Contemporary Authors

• The Gargoyle Hunters ( novel) Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2017

1. The gargoyle hunters LCCN 2016012828 Type of material Book Personal name Gill, John Freeman, author. Main title The gargoyle hunters / John Freeman Gill. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Description 339 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781101946886 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3607.I4355 G37 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/john-freeman-gill-on-his-new-york-novel-the-gargoyle-hunters/#!

  John Freeman Gill on His New York Novel, “The Gargoyle Hunters”
  Matthew Specktor interviews John Freeman Gill

  286 0 1

  MARCH 22, 2017

  FIRST NOVELS ARE A BREED APART — apart from other novels, apart from autobiographies (with which, nevertheless, they remain almost automatically suspected of being, or at least sharing a bed with), apart, increasingly, from the culture at large. (Why read one, unless your taste for novelty outstrips your apprehension about the length of your Netflix queue?) For all these reasons, it’s extravagantly satisfying to encounter an exceptional one, one that is neither embryonic nor overworked, but seems, rather, to appear fully and independently formed.
  I began John Freeman Gill’s The Gargoyle Hunters during the first week of November 2016. I read the first half over a languid weekend in San Francisco, and came home wholly under its spell in time to vote in the election. I somehow managed to re-enter that spell a week or so later, during a time when, to be honest, I found myself scarcely able to read (otherwise) at all. The book’s wit, its energy, its affection, and its equipoise consoled me, and its portrait of a singularly odd, rather entropic New York City family in the also-entropic 1970s offered a bit of warmth during the emotional skyfall that followed the election. In a time when my eye wandered anxiously or anemically off the page (as it still frequently does), it held me, delighted me, and left me enthralled.
  The Gargoyle Hunters teems with the particular vitality of its time and place, yet it is never for one minute especially “nostalgic.” It is stamped with the moods of Manhattan — specifically, the Upper East and Upper West Sides — and the flavors of the mid-1970s, and yet it seems (still! after such things have been previously and, one had thought, comprehensively described) delightfully and commandingly strange. And it reads, like all the best novels do, as both the encapsulation of private, urgent experience and a radical, inscrutable transformation of the same. I finished it bursting with questions for Gill, and he was gracious enough to answer them.
  ¤
  MATTHEW SPECKTOR: This novel moves with a kind of command — of landscape, of period and history, of character and understanding — that seems a little unusual for any novel, let alone a debut. Presumably, you’ve had this book — or a book — under construction for a while. How did The Gargoyle Hunters crystallize for you?
  JOHN FREEMAN GILL: The moment the novel became truly exciting to me was when I realized that I was in a position to tell a tale that was at once a small, intimate story of a fracturing family, and also a big story about the near-death of New York City in the mid-1970s. The small story came first. I began with the intimate, ruefully amused voice of 13-year-old Griffin and the circumstance he finds himself in. Caught between two warring parents in the aftermath of a difficult divorce, Griffin struggles to keep his family together in some fashion by serving as a bridge between his estranged father and mother. Contradictorily, however, he also feels an urgency to act as a protective buffer to keep his father from hurting his mother. The center cannot hold.
  At some point, it occurred to me that the fragmentation of Griffin’s family was echoed by the disintegration of 1970s New York, where I grew up. The vividly crumbling city of my childhood, and the dangerous, illicit world of architectural salvage, thus became both a metaphor and a very real, concrete landscape in which the story of Griffin and his father could unfold.
  I actually wrote the first 15 pages or so of the first chapter in 1995. I already knew, at that point, what the novel’s two climactic events were going to be — one of them concerning the escalation of the parental conflict and the other a dramatic twist on a bizarre real-life episode of destruction in 1970s New York. The emotional core of the novel — the feeling of impermanence and loss engendered by a relentlessly self-cannibalizing city, and the sense of displacement caused by an ugly divorce — were all part of my experience as a child, so combining the two in this novel felt completely organic.
  I then put the book down to do writing that people would actually pay me for — screenwriting and then, for far longer, journalism. But every few years I picked up those 15 pages, and not only did they repeatedly pass what a writer friend of mine calls “the cringe test,” but they actually felt dynamic; the world of the book felt alive to me. What I’d done, basically, was write an overture for the novel, introducing its major themes. Ultimately, I decided to trust that intuition, and I quit my job as a contract writer for the New York Times City section to write the book. I continued doing neighborhood profiles part time for the Times, but the novel became my primary focus.
  Now, I realize this route to a completed first novel may seem circuitous, but in fact I think it’s the only way this book could have gotten written. Though I understood some emotional truths when I wrote those first 15 pages as a 29-year-old, and though I had an intuitive sense of the city as a native New Yorker, the reality is that I didn’t know much about New York’s evolution, and I certainly didn’t know anything about architecture or architectural salvage. My years reporting on historic preservation and changing city neighborhoods for the Times provided an invaluable education in these things, so by the time I sat down to write the book in earnest I understood enough about New York’s multilayered cityscape to feel comfortable situating Griffin’s story within it.
  I had also acquired the tools of journalism, which I put to work researching my topic. I dove into the archives and tracked down colorful characters — gargoyle hunters — who had rescued and stolen architectural sculptures in the ’60s and ’70s. I climbed up the sides of cast-iron buildings with restoration experts and clambered up wobbly scaffolds. What’s more, I’d become a father in the meantime, which allowed me to understand Griffin’s parents in a way I never could have as a kid in my 20s.
  The genuine entropic and specific weirdness of family is a hard thing to stage in fiction. One runs the risk of seeming whimsical or extravagant. The Gargoyle Hunters is neither, and yet the family it describes — Griffin and Quigley and their parents, and their boarders and so on — are an insanely particular unit. I was reminded, obliquely, of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, another novel that couches not just a distress but a profound emotional violence inside its portrait of one family’s strangeness. Was that a challenge for you, or was it simply — as it is for the reader — a source of pleasure? Did you ever wonder: “My God, these people are odd … Will anyone believe them?”
