The Big Chair, Rebuilt to Last
Residents Await Return of Landmark, Now Rot-Proof

By Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 16, 2006

Not a week passes without a stranger asking Anacostia security guard Bunmi Fadairo what might seem like an odd question.

What happened to the chair?

In this Southeast Washington neighborhood, there is only one chair -- the big chair, the 19 1/2 -foot-tall landmark that was dismantled last summer after 46 years on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.

Tired of explaining that it had become old and rotted, Fadairo sometimes likes to joke that thieves lifted the chair off its pedestal and took off in the dead of night.

"And sometimes they believe me," he said, laughing at the idea of a gang running away with 4,600 pounds of mahogany on their backs.

Soon there won't be any more questions. After an eight-month absence -- an eternity for those who relied on it as a marker to navigate the world -- the chair is returning, rebuilt to last generations.

A ceremony is planned for April 25, when the chair's owner, Curtis Properties Inc., will unveil it before 250 invited guests, including Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D).

What they will see is a structure identical in size and color to the original, a perfectly proportioned model of a Duncan Phyfe dining room chair.

But instead of mahogany, used to make the original, the new chair, including the cushion, is aluminum -- a material expected to require minimal maintenance.

"It will outlive all of us," said John Kidwell, the original chair's caretaker for more than three decades.

Although the chair's rebirth in metal may seem sacrilegious to some, many say they will be happy to see it back in any form at V Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE.

"If you didn't know nothing about Southeast, you knew about the big chair," said Robert Bethea, 55, a consultant who lives in Shaw but regularly visits his doctor in Anacostia. He described himself as having been "a little lost not having it around."

When the chair was taken down, Bethea said, standing next to its empty pedestal, he suspected that the landmark had become a vulnerable relic, a casualty, so to speak, in a city in which gentrification is altering the look of many neighborhoods.

"I didn't think it was coming back," he said. "I felt it was a sign that changes were coming."

But Curtis Properties had always planned to resurrect the chair, even when the project's cost surpassed the initial $40,000 estimate. The owner hired an Orlando fabricator, which had built whimsical, oversize ornaments for theme parks, for the job.

"We couldn't not bring the chair back," said Lou Rizzo, a Curtis executive. "It's part of the community. It's a landmark for Southeast Washington. It wouldn't have been the right thing to do."

Curtis Properties originally had the chair built as a promotional stunt to draw customers to the furniture showroom it operated at the site in the 1950s.

A Curtis supplier, Bassett Furniture Industries of North Carolina, built the chair and transported it to the District on a flatbed truck, careful to avoid underpasses because the gargantuan parcel couldn't fit beneath.

From across the region, people came to see the new attraction, which stood on a stand with a plaque that introduced it as "The World's Largest Chair."

In 1960, Curtis executives tried another stunt. They hired Lynn Arnold, a 19-year-old model, to live atop the chair in a specially constructed studio apartment furnished with a bed, telephone, television, toilet and shower. Arnold lasted 42 days, regularly emerging on the balcony to wave to the crowds who came to see her.

Even after the Curtises shut down their furniture shop in the 1970s, they maintained the chair, which continued to draw crowds, particularly at Christmas, when a Santa Claus would wave from the seat.

As the years passed, the cycles of rain and snow pounded the chair, opening holes in the mahogany that Kidwell patched with cement. Last summer, he performed one of his regular inspections and noticed that the legs and back were rotting.

He became concerned that the structure could collapse. Within a few days, a crew brought in a backhoe to take the chair down.

Any thought of reconstructing the chair in mahogany quickly gave way to more pressing concerns -- cost and ensuring the new structure's longevity. Aluminum was the answer.

Building the new chair has not been easy. For one thing, Devery Lomax, a Laurel designer hired by the Curtises, could not get the original drawings from Bassett Industries, which never responded to inquiries from the chair's owner.

And for another thing, the original chair was in more than two dozen pieces (nearly two-inch-long blocks will be handed out as commemorative tokens at the unveiling).

So Lomax took photograph after photograph of the remnants and matched them up with old pictures, cobbling together an intricate and accurate design.

"It was like a jigsaw puzzle," he said.

When Kidwell inspected the design drawings, he noticed only one imperfection: The seat was level. It should have sloped five inches.

The fix was made.

"He obviously knows the chair," Lomax said.

Last week, Lomax flew to Orlando, where a crew was preparing to paint the chair brown. A few days before the unveiling, it will be placed on a flatbed truck for the two-day trip to the District.

April Hill, 39, and Erma Hawkins, 42, co-workers at a nutritional clinic for low-income mothers across from the chair, will be waiting with cameras.

"There'll be a lot of smiling faces," Hill said. "We missed it."