Pete Smith, ????-2007
I ran into my old friend and client Matt Ryan today and found out that Pete Smith has passed.
Pete Smith was someone most folks outside of the Irish channel and the 9th ward won’t know. Pete was a carpenter, a musician, and a vagabond- he had built houses and played music all over the country. He was a kind and gentle soul who never had a bad word to say about anyone.
I learned a lot from Pete. He was a master of the sort of reconstructive carpentry that is needed these days in New Orleans. He had large, heavy hands and worked very carefully. Probably the only reason that the building between First and Phillip on Magazine that we spent nine months fixing up didn’t collapse on our heads was because of Pete’s skill with hydraulic jacks and braces.
Pete was a fine musician as well, played the mandolin beautifully. He made a mean Spanakopita, too. You wouldn’t think that the skinny old man who looked like Willy Nelson could do things like that with those big hands. I had the feeling he could cook other things, but I never knew. He was always glad to see you, and he had a personal warmth and charm that affected everyone around him. I met only one person who didn’t get along with Pete, and the individual in question didn’t get along with anyone else, including himself.
We called him Old Pete, and he was beloved in the neighborhood. I am not exaggerating when I say that he was like a holy man, a holy man who was also an alcoholic. Pete drank too much and all the time. Not only did it keep him poor for the years that I knew him but it probably contributed to his untimely death.
I can still hear his rich voice in my skull, and see him shaking his big hands in that peculiar physical expression of his.
There are a half dozen houses around this city, maybe more, that are fine homes for people because of Pete Smith. I know of three myself, one of which is four two-bedroom apartments. There are businesses that operate in spaces that he constructed out of the shells of falling apart buildings. And the people who live there will never dream of the man who put them together, will enjoy the use of these spaces but never will know the old half-Irish half-Greek hippie carpenter from was born in Massachusetts, who could never afford to live in any of these places.
And never cared, either.
I remember one day when we were working on the big house on Magazine in 2002. It was a quiet day like most days we spent there, and hot. There was nothing but a hot, white silence as we put up stud after stud of Canadian spruce. And then, seeming from far away, someone started playing boogie-woogie piano across the street, and it got loud. Pete and I heard it, and he put down his tools, and walked over to the wall and beat out a rhythm with his big hands, and began to holler.
Pete Smith died but he never got old. He was alive.
Peter Smith, God rest your soul, we miss you.