  The characters in Griffin’s family never felt anything but real to me. They happen to be unusual, yes, but I never sought to portray them as odd for oddness’s sake. To misquote Tolstoy, “All happy families are ordinary; each unhappy family is peculiar in its own way.”
  Although all the characters in the novel, including Griffin, are invented, the setting and circumstance of his predicament are drawn from life. The 12-foot-wide Queen Anne row house on East 89th Street where Griffin’s family lives was my family’s brownstone in the late ’60s and ’70s. And after my parents were separated, my father did become my mother’s landlord, and she did begin taking in a cast of peculiar boarders to make ends meet. Setting the book in a house and time that were familiar to me instantly gave the story — for me, as the writer — an authenticity I never questioned. So it felt very natural to populate my childhood home with characters of my invention.
  The boarders, certainly, are misfits, but that assemblage of oddballs flows directly from the mother’s character: she takes in strays, and strays tend to be an unconventional lot. Beyond that, I think the rollicking strangeness of the brownstone in the novel is certainly a reflection of my own childhood in that house. Several years ago, I wrote a personal essay for the Times about growing up in that home, and one of my mother’s boyfriends from that period — a Wall Street Journal editor — surfaced after decades to tell me how uncannily I’d captured his own sense of our home at that time. He said that all of us rattling around in that big house was like Monty Python meets the Bloomsbury group.
  This book works, of course, within a tradition of the “New York Novel.” Whatever that means, exactly — I’m aware that’s a fairly broad descriptor. I felt the ghosts of J. D. Salinger, of E. B. White, maybe the living pressure of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Were there books you were aware of as models, as distant — maybe even accidental — relatives, or (go ahead, you can say) party guests you may have wanted to avoid? How do you feel about that lineage?
  While writing The Gargoyle Hunters, I read, and generally loved, every piece of high-quality New York literature I could get my hands on. But I never had anything remotely resembling a model. I’ve always had my own particular voice, and this novel, especially because it’s written in the first person, is really defined more by Griffin’s voice, humor, and sensibility than by any external structural or literary notions. And, of course, I am no literary tourist in New York. I’m not a writer from the Midwest or South for whom New York is some aspirational symbol or some vast, alluring Other he is itching to make known to himself or explain to the wide world. I’ve lived in the city virtually my whole life, and I’ve been reporting and writing about it for half that time. So New York lives in me as much as I live in it.
  What this means is that the New York of The Gargoyle Hunters is, for better or worse, my New York — not the city of any other writer or inhabitant. What chiefly interests me about my hometown’s relentlessly changing streetscape is not so much the architecture itself but rather my own — and my characters’ — subjective responses to it. That’s what the city and its buildings are, really — an objective, external reality that means vastly different things to anyone who inhabits or observes it. We all have our own associations with buildings, both surviving and vanished ones, that make certain corners or storefronts shimmer with meaning for us in completely idiosyncratic and personal ways.
  That said, I’m certain I’ve learned from every book I’ve ever read, and I love New York stories. I read all of E. L. Doctorow’s New York books while writing my own, and of course I adore E. B. White’s Here is New York and loved Salinger when I first read him as a teenager. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and David Gilbert’s & Sons are also both excellent. And Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a world unto itself.
  I actually had the surreal and wonderful experience of hearing Lethem read Fortress of Solitude in the home of a dear friend of mine, the literary agent Sarah Burnes, on the very block in Boerum Hill on which that novel is set. I found it mesmerizing, particularly the opening section, in the way that it captured the child’s particularized experience of a city block — knowing every crack in the sidewalk. I also thought that book did a remarkable job of capturing the verbal rhythms of 1970s New Yorkers. But, of course, Lethem’s Brooklyn neighborhood was very different from the neighborhoods of Manhattan that Griffin stalks.
  Probably my favorite New York book is Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970). I wrote the prologue of The Gargoyle Hunters while under the spell of that novel. A 1960s gargoyle hunter had told me a remarkable story about picnicking on the ruins of McKim, Mead & White’s Penn Station in the New Jersey meadowlands, where the train station’s remnants had been dumped. And at the same time, I happened to be reading Time and Again, so as I read I kept flipping to the blank pages in the back to scribble much of the dreamlike scene that ultimately became the opening of The Gargoyle Hunters.
  You’ve written extensively about architecture, and this book certainly partakes richly of that body of knowledge. Is that something you feel you’ve exhausted, however temporarily, or is that an ongoing dialogue for you in fiction? Is architecture an “influence,” so far as that goes?
  It’s hard to say. Outside the margins of this current novel, my interest in architecture is more about the passage of time and the patina of personal and shared experience that tends to build up on a building or block over the decades and centuries. The built environment just happens to be the world I grew up in and know best; if I’d grown up out west, maybe I’d be fascinated by mountains or trees.
  More broadly, I’m interested in how things are made, the craft and process of creating objects and cities. So some of the novel ideas I’ve been mulling do touch on the architectural arts, though in a much more peripheral way than The Gargoyle Hunters. One of my ideas unfolds in mid-19th-century SoHo, long before it was known as SoHo. Another is set in 1980s Manhattan.
  You once mentioned to me that a “true story” was the seed of this book. Now having read it, I can only marvel at whatever it was that turned that small anecdote into this rather larger narrative. What was that story?
  The true story I was referring to wasn’t quite the seed of this book but rather an event around which I built the novel’s climax. In the 1970s, a band of brazen thieves perpetrated a seemingly impossible heist: the theft of an entire New York City landmark building, cornice to curb. The building was under the protection of the city’s young Landmarks Preservation Commission at the time, and its theft was a scandal that stunned the city and made the front page of The New York Times. Fingers were pointed, and indignant editorials written. But to this day, no one knows who stole that building or what became of it. I decided to solve the mystery by placing 13-year-old Griffin and his obsessive, manic father at the center of the action. I wanted to know the end of that story, so I sat down and wrote it.
  ¤
  Matthew Specktor’s latest novel is American Dream Machine.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/realestate/hunting-gargoyles-and-other-architectural-treasures.html?mcubz=0

