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Heavy-metal artist melds practicality, beauty

An ironworker who carries a torch for ornamental designs practices his craft from a Howard Avenue shop.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published September 29, 2006

WEST TAMPA - Bill Patterson can turn iron into practical beauty. His curlicue stair railings, fences, balconies, doors, gates, stairs and columns grace homes all over the Tampa Bay area.

A true artisan, Patterson, who learned his trade as a fabricator for Florida Steel Co., is the kind of creative and detail-oriented craftsman common in the Gilded Age but scarce today. He knows his material so well, he can transform it into a masterpiece for the common man.

His clients include a slew of home builders as well as residential customers. His business, Alasco Ornamental Iron and Welding, sits at the end of a row of businesses along N Howard Avenue. He shares the block with the Rag Man and a Jamaican restaurant, the One-Stop Jerk Center.

Inside the 1,000-square-foot shop, at 2110 N Howard Ave., he has a lifetime's worth of equipment, including a 30-ton "ironworker" machine that's more than 50 years old.

He knows this because he called Cleveland Dye and Punch Co. "they know every machine ever made" to ask. He saw it in the yard of a guy whose son made mullet nets back when he lived near La Salle Street and Himes Avenue.

Patterson kept thinking about it and finally offered the son $100.

"The guy said, 'No, just give me $25,' " Patterson said, laughing at the recollection.

Does it work?

"Does it work?" he retorted, still laughing. "That thing will cut a three-quarter-inch diameter solid bar like cutting butter."

At 61, the strapping Patterson, who now lives in north Brandon, is a captivating raconteur. His conversation is half shop talk, half tales of Old Florida.

He grew up in the Panhandle on a farm that touched Georgia, Florida and Alabama. He picked cotton by hand, 100 pounds a day, with a long sack strapped to his back.

He earned $3 a day.

There were nine kids in his family - five girls and four boys - and Patterson fell somewhere in the middle. They lived in Bascom, a town so small that "there were two grocery stores, one on each side of the road, and a post office no bigger than your utility shed."

In the early 1960s, he moved to Tampa to be near his mother's youngest brother.

"I was looking for a better life. I was tired of the farm," he recalled. He traded cotton picking for a job on a feed lot where he helped to fatten 1,800-pound Brahma bulls.

After a 95-cents-an-hour stint cleaning uniforms at the Pan American Linen Co. in Tampa, he went to work for Florida Steel in 1964.

"When I first started, man, I had a low job," he said, remembering his days rigging cables to a lift. Two years later he began operating a crane but lost the job because of racism that then penetrated the workplace.

"One day a supervisor came in and saw me operating a crane and told my boss to take me off," Patterson said. "He said there were too many other people who could be driving besides me."

Gradually, Patterson worked his way into a fabricating job, where he "learned from the old-timers, the guys who were in World War II, the best of the very best."

In the ages before calculators, his mentors were modest math whizzes who figured formulas for fabricating with pencil and paper using trigonometry and geometry, Patterson said. "We all learned math the long way. I used to take the math books and sit down at the table at night just to get good at it."

In 1976, he started doing ornamental iron fabricating on the side with a group of Cuban friends who took jobs in the evenings after their shifts at the steel plant.

Eventually he started his own business, working with two of his sons at the Howard Avenue shop. In 1997, he went to work for a steel company in Zephyrhills, where he stayed until 2004.

"I just got tired of it and decided to come back to doing this. I love my business because it's interesting and I never get bored," he said, showing a visitor a book of railing designs that he can buy from Italy and modify or make by hand if need be.

"Usually when we do a railing we draw the whole thing out on a table first," he said.

Patterson has just two employees, but the jobs keep pouring in: "We've got a system, a really fast system. Nobody else does this like this. Nobody."

Though his fabricating skills are in great demand, the work is labor intensive and can be expensive, which is sometimes problematic in an age of cheap foreign labor.

Recently, his $25,000 bid for an ornate door lost out to a cheaper quote from Mexico.

Patterson wouldn't budge.

"I wasn't going to do it for less," he said. "Not for that kind of work."

Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached at ebettendorf@hotmail.com.

[Last modified September 28, 2006, 08:13:14]