Filed under: Stories by Tomas Dinges
Quill Hyde, the owner of Hyde Power, a metal and theatrical engineering shop in Red Hook, needs to keep his 2-year-old business focused on the short term. Between June and August he blew all of his profits on a carousel, a post-apocalyptic carousel. He is only slightly repentant. “If I were to keel over tomorrow, the only thing I would regret is not having life insurance,” he says. Now he has a 10-month old daughter with his high-school sweetheart and is concerned about their future. “True Love” is tattooed in a Medieval font across his knuckles.
“I have unplumbed depths of optimism,” says Hyde, a 10-year veteran of the business. “It is just built into me, even if shit does come crashing down. Even if this company does go bankrupt it really doesn’t matter. You just re-incorporate and keep going.” He still owes American Express many thousands of dollars and wages for the small army of workers who worked night and day over eight weeks to build the 60 foot long, 45 foot high and 10,000 pound carousel, A Cavallo.
A Cavallo, which means “by horse” in Italian, is described on Hyde Power’s website as a group of “steel horses, Appaloosas back from hell, carouseling on a Coney Island pirate ship, with a stage on the back, shooting fire out the top.” It was to be shown at the annual Mad Max-like communion of avant-garde artists and their creations, Burning Man, held in Nevada’s gritty Black Rock Desert.
This is the second six figure investment in two years Hyde has yet to pay off. His first was gutting and remodeling his rented workshop in an old brick firehouse in Red Hook. Now, after a busy spring manufacturing scenery for Broadway theatrical productions and the custom machinery that moves it, business has dropped off precipitously.
“We are no longer diving towards the water anymore, we are kind of leveling off,” he said. He makes the sound of a propeller-powered airplane. “We are kind of like the Spruce Goose, 20 feet off the water, sort of flying, but really just hovering. And people on shore look at it and say, ‘What the fuck is that guy doing?’”
Hyde is 34. He is a tall, but unimposing, man with short blonde hair, an intense focus and plays in a band called the Betty Ford All-Stars. He is figuring out the way to pay for more time and money consuming fantasies like A Cavallo, which, he says, if given the opportunity he would create regularly. He credits part of his mechanical inspiration to his grandfather, a successful inventor and businessman whom he says designed the technology behind shower head faucets, single lever sink faucets and the garbage disposal system, the InSinkErator. Hyde has yet to match his feats, or official patents. And, despite having built the moving scenery for big productions like Blue Man Group, his business plan has yet to find its groove.
What he wants to do is sell the design and engineering involved in making the horses and the carousel they ride on, as well as everything else he thinks of. This includes the crane bearings that enable entire thing to be able to steer its wheels regardless of the weight and the placement of multiple cutoff valves on the isolated fuel tanks that generate the fiery effects. The carousel frame itself is based on a miniaturized, remote drive system ordinarily designed for remotely moving stage props, as in one case, a blue hippogryph (a mythological beast with wings like a raven and legs like a mare). Most of these technologies are derived from his theater engineering.
A Cavallo was to be a vehicle to promote this business. To some extent this has materialized. When he totes around a miniature steel horse to trade shows people call out in familiar recognition. But he needs help to explore markets, he says, like the luxury home market, for example. His $85,000 elevator-lift system could be used to conceal a pool table beneath flooring and future projects could have military applications.
“My problem actually is that I have so many interests, so many competing business models, it’s hard to get any one totally together and off the ground,” he said. “It’s because I’m also in the process not only of developing this theatrical market, but also this luxury home market. I gotta start selling stuff to all these luxury homes.” He is also trying to launch A Cavallo as a non-profit internship program crafting “mechanized art experiences,” which, through the collective process of creation aim to break down barriers between individuals.
But what he really wants to do is design. Hyde spends at least eight hours a day in front of two computer screens designing rainbow-colored three-dimensional schematics on Autocad and Solidworks. His long-term new projects seem to get larger and larger in scale and his short-term projects have yet to materialize consistently. In its place is idle creation. His lead welder and friend John Hannon, who was a screenwriter before joining with Hyde, was making little steel boxes for himself one week in the absence of work.
Hyde thinks of the accumulation of capital as “inherently bogus,” and useful only in that it spurs more creativity. “I look back and I’ve read a lot of books about inventors and history and scientists and visionaries and none of them were making money,” he said.
His wife doesn’t care. She was furious with the creation of A Cavallo, he says, although she eventually participated. She wants him to make money so the family is secure. Her profession, designing and making patterned silk dresses, may not assure great financial returns, but its operation doesn’t generate yearly overhead of $250,000 as does her husband’s. “She sees my development as an escalating series of toys,” he said. “Bigger and bigger toys.”
She knows his ways. They met for the first time in Oregon when he was 12, and have been in a relationship off and on since he was 16-years-old. Now it is stability she wants, he says, not toys that require teams of 50 to assemble. “She has hated it from the beginning and is like you are just wasting your time and money,” he said. “That’s been ongoing.”
Beyond the unlocked door of the 134-year-old former Red Hook Fire Department that is Hyde Power’s metal shop and office are the original painted wooden slats with street intersections posted on the wall. Music from the 1920s floats out of a stereo. Brass tear-drop chandeliers hang from the ceiling and different machine tools, some from the 1950s (the Hole Driller, the Length Cutter, the one for square stuff and the one for round stuff) occupy niches. Two carousel horses, one with a cut mirror and mosaics glued onto its snout, rest placidly on the concrete floor. A hooded welder hunches over the crackle and flash of his argon MIG solder. The welder draws out a fat 10 cm weld that joins a custom designed CNC, water-cut piece of steel to a four-foot high rectangular frame. Near the back, Hyde stoops over designs for a testing device of a computerized actuator system for a shipping container. When its walls are unfolded the ordinary container is transformed, in this case, into a coffee shop for the Illy espresso company to be displayed at 11 Columbus Circle. It is a project for Adam Kalkin, an artist and designer on the leading edge of converting shipping containers into useable spaces.
As it happened Hyde’s calculations for this step in the project were off. The resin that was thickly applied to the inside surfaces of the shipping container walls was surprisingly heavy and the seven-foot-long white cylindrical screw jacks he had fitted to lower the container walls couldn’t pull them back up. Now he was left to design a system to test the strength of his solution. It was going to require another 1000 horsepower.
He instructs a smaller, disheveled, young man who wears a loose jacket with a faded Hyde logo imprinted on the back how to drill through quarter-inch steel in a swift series of brief instructions.
This is the sort of business that Hyde needs in the short term. The woman who showed up unannounced off the street and wanted her iron gate welded is not. He took her business anyway.
Hyde’s next project is a big project, the kind that he likes best. Think the scale of the immense red banners of Christo and Jean-Claude in Central Park. He has designed on his computer a garden of a dozen 40-foot flowers, some of which release fire (they are on the outer ring), some of which display light shows and others have solar panels on their petals, follow the arc of the sun and power the whole thing. They move like a flower would move, with a 360-degree range.
And then there is the design of the Artificial Intelligence needed to make this mechanized ecology come alive. “That’s like a million dollar project,” he says. He hopes to show it at Burning Man in a year or two. He is bidding on a job in Las Vegas to see if it could help offset the research and development costs of the garden endeavor.
He has already redesigned the flowers once and recognizes that his flowers will not make money. He has not found a benefactor for his plan or time to develop his market niches. Nor is he afraid of bankruptcy.
But he is concerned for his wife and the future of their child.
“It’s just so frustrating,” he says. “Knowing what could be, seeing what could be, and trying to get there is one of your problems.”
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