  REAL ESTATE

  Hunting Gargoyles and Other Architectural Treasures
  By JULIE LASKYAPRIL 7, 2017
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  Encounters With Gargoyles as They Gobble Up Buildings
  Encounters With Gargoyles as They Gobble Up BuildingsCreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times
  “You, son, are going to learn to look up,” says a man with a passion for architectural sculpture in John Freeman Gill’s new novel, “The Gargoyle Hunters” (Alfred A. Knopf). “You are not going to be another one of those blinkered goddamn New Yorkers who walk around town staring at their shoes.”

  Set in the 1970s, “The Gargoyle Hunters” is narrated by Griffin, 13, who is coping with warring parents in a city coming apart at the seams. Recruited by his father to save the whimsical stone carvings and terra-cotta castings on old buildings about to be demolished, he is put to harsh tests of loyalty, even by teenage standards. Mr. Gill, who grew up in the East 89th Street townhouse that Griffin occupies (“something of a grandly tricked-out imp, just 12 feet wide”), spoke about this curious form of preservation and where to spot a good gargoyle today. (This interview has been condensed and edited.)

  This book is loaded with architectural details, like how immigrant carvers immortalized their wives and pals in stone. But it’s also stuffed with 1970s cultural references. Did you mean to make baby boomers weep with nostalgia?

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  This ended up being a period novel, but it didn’t begin that way. I started with the sort of ruefully amused voice of Griffin, and the predicament he finds himself in, in the aftermath of a difficult divorce. The narrative takes place in 1974 to ’75, when the city was near defaulting. Everything that wasn’t nailed down was being stolen. There were urns stolen from the Grand Army Plaza arch in Brooklyn that were later discovered at a belt-buckle factory. The climax of my book was built around a true-life event: In 1974, a cast-iron building facade that was under the protection of the city Landmarks Preservation Commission was stolen, cornice to curb. The circumstances are a bit complex, but who stole it and exactly what happened to it are, to this day, unknown. I wanted to know the end of that story, so I sat down and wrote it.

  How much does your early life in a Manhattan brownstone resemble Griffin’s?

  The characters are invented, but the sort of rollicking strangeness of this family of artists is a reflection of my own childhood. Several years ago, I wrote a personal essay about it. When it was published, one of my mother’s boyfriends from that period, a Wall Street Journal editor, contacted me and said how uncannily I had captured his own sense of that house at that time. He said that it was like Monty Python meets the Bloomsbury group, with all of us rattling around together. My parents did get divorced while they were living in that house, and my father did become my mother’s landlord, and she did begin taking in oddball boarders to make ends meet.

  Were there really gargoyle hunters?

  The title of the book is taken from a 1962 New York Herald Tribune story called “Gargoyle Hunting in New York.” And actually my mother was a sometime gargoyle hunter. She would salvage snarling gargoyle keystones from demolition sites and take them home in my sister Tracy’s stroller after kicking Tracy out. The most famous gargoyle hunter was the art dealer Ivan Karp. In the 1950s, he and a band of other folks — they called themselves rubble-rousers — rescued all the architectural treasures they could find from demolition sites all over town. In my book, the characters are embarking on a much more morally questionable crusade.

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  Where are the best places in New York to see gargoyles?

  I spot new ones all the time when I wander around Park Slope. There’s a lot on the Upper West Side around the 80s, from Broadway to Columbus. Manhattan Avenue and the surrounding side streets are teeming with sculptures. And the one Louis Sullivan building in New York — the Bayard-Condict Building, at 65 Bleecker Street — has a remarkable collection. Susan Tunick, a terra-cotta authority, told me that when the building was being restored, she was allowed to go out on a scaffold. She looked up and saw this colossal bosom looming over her.

  A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2017, on Page RE10 of the New York edition with the headline: Hunting Gargoyles and Other Architectural Treasures. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

• John Freeman Gill - http://www.johnfreemangill.com/index2.html

  John Freeman Gill is a native New Yorker and longtime New York Times contributor whose work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. He is the real estate editor of Avenue magazine, for which he writes "Edifice Complex," a monthly column exploring the biographies of historic New York City buildings and their occupants. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, The Washington Monthly, The International Herald Tribune, Premiere, The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. He has written nearly 200 articles for the Times, including 30 cover features and cover columns for various sections.

  The Gargoyle Hunters, John's debut novel, was sold at auction and will be published by Knopf in Spring 2017. A literary coming-of-age story, the book is set in the world of illicit architectural salvage in the vividly crumbling Manhattan of the 1970s. John has appeared twice on Leonard Lopate's WNYC radio show to discuss the novel and its subject matter, some of which derives from a feature he wrote for The Atlantic and a widely circulated op-ed piece he penned for the Times. John received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and a BA from Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and won two prizes.

• John Freeman Gill - http://www.johnfreemangill.com/index.php

  About John Freeman Gill
  JOHN FREEMAN GILL is a native New Yorker and longtime New York Times contributor whose work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, the International Herald Tribune, New York magazine, Premiere, Avenue, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he won two prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in New York City with his wife, three children, and a smattering of gargoyles.

