the rising clutter that crowds this giant brick cavern, a towering old boiler room that he must transform, in two short weeks, into an extension of Pierogi 2000, his small but influential art gallery a few blocks away. “It’s starting to fill up in here,” he says with a satisfied smile. “We’re already running low on space.” Earlier, Amrhein ushered in two sizable arrivals: the six-foot wooden crate that holds an 800-pound sphere made of security monitors, and an even-larger metal crate containing a four-and-a-half ton piece of Antarctic ice.
Just a week earlier, this defunct boiler room in a factory on Williamsburg’s North 14th Street looked like the backdrop for the dramatic confrontation of a film noir. The room’s dirty brick walls stretch nearly fifty feet to the ceiling, where a metal catwalk spans the room’s width. Birds swing in and out, perching on the broken panes of a window, where a dim light ekes through decades of grime. A brick boiler, built in 1931, stands like an industrial mausoleum with hinged, steel portholes and a melange of pipes turning at right angles, winding across each other and doubling back, as if Jules Verne had contributed the first sculpture to this new expedition.