Architectural Salvage Michigan

BH native featured on HGTV show

Banding Together: Cutting-edge architectural salvage ... - Grid

On a blustering snowy weekend in late January, a group of men and women gathered in front of a bedsheet and projector in a timber-framed cabin in Eagles Mere, Pa., to discuss how to become a cooperatively owned business. In between breaks for venison stew, toboggan sledding and heating snow for water, those in attendance heard impassioned speeches about governance and power. Debates over fairness, dignity, and responsibility flared and simmered. A sample policy and procedures manual was presented and picked apart as each person was asked to truly consider Greider’s question.

Over the past several months, the 15 employees of Greensaw Design & Build have decided—for better or worse—to answer yes to Greider’s call to action. The small Northern Liberties architectural salvage construction company has set out to become one of an estimated 300 worker cooperatives in the country and what the employees call “Philadelphia’s first new-generation co-op.”

“It’s a huge risk,” says Brendan Jones, Greensaw’s former sole owner. “The thing with a co-op is that they’re significantly more profitable than regular businesses. But those are only the ones that work.”

Built from scratch by Jones in 2006, Greensaw is known for transforming salvaged materials into immaculately elegant, hand-crafted and sometimes funky coffee tables, kitchens and houses.

But in one of the worst economic periods for the hard-hit construction industry, the stakes for everyone involved are high—financially and philosophically.

Greensaw—a rapidly expanding company with slim profits and growing pains—is betting on a vision it believes in: that workers should be able to have a say and earn more than just an hourly wage.

But if the company fails in the process, Jones’ “life’s work” may go down the drain, and all of Greensaw’s employees with it.

A Center City Philadelphia native with the build of a lumberjack and a soft, drooping voice, Jones discovered his love for architectural salvage at a family-owned Eagles Mere cabin that used to be a horse carriage. As a kid, he scoured the surrounding woods, collecting bricks, glasses, pots and other remnants of the Raymond hotel that once stood near the site.

His first real construction gig came in the summer after his freshman year of college; Jones fled school and a girlfriend to live in a small fishing town in southeastern Alaska, where he built himself a little lean-to in the woods.

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