• Omnivoracious - http://www.omnivoracious.com/2017/03/interview-john-freeman-gill-the-gargoyle-hunters-amazon-book-review.html

  An Interview with John Freeman Gill, Author of "The Gargoyle Hunters"
  Sarah Harrison Smith on March 23, 2017
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  Gargoyle-hunters225John Freeman Gill is the author of the debut novel The Gargoyle Hunters, published this week by Knopf. The setting is mid-1970s New York, back when the city was dirty, dangerous, and on the verge of going bankrupt. Gill’s narrator, Griffin, is a 13-year-old boy whose parents are in about as bad shape as the city: they’re divorcing, money is tight, and their kids are pretty much left to their own devices. Eager to spend time with his volatile, absent father, Griffin joins him in his “dangerous and illicit” architectural salvage business, rescuing—or perhaps just stealing—sculptural elements like gargoyles from the facades of the city’s buildings.

  People often say of New York, whenever you look up at the buildings, you’ll see something remarkable. You could say the same thing of the quality of the writing in The Gargoyle Hunters. There’s a great story here of a boy coming of age in a troubled environment, hanging out with his friends, figuring out girls, and taking some seriously dangerous risks along the way. There’s also the fun of seeing New York City’s monuments through Gill’s knowledgeable, fascinated eyes. But what is perhaps most striking—and visible on every page, the way great buildings are visible everywhere in the city—is just how accomplished and sophisticated Gill’s writing is.

  In addition to his work as a novelist, John Freeman Gill writes the monthly “Edifice Complex” column on historic buildings and their people for Avenue magazine. He has also written journalism and criticism for The Atlantic, The New York Times, the New York Observer, and Washington Monthly.

  Amazon Book Review: What was the genesis of the book?

  John Freeman Gill: It’s funny, it’s hard to tease these things out after the fact. When you’re working on a novel, everything you’ve ever read or experienced or continue to read informs it, but I think basically at some point the book does two things. I was trying to write a small, intimate story of a fragmenting family, a relationship between a father and a son, but I was also trying to write a big story about the near death of New York City in the 1970s, in the run-up to the famous Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” when the city almost defaulted on its debt.

  So I started with a small story, the intimate story. I think stories don’t really mean much if there’s not an emotional impact, an emotional heart to them. So I started with the fragmenting family, and at some point I realized that the fragmentation of the family was actually echoed by the fracturing of the tumultuous New York City of the 1970s that I grew up in. I also realized that the world of architectural salvage in 1970s New York could then become both a metaphor and a very concrete nuts-and-bolts crumbling landscape in which the story of the father and son could unfold.

  As you depict it, 1970s New York is both a great place that’s literally there for the taking and at the same time a place where kids like Griffin get mugged walking home from school. Do you view it as utopian, or dystopian, or both?

  I think the city of the 1970s was a city of both peril and excitement, and I think those two go hand in hand. I still love New York City, I still live in New York City, but we now have a buffed and sanitized and tourist-ready city that is very pleasant in a lot of ways if you aren’t poor but it’s a much less thrilling place than the city we grew up in. The city is so much more homogenized now. The uncertainty of 1970s New York was that you could go out in the street and meet oddball characters who might be fascinating or dangerous or both. That’s a city that is an exciting place for a novelist to let his characters loose in.

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  Raising children as you do now in New York City, do you feel like they are missing out on some of the central things that Griffin enjoys in his childhood? That sense of the ability to explore and to screw up and get into trouble?

  That’s a good question. It has as much to do with the change in parenting styles as it does with the relative danger of the city. Griffin’s parents are almost completely absent but that wasn’t that uncommon among my friends. We were all latchkey kids. I live in Brooklyn now, and Brooklyn to me has a little more of the edge that the city of our childhood did. I still love many things about Manhattan, but large swaths of it feel like a theme park. It’s there for rich people to have great culinary experiences and the like.

  Your writing about architecture for Avenue magazine obviously dovetails with a lot of themes in this novel. Did you begin writing The Gargoyle Hunters after taking that job at Avenue? How did those two intersect?

  The narrator of The Gargoyle Hunters grows up to become a columnist who writes about architectural history for The New Yorker, but I did not have any job like that when I invented the character. I finished the book before I ever took on that job. What I write for Avenue is a monthly column that I define as an exploration of historic buildings and their occupants. The buildings sometimes have transformations over the years, but I’m equally interested in and maybe even more interested in the different lives that are lived in and around buildings. Different people who inhabit the same building across 120 years are just fascinating.

  Your narrator, Griffin, isn’t afraid of heights. Are you? Have you done that kind of climbing up high in buildings?

  Yes, I have, specifically when I was researching this novel. I’m both an outliner and a discoverer so I will make outlines as I go along. I knew what the two sort of climactic events of the book were before I even sat down to write. But then I thought, I don’t know a damn thing about gargoyle hunting or how cast-iron buildings were assembled or disassembled. I don’t know anything about how terra-cotta was installed in buildings in the 19th century or how thieves or restoration people can extricate it. So I dove into that and I interviewed people who did that kind of work—because people really did this in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

  To answer your question about fear of heights, when I was researching terra-cotta buildings for The Atlantic I went with to Philadelphia with an architectural salvage man who is still very active today. He was dismantling an incredible 19th-century church. The descriptions of people on scaffolds in The Gargoyle Hunters are based on my experience of going up in the scaffolds in that building. I found it terrifying. I never thought I was afraid of heights, but everybody has his limit. These demolition contractors, that’s just what they do. There were guys up on wobbly, flimsy scaffolds, at least 30 feet up inside this cavernous church. They were up there literally with jackhammers, jackhammering out the glazed terra-cotta saints that they could take out and sell in the salvage shop. I climbed up, and these guys are swinging around—they’ve got their hard hats on and they’re carrying this very heavy equipment and they’re swinging around on these scaffolds like monkeys—and I sort of carefully, cautiously climbed my way up to about seven-eighths of the height, but the top level had nothing to hold on to. I got close enough to see everything they were doing but I just didn’t have the stomach to go up to that top level.

