Gretsch Building Brooklyn Redux

On a recent trip to Brooklyn on the "M" subway line with Danny Reisbick, long-time store manager here and to this day webmaster supreme, while going over the Williamsburg Bridge I pointed out the old Gretsch Building, where Gretsch guitars were made from the 1930s through the late 1960s. I noted to Danny that it still says GRETSCH BUILDING No. 4 across the facade, just below the roofline, despite having long since been sold and converted to chi-chi co-op apartments. Danny asked what I knew about the building and about my experiences working at Gretsch back in the 1960s, so here goes...

That building, at 60 Broadway, Brooklyn, has eight floors, the top five of which were occupied by Gretsch; all those great Gretsch guitars were made there, from start to finish, nose to tail as they say. Many factories were vertically integrated in those days, which is to say that as many of the components used in their finished product as possible were made in-house, as opposed to buying them from various suppliers and basically being just an “assembler”. We made the pressed tops and backs, carved the necks, made bridge bases, made bridge tops and pickup covers and plated them in the plating/machine shop, wound the pickups, hooked up the wiring harnesses, and so much more that few do today. I applied for a job there in late 1964, at the ripe old age of 17, having just dropped out of my freshman year at Northeastern University Engineering in Boston; working on guitars was way more appealing to me than going to school at the time, and still is. I had already been fooling with fretted instruments for years, taking them apart, repairing them, making 5-string banjo necks and more, so I had experience under my belt. That, plus having hand tool skills to make and fix things since I was a little kid and having working knowledge of all sorts of machinery, got me the job. Based on all that, the foreman at Gretsch immediately put me to work assembling banjos, but after a few weeks they realized that they could put my skills to better use and so there I was, at the top production job in the place along with five or six much older guys, getting guitars straight from the spray room/finishing department, installing all the electronics, parts, and hardware, and doing all the setup work (nut, bridge, tailpiece, final action work) to make each guitar into a playable, fine musical instrument before being shipped out to stores. Even better than that, they eventually moved me to the repair department, to take care of the instruments sent in by their world-famous endorsers as well as for the general public. All this at the even riper age of 18; I was in heaven. I stayed at Gretsch for about a year, during which time I learned quite a bit about what gets done in major guitar production, and especially what not to do. From there it was on to setting up my own repair business in a few locations in lower Manhattan for the next five years, then opening my store at its first location at 35 Bedford Street right here in the West Village. And I'm still in the same neighborhood, doing what I’ve done for over fifty years, and still loving it.