The career crafters

When Pauline Agassiz Shaw founded the North Bennet Street Industrial School in Boston in 1885, Chris Gray was hardly the kind of student she had in mind for her settlement house.

The native of Blue Hill, Maine, isn't in need of the basic English and urban survival skills that Ms. Shaw and other social activists were providing for newly arrived European immigrants flooding the narrow streets of Boston's North End and similar neighborhoods along the Eastern seaboard.

In at least one way, though, Mr. Gray is similar to those Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants - he has come to what is now called North Bennet Street School to learn the foundations of a craft that he hopes will support him.

But unlike earlier generations of students at the old brick building at 39 North Bennet Street, Gray and the other men and women here learning furnituremaking, violinmaking, piano technology, jewelrymaking, carpentry, locksmithing, book binding, and preservation carpentry are learning skills that they hope will allow them not only to earn a good living, but also to live a good and satisfying life.

"This looks like a way to earn a living and do something I want to do," says Gray, finishing the intricately inlaid legs of a demi-lune table he is crafting in the school's furnituremaking workshop. "I've grown up around woodworking," he says. "It's so easy to get lost in it and do what you want to do."

What Gray, son and grandson of Yankee carpenters, wants to do is create contemporary furniture to his own designs. But when he went to the Maine College of Art after high school graduation, he discovered that no one there could teach him the techniques of traditional wood joinery, the basic skills and knowledge of wood and tools he feels he needs to make his artistic designs a reality. So, he says, after less than a year in art school, teachers there suggested he head for North Bennet Street.

Described as one of America's first trade schools, North Bennet Street "piloted the teaching of industrial arts, and then the public schools picked them up," says Cynthia Stone, its executive director.

"The school really got crafts oriented during the Arts and Crafts era. After World War II [it] went in a number of directions, adding camera repair" and similar trades. But in the 1980s - the decade when the school finally closed its neighborhood day-care center and ended its last community tie to the days of Pauline Agassiz Shaw - the institution's leaders "said 'Crafts are what we do best, so why don't we do that?' " says Ms. Stone. "Of course," she adds, "the definition of crafts has changed: We define it in traditional terms as the production of aesthetically pleasing, functional objects. But today when you hear ads on TV, everything's called a craft - the craft of sandwichmaking, the craft of beermaking."

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