  One last question: What’s your favorite building?

  It has to be the Woolworth Building, Cass Gilbert’s neo-Gothic masterwork, which at 60 stories was the tallest structure in the world when Frank Woolworth built it on lower Broadway in 1913. You can see it from my sister Tracy’s loft in Tribeca, and I always found it majestic and a little otherworldly, so I decided to set a climactic sequence of The Gargoyle Hunters atop it.

  In that chapter, Griffin is impelled by his obsessive father to clamber up the Woolworth’s richly ornamented crown to saw off its last surviving terra-cotta gargoyle with a power saw. It was really important to me to make that episode as real and convincing as possible, so I spent a lot of time interviewing a preservation architect and gargoyle wrangler who spent three years on and off the scaffolding around the Woolworth during its massive 1970s restoration. My fantasy was that he might have an old snapshot or two that could help me inhabit that time and place. I figured it was a long shot, but I asked him anyway. “Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, making me the happiest novelist in the world, “I happen to have a whole PowerPoint presentation full of period photos showing step-by-step how we did the restoration, and I’d be happy to share it with you.” Then he actually walked my characters around the top of the Woolworth with me, giving me feedback on how Griffin and his father might realistically have gone about sawing a gargoyle off the building's pinnacle. Most astonishing to me was the coincidence that the architect also just happened to own the very gargoyle I had created my story around. The project manager had presented it to him at the end of the Woolworth’s restoration, mounted on a wooden base. He keeps it in front of his fireplace.

  Thank so you so much, John. I really enjoyed the book and I know a lot of other people will too.

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  Comments (1)

  I love this book and think it would make a great series for Amazon Prime. It's action packed, approprite for PG13 and leaves the reader wondering how this fearless young man meets his next challenges.
  Posted by: Mary Ann Howard | Friday March 24, 2017 at 10:09 AM

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Print Marked Items
Gill, John Freeman: THE GARGOYLE
HUNTERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Gill, John Freeman THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS Knopf (Adult Fiction) $27.95 3, 31 ISBN: 978-1-101-94688-6
A teenager gets wise to Manhattan, and his father, via the city's architectural ornaments.Griffin, the narrator of Gill's
debut novel, recalls the year he was 13 years old and navigating the ruins of his parents' broken marriage. His mother is
taking in boarders at their home on 89th Street between Third and Lex to make ends meet, while his father works in
antiques restoration. When dad notices Griffin's ability to squeeze into small spaces, he's recruited into the dark side of
the family business, sneaking into the city's historic buildings and chipping and sawing off gargoyles and other
decorations from facades. The book is set during 1974 and 1975, with the crime-ridden city at the brink of bankruptcy,
so the pair's lawlessness feels like part of the landscape, though Dad insists he's "liberating" civic treasures from the
inevitable wrecking ball. (The novel's poignant prologue is set in the New Jersey dumping grounds of the ruins of old
Penn Station.) Gill, who's written often on New York's architectural history, understands buildings from wrought-iron
panels to terra cotta sculptures, which makes for some detailed and engaging set pieces, like the pair's death-defying,
dark-of-night effort to remove a gargoyle from the top of the Woolworth Building or Griffin's exploring the innards of
the Statue of Liberty with a romantic interest. But as Griffin looks back on his youth from the present day, his (and
Gill's) nostalgia feels awkwardly stronger for buildings than for loved ones. Dad is purposefully Sphinx-like, but
Griffin's mother, sister, and friends rarely feel like more than incidental figures relative to the novel's true passion. Even
so, the story enlivens in the closing chapters, which set the depths of Dad's obsession against the arrival of a hurricane,
suggesting that our best efforts to save our civic treasures will always have to reckon with nature taking its course. A
portrait of 1970s New York that's sturdy if sometimes stiff.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gill, John Freeman: THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357383&it=r&asid=58c8c5ac59033598e99de26b5ce38162.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357383
9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506558421244 2/3
The Gargoyle Hunters
Publishers Weekly.
264.3 (Jan. 16, 2017): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Gargoyle Hunters
John Freeman Gill. Knopf, $27.95 (352p)
ISBN 978-1-101-94688-6
Gill, who has written extensively about New York City's architectural gems, makes his fiction debut with a comingofage
tale about preservation and its discontents. The result is flawed but intriguing, a structure whose outward charm
conceals some hidden cracks. In the late 1970s, the young narrator, Griffin, lives in an Upper East Side row house with
his sister, bohemian mother, and the steady stream of down-on-their-heels boarders she takes in. Living downtown, his
mercurial father restores antique architectural decorations, often pilfered from one of the many buildings slated to be
torn down by "brutally efficient" demolition contractors as the city continues to "cannibaliz[e] itself." Dad enlists the
nimble, eager-to-please Griffin in his thieving efforts, which involve prying gargoyles perched on Manhattan's historic
buildings, then a more ambitious effort: to "steal a building." The portrait of Griffin's father has some nice touches-- he
is the kind of man who takes his baby out for a midnight walk and returns with a terra-cotta bust strapped onto the
carriage-- but he comes across less as a rounded character than an eccentric tour guide holding forth on ornamental
features, lambasting philistine developers, or speechifying: "The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and
around a historic building give it all kinds of layers of collective meaning--a patina of memory and grime and
experience." Griffin himself is a winning narrator striving to map his place within urban and familial landscapes in a
bewildering state of flux. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Gargoyle Hunters." Publishers Weekly, 16 Jan. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478405236&it=r&asid=1d5c26af2b8924d437d4af1069fd1a58.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478405236
9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506558421244 3/3
The Gargoyle Hunters
Bill Kelly
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Gargoyle Hunters. By John Freeman Gill. Mar. 2017. 352p. Knopf, $27.95 (9781101946886).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is tasked by his mother to destroy a long-abandoned outhouse, out of which a large
gnarled tree has been growing in the fertile soil behind their five-story brownstone. This metaphor sets the tone for
Gill's stellar debut, in which the Caulfieldesque hero must navigate both the crumbling marriage of his eccentric
parents and the impending disaster that is 1974 New York City. While his conceptual-artist mother creates mosaics out
of egg shells, Griffin and his sister, Quigley, battle an eccentric cast of boarders for the meager provisions in the pantry.
Craving the attention of his estranged father, Griffin sneaks into his dad's warehouse and is quickly brought into the
family business of architectural salvaging. The lithe and sprightly Griffin is the ideal partner to help steal architectural
sculptures, including gargoyles, off the faces of buildings. Gill, who is a noted expert on historical architecture, brings a
DeLillo-like eye for detail to his descriptions of the city while also perfectly capturing the father-son relationship in all
its warmth, hero-worship, and, ultimately, disappointment. A bildungsroman rich with symbolism, wistful memory, and
unabashed longing, this is a remarkably tender love letter to a city and imaginative fiction par excellence. For fans of
Donna Tartt and Colum McCann.--Bill Kelly
YA: Gill's young protagonist and the subjects of parental separation, first love, and fitting in will likely resonate with
YAs. BK.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kelly, Bill. "The Gargoyle Hunters." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077943&it=r&asid=14cc82229276135bfa68bfe5ef003626.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479077943

