It feels like I live on the screened-in porch I played on as a little girl. Air and light pour through my 4,000 square feet of industrial space, grand space that lets the mind wander, free to concoct dreams and ponder why people buy those pink flamingos. The el roars past the endless windows facing a western sky that’s sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes purple, sometimes orange. The sound rumbles through the steel I beams and old brick, drowning out all communication, interrupting thought. A giant pendulum now stored in a sixth-floor closet once kept time in the soaring clock tower that tops this former factory, beating like its heart.
Two strips of grass, fenced in by wooden stakes and rope, frame the sidewalk that leads to the front door of the Larchmont. Four trees shade the entrance. The Speed-O-Print logo, painted in gold and silver script, once gleamed through the glass arch above the door until it was scratched off a couple of years ago. A slab of heavy corrugated black rubber lies on the floor of the gray marble lobby; white block letters embedded in the black surface spell out “Speed-O-Print.” A stairway rolls to the left, curling behind the elevator. Dark shadows cast on the walls make you wonder what’s lurking on the landing, just out of sight. Labyrinthine stairwells lace the entire structure, connecting the three sections and seven floors. To reach back in time to discover the stories this building still holds, start with the grimy back stairwell; the grit in those corners probably predates Prohibition. Despite the low light and mysterious echoes, the stairs still provide the safest form of travel through the building, because the elevators often stick between floors. Escape is easy from the passenger elevator–roll up the grate and the heavy metal door, then climb out. But the cagelike freight elevator is a more harrowing challenge, with heavier doors that are harder to pry open and a single bare bulb that lights up the shaft just enough to let you see you’re in trouble, but not enough to show you a way out.
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The four- and seven-story sections housed Bell & Howell’s main machine shops, huge expanses of concrete divided by seemingly random sections of drywall and imposing pillars too wide to reach around. The windows start at your hips and soar up 15 or 20 feet, stopping just shy of the ceiling. Windows wrap the building like ribbons, encircling each floor. The glass panes push out on hinges halfway up the frame and are propped open with metal rods, letting the sky and city in.
Bell & Howell earned a reputation as an innovator. Company founder Albert S. Howell personally held 147 patents on inventions that changed the way movies were made and exhibited. In 1912 Bell & Howell introduced its 2709 standard 35-millimeter camera, the first all-metal movie camera. It was produced in response to the plight of explorers Martin and Osa Johnson, who lost their state-of-the-art wood-and-leather model to termites and mildew in Africa. Thirteen years later the company created the Eyemo, a small, versatile camera enthusiastically picked up by newsreel crews. Filmmakers continue to use the 2709 as a rotoscope camera, which allows live-action footage to form a frame-by-frame basis for animation. Walt Disney animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a 2709 camera manufactured in 1914. The Eyemo is still regularly employed as a “crash cam,” getting smashed by cars and dropped off cliffs. Bell & Howell focused on professional equipment, but it also manufactured 8- and 16-millimeter products for amateur moviemakers like your parents, who probably recorded your first steps with a Bell & Howell device.
The company would go on to win Oscars for technical contributions to the film industry, and it would develop more sophisticated communications products in such areas as microfilm and aerospace. Sales increased almost 13-fold by 1963, when Percy resigned as chief executive to run unsuccessfully for Illinois governor (he won his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1966). The company’s longtime ties to government prompted Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to call its headquarters after Bell & Howell two-way radios were found in the possession of the “White House plumbers” at the Watergate Hotel (Woodward’s inquiry found no connection between the company and the break-in).
Years after the Speed-O-Print sales and management guys vacated the space, it still felt like an intrusion on their territory when you’d turn the oversized brass doorknob and push open the door that guards the second-floor office. I envision factory laborers in ink-stained coveralls complaining about the sales and management guys as they scrub away the grime and grease on their hands in the eight-spigot sink I now use. But former employees say Samuels was a generous guy. Workers liked him despite (or maybe because of) his man-about-town image.
An odd collection of people inhabit the building. Silk screen printers, a futon factory, and photographers have come and gone. There’s Steve and me–refugees from ad agencies. Bill next door is a computer artist. His wife B.J. is a graphic designer who creates children’s books. Between the two of them I think they’ve got enough processing power to launch nuclear weapons. Tiffany designs and manufactures clothes. Tom is a well-known sculptor. There are a couple of light machine shops, a guy who builds and installs fireplaces, and a combination record collector/dealer and cat sitter. The Bruno Sport people run fitness camps. And then there are the guys from a direct-marketing company downstairs; they sell computers by phone and grunt like animals while loading equipment into trucks.
