“For me too,” said Olga Bloom. “I just got to be 88 years old. Born April 2, 1919, in Boston, Mass.”
There are few better arguments for the cliché: 88 years young. And for 30 of those 88 years, including this one, she has been here on her tied-up barge at Fulton Landing, Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, house-mothering superlative chamber-music concerts by top-rank musicians, four times a week, every week in the year, for any and all who would come and listen. Bargemusic it’s called. Admission $35; for students, $25; many tickets and some concerts free.
“And now we’re installing jazz on Thursdays,” she says. “An American voice that’s been influential on composers around the world.”
Was the barge always here, just waiting for you?
“Oh no. I brought it here. It was all quite murky,” she says of those days 30 years ago. “Nobody knew, and they still don’t know, how to classify me. There were no laws, no rules, for or against what I wanted to do, so I just hung out.”
One day, she says, there was an ad in the papers for 10 barges for sale in Jersey City, back behind the Statue of Liberty – “barges belonging to the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, which wasn’t carrying coffee any more … Want a cup of coffee?”
She goes off to make it. On her return:
“I know what happened to three of those 10 barges. The River Café bought one. Con Ed bought one. And I bought one. Actually it’s my third barge. When I went on board the first one, I saw that the wood was so thick, it would absorb all the sound. The second one turned out to have a bottom so spongy that if you poked a finger into the hull, your finger would go right through. With the third one” – this one – “the problem was where to take it, and how.”
She stops, thinks, then says: “Maybe I’d better tell you in narrative form.” Takes a deep breath.
“I’ve been a musician all my life. Violin and viola.”
Do you play them now?
She touches the violin case lying before her. “Every day. And I was married to two musicians. My first husband, Philip Arkuss, was too young to be well known. He was going into the Army when we met, and we did a tour of Army camps together. The Army put him on a plane as a radio man, and he was killed, at 23, on his first flight, over the Celebes. My second husband, Tobias Bloom, was a violinist with Toscanini in the NBC Symphony, possibly the greatest orchestra ever formed. He died two years before I started this barge thing.”
Her name, at birth, was Olga Bayrack. Her father, born in Kiev, was Feodor Bayrack, a building engineer. “I went to his graduation from M.I.T. My mother, Euphrosina Maslanka, was from Vienna. My father was an ardent Communist, my mother went to 7:30 Mass every morning of her life. It was their love of music kept them compatible. I was at Boston University when my mother died. It was very hard times, but I got a job at Filene’s because they had a little orchestra to open the store every morning.”
Even after she was married, “nobody would pay my rent, so I became a New York breadwinner.”
At Tanglewood, one summer in the early 1940s, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky wanted her to go to Juilliard, “but I couldn’t afford Juilliard” and didn’t go.
“I have,” says Olga Bloom, “encountered many great musicians who had no platform – musician workers in the theater, in every ballet you ever heard of, in radio and television, and there’s no place for them to be heard individually.
“So let me tell you why the barge.
“My brother Andrew and his wife Norena and I were discussing a proper environment in which to raise their expected child, and we thought that since there was such a sameness in architecture everywhere – since the banks all look alike, the apartment houses all look alike, the schools all look alike and so do the stores – and since I at the time lived on a waterfront on Long Island – well, wouldn’t it be a great idea if they brought their child up on a houseboat.
“Some days later my sister-in-law called me and said she’d looked in all the newspapers and couldn’t find an ad for a houseboat, but she did see an advertisement for some barges behind the Statue of Liberty in New Jersey.
“When I heard the word barge I immediately thought: What a perfect size for people who have no idea what chamber music is.”
She went, looked, bought Barge 1, then Barge 2, then – for $10,000 – Barge 3.
It was time for some education in waterfront matters.
“Waterfront people are an astonishingly creative breed. They can transform any object into something else. They began to advise me; I think I amused them.
“The first thing I learned was that a wooden vessel is not insurable for public use. Because of fire laws.
“The second thing I learned was that wooden ships have to be caulked, and that’s something – the art of caulking – that’s gone out of style. There’s nobody left behind who knows how to do it.
“The third and most important thing I learned was from a tugboat captain – Captain Hernly – who told me to get a maritime engineer to advise me. Then Captain Hernly asked: ‘How you doing for a site?’ By then I’d been denied a berth in any of the boroughs of New York City. So Captain Hernly told me about Peter Stanford, who [with his wife Norma] had created the South Street Seaport, but had since had differences of opinion with the Seaport’s [tourist-trap minded] board of directors. So Stanford had left the Seaport to come here, to an old firehouse [at the foot of Brooklyn’s Fulton Street, less than 100 feet from Bargemusic’s barge], where he got the right to bring interesting vessels. I went to see him.”
The barge, and its mission, was certainly an interesting vessel. “Neither Peter nor I had a lease of any description.” And Bargemusic’s office is now situated in that onetime firehouse.
It was Captain Hernly’s tug that towed her barge from Jersey City to Fulton Landing. “An all-day process. His tugboat was so small and my barge was so big.”
Remember that child that Olga Bloom’s brother and his wife were going to have? Well, they did, and she today is Selene Castrovilla, currently the author of By the Sword (Calkins Creek, 2007), a novel of the American Revolution – “and the most prominent event in the book takes place right here at Fulton Landing.”
Dumb question: Ms. Bloom, who are your favorite composers?
“Right away I’ll say Bach and Mozart. I love Haydn. But my biggest instructor remains, to this day, Bach.”
Do you ever take part in the concerts?
“I get up and play sometimes.”
Do the artists get paid?
“Of course they do.” Two beats. “I beg a lot.”
She’s especially proud of “the astonishing success we’ve had with local P.S. 8 – kids on the roof of the barge, on the deck, under the piano, all over the place.” The maestro of these events, violinist Mark Peskanov – “my heir” – was a protégé of Isaac Stern “at the time Isaac Stern was saving Carnegie Hall and [dryly, straight-faced] his wife [Vera] was saving Palestine.”
With Olga Bloom, irony and uncrushable idealism go hand in hand. “One of our board members is a Hapsburg. He said: ‘This is the greatest cultural advance in 200 years.’ Do you want to know my mission? We are here as a peaceful invasion to be in residence to the community at large.”
Underfoot, as the journalist steps past the grand piano to absorb the view of Lower Manhattan and the Woolworth Building, the barge rocks gently, left, right, left, right.
Chamber music of the East River mermaids.
Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Haydn, Mendelssohn –