"Gill, John Freeman: THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357383&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. "The Gargoyle Hunters." Publishers Weekly, 16 Jan. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478405236&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Kelly, Bill. "The Gargoyle Hunters." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077943&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-gargoyle-hunters-by-john-freeman-gill-a-love-letter-to-new-york-city/2017/03/13/8f16aa44-05a0-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html?utm_term=.1f29e335d86b
  Word count: 1234

  ‘The Gargoyle Hunters,’ by John Freeman Gill: A love letter to New York City
  By Ron Charles March 13
  I know, I know — we need another novel about New York City the way New York City needs another skyscraper. But clear a little patch of ground for this unabashedly charming story by John Freeman Gill. For years, Gill has been writing about architecture and real estate, and now, at an age when most successful journalists would be content just to keep their careers in good repair, he’s embarked on a wholesale rehab. The result is “The Gargoyle Hunters,” a debut novel that’s billed as another love letter to New York, but fortunately, it’s more like a collection of quirky postcards.

  (Knopf)
  For Gill, the essential characteristic of Manhattan is its violent reinvention, a compulsive process of creative destruction that makes it such a “maddening, heartbreaking, self-cannibalizing” place. Native New Yorkers know their avenues wind into “a Mobius strip of self-annihilation.” At any moment, rapacious developers may reduce the most beloved old buildings to “a moonscape of devastation” before throwing up some “soulless, homogenized Modernist crap.”

  “This is a city,” Gill writes, “where you could inhabit multiple eras simultaneously,” which is what his novel encourages us to do, too. The narrator is Griffin Watts — a clear stand-in for Gill himself — who’s looking back at the summer of 1974 when he was 13. He’s a lovable scamp, a touch theatrical, precocious but innocent. He’s the kind of young man who’s obsessed with baseball but also takes fencing classes; he’s tantalized by girls but unsure what to do with them. His diction shifts erratically from 1970s TV shows to 1930s rom-coms — not so much an actual boy as a boy reconstructed from an older author’s nostalgia. But that’s as it should be because this is a story about nostalgia and the way that sweet elixir can turn rancid in the airless confines of a man’s heart.

  [Review: ‘City on Fire,’ by Garth Risk Hallberg, is a sweeping portrait of New York in the 1970s]

  Young Griffin lives with his distracted mother, who dabbles in mosaics made from crushed eggshells, and a series of misfit boarders who compete with Griffin for food, which gives their dysfunctional household a Dickensian-lite atmosphere. The central challenge of his adolescence and the focus of this often funny novel is Griffin’s efforts to win his errant father’s attention. Mr. Watts is a handsome antiques dealer, but that’s just a facade for his real work, which is salvaging imperiled details from New York buildings.

  Some fathers might teach their sons to change a tire; Watts teaches Griffin to clean decorative moldings. He can be strident about architectural ornaments, yes, but he’s never dull. He’s clearly the product of Gill’s long career writing about technical matters for lay readers. Griffin is surprised how interesting cornices and terra cotta angels are, and you will be, too. The whole cityscape seems suddenly infused with meaning. “You, son, are going to learn to look up,” his father tells him. “You are not going to be another one of those blinkered goddamn New Yorkers who walk around town staring at their shoes, or worse, have their eyes so fixed on whatever goal they’re hurrying toward that they never see the city around them.” I was lucky enough to be reading this novel while in New York and was surprised by what an elevating effect it had on my own vision. After a few chapters with Watts, it’s impossible not to turn your gaze toward the sky.

  But “The Gargoyle Hunters” isn’t an architecture lecture bolted onto the frame of a novel. It’s far too fun for that, and it revolves around Watts’s highly questionable avocation. He’s consumed with a collector’s mania, and the object of his obsession is Manhattan’s physical history, a record in stone, granite and iron that he surreptitiously gathers in an old baby carriage or his repurposed Good Humor ice cream truck. Doors, pews, banisters, cornices, moldings, grilles, medallions, pilasters — they’re all squirreled away in his Tribeca lair, which shimmers with a touch of dark magic. Some might call what Watts does “stealing”; he prefers the term “liberating.” His superior taste allows him to transcend the common morality of philistines. “What I’m doing is saving these things,” he tells Griffin, who is willing to believe that if it means he can spend some larceny time with his dad.

