Greenwich Woodcarvers

For 25 years Greenwich House has given to the Italians in the Village all that they have known of cultural development, health, recreation. There are more than 26 thousand a year who take advantage of the music school, baby clinics and nursery, arts, drama, dancing, made possible by the original and continued efforts of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, director.

Last week the Greenwich House, Manhattan, Workshops opened, a workshop where Italian boys are apprenticed in the old tradition to a master cabinet maker--Nicola Famiglietti, once of Naples. In the little house on Jones Street, designed by Delano & Aldrich, architects for Greenwich House itself, there are, not classes, but a guild of young boys whose ancestors may have been famed violin makers or stone cutters of Italy, or sculptors whose talents have descended to a generation unrealized were it not for Greenwich House and Victor Salvatore, who lends his time and enthusiasm and wise counsel to the development of "The Arts of the Building Trade."

The boys buy their own tools, the tuition is the work they do. Cabinets, carved wood, original in conception but steeped in the old Italian spirit are sold to the equal benefit of the shop and the young artisan.

They have carved a reredos for a chapel in Long Island, screens for a Manhattan church; are in demand before their years of apprenticeship are over by sculptors, cabinet makers, architects in New York.