THE AMISHMEN OF TIMES SQUARE

On a recent muggy afternoon, a battered pickup truck drew up to the curb outside a designer showroom in Times Square. Three men alighted, in different shapes like a fable: a tall one, a short one, a stout one. All three wore stiff-brimmed black hats and frock coats. The men squinted at the lights and smoothed their beards down, while the truck sped off, no doubt in search of sin or Disney, or both.

In a spare barn behind their parents’ house in Lancaster, PA, brothers Elam and Amos Beiler make luxury leather goods for a top New York designer: leather coasters, director’s chairs, leather-wrapped wastepaper baskets. They came to New York to see their biggest product to date—a hand-crafted bedframe wrapped in oxblood leather, retail price $12,000—on display in a Times Square showroom. The brothers traveled with Jonas Stoltzfoos, fellow Amishman and leatherworker, using a Mennonite car service. (Car trips, if not car ownership, are permitted among the more progressive Amish in Lancaster.) Jonas has had brushes with worldly success himself: his shop has made leather harnesses for the Budweiser Clydesdale team and the pets of Michael Jackson, Kenny Rogers and a Saudi prince.

The older brother, Elam, heads the Beilers’ leatherwork business. Elam is an open-faced, shorter, agreeable man of 37. Like many Amish, he answers questions equably, but the paydirt of what he really thinks is in his silences. (Out of modesty, the brothers asked that I change all names for any story I wrote.) Amos’s presence is more vigorous and worldly: he is 35, tall, usually dirty-handed, and surprisingly handsome with a beard like a spade and a smooth brown skin. A missing eyetooth doesn’t prevent him from smiling, a lot. Both men are bright and attentive; but, for an Amishman, Amos can really work a room.

Dropped like a sack of potatoes outside the showroom, Amos was struck by his first glimpse of the window display: “They had a new set of colors for their towels that season,” he explained to me later in the faintly singsong, open-voweled accent common to the Lancaster Amish. “So, to show off these new colors, they had a bunch of dryer machines, and each one was the new color of a towel. And the towels, they were going around on the inside. I asked the fellow there about it, and he said: 'It was the CEO’s idea. He thought it would be youthful, vibrant, you know.’” He paused. “About twelve dryer machines. I had never seen anything like that.”

Inside the showroom, the brothers found their bedframe amid an eerily familiar little tableau. “They’d made a little post-and-carriage barn, painted black. They had a little silo thing out of corrugated steel, and it had a fireplace in it,” Amos recalls. “Jonas said maybe they’d make a black cardboard Amishman like one of us and put it in there. I said, 'It’s a possibility.’”

A little dazzled, Jonas and the brothers stepped outside for air. “We were walking on one side of the sidewalk, because the other side had some construction work,” Amos continued. “So Elam and I were on the one side, and Jonas was on the construction side. All those construction guys were looking over at us, across the street, and Jonas tapped one guy on the shoulder and said, “Those are some funny-looking people!” Pointing at us.” He laughed loudly. “Mmm, I remember Jonas saying that: Those are some funny-looking people!”

Speaking with them later in their mother’s kitchen in Lancaster, I asked what he remembered most about Times Square—expecting lights, ads, pressure, commerce, the Naked Cowboy. Amos paused again—the Amish are champion pausers—and replied, “I remember it started raining, and seeing all the people coming out of the subway. Every one opened up an umbrella as soon as they could. Pop, pop, pop.” He flared his fingers out, like a little explosion, at each “pop”.

I had come down to Lancaster to interview the brothers for a story on Amish small businesses. Having seen much of their smaller handiwork already, I was eager to see the bedframe prototype from Times Square, if they still had it in the shop. Amos nodded and said, cryptically, “Let me ask my wife first.”

A few minutes later, to my mild shock, I was standing in Amos’s half-lit bedroom. A stream of children trailed me like iron filings when a magnet is dragged through them. The bed was large and beautifully simple in design; the sleeping quarters were cordoned off from the living room by two sheets hung from the ceiling. Elam joined us and described the problems of shipping the bedframe to customers. In the end they made the 91” headboard post in two pieces for dismantling. “People couldn’t get them up the stairs,” Elam said, giving me a brief image of cramped New York service elevators, and the rooms that typically house a $12,000 leather bedframe. Meanwhile, Amos’s two youngest girls were tussling delightedly in the faded sheets, their braids and organdy caps coming loose in the dim light.

—by Jude Stewart

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