  John Freeman Gill (Derek Shapton)
  And what fantastic adventures these two have while creeping around and up New York buildings in the middle of the night, liberating ornaments that might fall by the wrecking ball tomorrow — or someday. There’s no job too risky that Watts won’t send his son tiptoeing out on a crumbling ledge, or crawling across a sagging board, or even dangling from a fraying rope to rescue an endangered gargoyle 50 stories off the ground. Looking back, Griffin realizes these were not “reasonable things for a grown man to ask of a thirteen-year-old boy who wanted only to get close to him,” but at the time, he was thrilled. And frankly, so are we. Gill has a surprisingly good facility with these sweaty-palmed adventures high above New York. You’ll never look at the Woolworth Building the same way again.

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  The novel’s most significant problem, though, is that its best scenes — Griffin’s late-night capers with his dad — are so delightful that other parts feel relatively bland. Griffin’s adolescent interplay involving a would-be girlfriend generates all the excitement of a glass office building along the highway. His sister’s troubled life never comes into focus, and his mother remains a slim caricature, despite some recurring Oedipal scenes that would keep a gaggle of Freudians busy for a month.

  All that filler dims but can’t distinguish the poignancy of Griffin’s love for his father. In the end, despite his grandiose designs on the city, he’s just a man of “outraged loneliness” who wants to restore everything except his relationship with his own son. That could have made Griffin a bitter, damaged person, but ultimately, he learns what he needs to from his dad, even if it’s not what his dad thought he was teaching.

  Four little ceramic gargoyles are grinning down at me right now from the bookshelves above my desk. They have never seemed more coiled with life.

  Ron Charles is the host of The Totally Hip Video Book Review. See the latest installment, a review of Dan Chaon’s “Ill Will,” at wapo.st/illwill.

  THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS
  By John Freeman Gill

  Knopf. 339 pp. $27.95

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  Ron Charles is the editor of The Washington Post's Book World. For a dozen years, he enjoyed teaching American literature and critical theory in the Midwest, but finally switched to journalism when he realized that if he graded one more paper, he'd go crazy. Follow @roncharles

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21169-john-freeman-gill-gargoyle-hunters#.WcxCK6i3xaQ
  Word count: 521

  THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS
  By John Freeman Gill

  Knopf
  $27.95
  ISBN 9781101946886
  Published 03/21/2017

  Fiction / Literary Fiction / Debut Fiction

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  Web Exclusive – March 21, 2017

  THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS
  Monsters inside and out
  BookPage review by Tom Deignan

  New York City’s renaissance—safer streets, graffiti-free subways, suddenly trendy neighborhoods—has brought with it a nostalgia for grittier times. A wide range of books from Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to Patti Smith’s Just Kids have explored the drama and poetry of New York’s so-called bad old days. John Freeman Gill’s first novel, The Gargoyle Hunters fits neatly into this subgenre. It unfolds in Manhattan during the mid-1970s when crime was rampant and New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

  The book revolves around 13-year-old Griffin Watts, who lives with his mother, sister and various boarders in a dilapidated Manhattan brownstone. That is, when he’s not roaming the city at night with his father, who “liberates”—steals—gargoyles and other architectural ornaments from the city’s aging but beautiful old buildings. Griffin wants so desperately to spend time with his dad that he can’t see the looming danger, both emotional and physical. Scaling a building to swipe another treasure for his dad, Griffin says, “I wasn’t sure whether I felt like a mountain climber or a marionette.”

  At a deeper level, Gill—who knows the city intimately and is even a real estate columnist and editor—is wrestling with the nature of change. Cities like New York evolve (for better or worse) the same way people do, and the real danger comes when we ignore that reality. Fans of Richard Russo will appreciate the complex dynamic between needy, young Griffin and his father, whose breezy affability masks profound, even abusive, flaws.

  Some of Gill’s dialogue strains to be humorous, and readers outside of New York will have to decide how interested they are in some of Gotham’s long-lost landmarks and sports stars. Overall, though, The Gargoyle Hunters is an absorbing family tale and a wise meditation on aging.

• Bowery Boys: New York History
  http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2017/04/gargoyle-hunters-architecture-nostalgia.html
  Word count: 793

  Bowery Boys Bookshelf
  ‘The Gargoyle Hunters’ and the Architecture of Nostalgia
  April 20, 2017 Bowery Boys 0 Comments
  BOOK REVIEW The architects and builders of the post-Civil War period provided New York City with masterpieces of great beauty — cast-iron facades, modern emblems of trade rendered in marvelous stone, fanciful medieval gargoyles upon impressive towers. Gilded Age architecture and the ornate shapes of pre-modern design have nonetheless defined the timeless identity of the city.

  In the 1970s lovers of this fading architectural landscape decided to protect its most treasured features. By liberating its details from the landscape entirely.

  They were called ‘gargoyle hunters’, so passionate for the city’s magnificent beauty that they would rather steal aspects of it than see it destroyed.

  The Gargoyle Hunters
  by John Freeman Gill
  Alfred A. Knopf

  John Freeman Gill‘s new book The Gargoyle Hunters is obviously about one of these guerrilla collectors, working with a crew of thieves, chipping away at doomed architectural wonders falling into disrepair, scouring heaps of rubble for a bit of beauty in a city tumbling into financial ruin.

  One of the thieves is the gargoyle hunter’s son. His name is Griffin.

  Shortly into Gill’s captivating and exuberant novel, one realizes that architectural crimes are merely the backdrop. This is a story about all varieties of nostalgia. Formalized urban nostalgia, of course, of the kind that drives landmark preservation and podcasts about New York City history. But also the constant pining for recognizable moments in a person’s life, both for the pleasures of our childhood and for the relationships that once held us in safety.

