
A Brooklyn bronze foundry has endured on the banks of the East River for nearly 100 years. Its fourth steward Billy Makky can be be found in the shop daily wearing a fireproof apron and one of many hats: craftsman, artist, alchemist, engineer, businessman – and when interacting with New York creatives –psychologist.
There’s a DNA, an origin story, that bridges the Iwo Jima Monument, the crucifix Pope John Paul II leant on during mass, the coiled muscles of Arturo Di Modica’s Bull of Wall Street, the folds of Lynda Benglis’ sculpture, and the figures who march behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s funeral carriage at his Washington monument. These bronze pieces, along with countless other monuments, adornments, and portraits scattered across the globe, were all made with the same tools and cast in the same furnace in Brooklyn. Bedi-Makky Art Foundry has lasted as long as the sculptures, a company passed down from partner to friend, father to son, producing bronze art work for over a hundred years.

The bronze business has changed dramatically since the golden age of foundries in New York City, however, and the demand for public sculpture, the bread and butter of the industry, has shifted. But Bedi-Makky’s current owner, Bill Makky, still carries on the tradition, filling commissions designed to become iconic public symbols. The foundry’s most recent project? A bronze hockey glove as big as a sea turtle, designed for Madison Square Garden as a good luck symbol for Rangers fans.

Bill’s foundry, where the liquid bronze for the sculpture is poured, is one of several businesses that emit a cacophony on Greenpoint’s India Street. Auto repair shops line the street, with gleaming classic Lincolns hiked up on the pavement. The gritty whine of sanding and the pop of an air compressor blend with the roar of the furnace in the foundry workshop.
The noise is intense, but the space feels sacred. “More than one sculptor has come in here and called this place ‘the Cathedral’,” Bill says. The outer room of the workshop is a luminous nave under a peaked skylight. A layer of fine dust silts the floor. It captures the details of shoeprints that cross from the tool bench, to the man-high ovens, to waiting plaster molds that Bill will cover in more sand to make a cast. In the room next door, the furnace Bill uses to melt down bronze for castings is so hot it makes the bronze inside glow green.

On a pouring day, usually a Monday, two assistants help Bill tip a crane away from the furnace to drain hypnotic gold rivulets into molds. “No running,” Bill orders to anyone skipping out of the way, like he’s a lifeguard overseeing the deep end of a pool. Drops of liquid splash onto the sandy floor. The bronze gurgles like a stew. “Sounds good.” Bill can tell the temperature of the molten bronze by the sound. One of the assistants leaning close to the heat waves simmering off the equipment wears a mask. Bill wears only an FDNY baseball cap.

The foundry itself is both functional and beautiful. Tools hang like a museum display on the wall. A Colonial figurine glares down from a top shelf, as does a bird with wings spread like a rising phoenix. Beside them are rolls of duct tape, repurposed Chock full o’ Nuts cans, tubs of oozing rubber, hanging ladles. Nudes are stacked on filing cabinets. An extension cord coils around the legs of a knee-high bronze girl. A crucifix staff leaning in a corner is a cast of the one Bill made for the Pope.
The models and bronzes aren’t aesthetic and they aren’t clutter. They are core to the long-term business models of Bill’s industry. Business-savvy artists request that Bill make multiple castings of one sculpture. The first is the commissioned work. The rest are an investment in the hope that later buyers will want replicas. Bronze is a big commitment – to make, to buy, and to display – a lifetime commitment at least. “We have customers for fifty or sixty years,” Bill says of his artists. “They’ll sell one bronze edition, then maybe twenty years later, they’ll sell the second. So, we have everything in storage.” Even when an artist passes away they’re still Bill’s clients. He keeps their casts for the estate, in case they can get a buyer. “It’s an old-fashioned business, like life insurance,” he says. The Bedi-Makky foundry is itself a product of old school models of intergenerational business planning. Bill is the fourth generation of owners – the last one being his father, István – that stretches back to the foundry’s start at the turn of the century.

Bronze art foundries mushroomed in New York at the end of the 19th century under the umbrella of a nationwide financial boom. Capital from railroads and factory network poured in. The time was called the Gilded Age, and in celebration of its namesake and the extra cash flow, burnished ornamentation became the new craze. Sculptors like Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederic Remington led the trend, setting out to create a particularly American sculptural identity. Marble spoke to a European tradition, so Gilded Age sculptors chose bronze as…
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