  Below: The World Trade Center, with the Woolworth Building peering through — two architectural contrasts in Gill’s novel (photo date 1973)

  Gill, a New York-based journalist and New York Times contributor, is the son of a ‘gargoyle hunter’ who traipsed 1970s in search of aged, deteriorating treasures, and his adventure, while certainly fictionalized, has the immediacy of a memoir, laced with specific references to corner shops, restaurants and cheap snack foods.

  Griffin’s parents are separated so he spends time between his home — a rustic, unrenovated brownstone on the Upper East Side — and his father’s workshop in a warehouse in Tribeca, many years before chic hotels and film festivals would arrive here. Griffin has accepted the separation, if mournfully, just as he assumes New York as a faded, withering place, the rubble upon which the foibles of his adolescence play out.

  Below: Heaps of rubble abound in early 1970s New York. In The Gargoyle Hunter, they sometimes possess abandoned treasures.

  But those around him are not so complacent. His sister spends her time trying to piece her family back together in crafty ways. At one point, she smashes a window with a rock, knowing her father will have to come back and repair it.

  Her father also vandalizes to repair the past, soon employing his son in wild and increasingly dangerous capers to remove carved detailing from old Gilded Age buildings, finding great spiritual urgency in his tasks.

  “The bridge of time is very poignant,” he told me. “I think about the immigrant carvers who came over here and did this work on people’s home — itinerant nobodies, many of them, with no stable homes of their own — and I meet them across time.”

  Their adventures soon lead to a startling heist — the theft of an entire building.

  “No, not part of a building, son. What we’re going to steal is a building — the whole damn thing, cornice to curb. Just stop asking so many questions and you’ll see. Okay?

  (NOTE: This sounds far-fetched, but Gill bases this on an actual event of a cast-iron structure win 1974.)

  Below: The ramshackle streets of Tribeca, another vivid location from the book

  I feel as though Gill is doing a bit of gargoyle hunting from his own life, the novel filled with charming and very specific anecdotes of teenage exuberance and wistful remembrance, dotted along the corridors of 1970s New York that you can almost follow along with on a dusty map.

  There’s even a marvelously awkward experience atop the Statue of Liberty, one that feels gleefully unrestricted, with a major nod to modern cinema’s greatest ode to nostalgia — A Christmas Story.

  The central crimes (or are they rescues?) of The Gargoyle Hunters feel realistic because they’re paired with the common trials and errors of teenage life, moments we all wish we could chip away and save forever.

• Book Reporter
  http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/the-gargoyle-hunters
  Word count: 740

  Review
  The Gargoyle Hunters
  by John Freeman Gill
  Buy this book at IndieBound
  Buy this book at Amazon
  Buy this for Amazon Kindle
  Buy this book at Barnes and Noble
  New York City is a living, breathing creature that belongs to its occupants. That is the message ever present in John Freeman Gill’s debut novel, THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS. This is truly a wonderful city, and Gill takes you back in time to 1970s New York and gracefully guides you through it. Plenty of chapters open with commentary on the city, how it lives, breathes and behaves. The author fully immerses you in the Big Apple, even if you haven’t the slightest clue what the difference is between the West Side and the East Side, or how a neighborhood can completely change above a certain street. The descriptions are vivid, and he takes his time eloquently describing buildings, rooms, the city and the gargoyles themselves.

  But as much as THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS is about New York City, it is, at its core, about the bonds between parent and child, specifically father and son. The novel revolves around the relationship between Griffin Watts and his father, who is separated from Griffin’s mother and living amongst the gargoyles he steals --- or liberates, I should say. He views his gargoyle thieving not as stealing, but as liberating pieces of the city from those who would not appreciate them. He is in love with New York and can’t stand to see pieces of it go to waste, be torn down, or not be looked at with the same wonder that he does.

  "The bond between father and son is what this book is really about, and it will keep you reading until the end. THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS is a very good debut novel that deserves a spot in your personal library..."
  Meanwhile, all Griffin wants is for his dad to be his dad. He goes along with him on hunts and becomes a part of his father’s hunting team, but their relationship, at its foundation, is very business-centric. Some of the best moments in the book are when Griffin goes gargoyle hunting alone and brings back pieces to his dad. They turn this into a scavenger hunt, quiz-like game where Griffin presents an artifact and his dad explains where it’s from and the history behind the building. While Griffin’s dad demonstrates his knowledge and love of the city above all else, Griffin attempts to form a meaningful bond between them.

  Although this is the focal point of the story and gets developed well along the way to a satisfying conclusion, Gill does introduce readers to a number of supporting characters. Griffin’s mother collects eggshells to use as part of her art. His sister, Quigley, is about as interesting and eccentric as you’d expect a person with that name to be. Griffin’s crush, Dani, is one of the more well-rounded characters here.

  However, the supporting cast often gets little attention, and most secondary storylines are dropped in favor of isolating Griffin and focusing on the bond between him and his father. Griffin’s mother isn’t given much to do. The tenants that the family houses for rent money are one-note characters who do little to help the story. Griffin and his best friend, Kyle, drift apart, and his other friends and classmates are barely present or used. Quigley isn’t given much to do in the latter half, which is a shame for she has some of the novel’s best scenes. She forms a friendship with one of the tenants that proves to be a highlight of the book, but isn’t developed to its fullest extent. Still, these issues will not detract from your enjoyment of the novel.

  The bond between father and son is what this book is really about, and it will keep you reading until the end. THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS is a very good debut novel that deserves a spot in your personal library, and John Freeman Gill will certainly be an author to watch out for.

  Reviewed by Austin Manchester on March 24, 2017

  Buy this book at IndieBound Buy this book at Amazon Buy this for Amazon Kindle Buy this book at Barnes and Noble

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