September 26–October 3, 1996

cover story

Zinni's World

A crew of art students gives a Center City legend a new lease on life.

By David Warner

Inside a shabby-genteel grey colonial in Haddonfield, NJ, with no sound in the summer air outside but the steady buzz of cicadas, Joe Zinni, 80, sits at the edge of a roll-away cot and contemplates the world he used to know.

There was a time when Zinni cut a dashing figure in Philadelphia. A veteran combat photographer and the owner of a successful group of art supply stores, he was a member of more than 30 social clubs in the city and a noted ladies' man. He hosted weekly parties at his Center City studio for the cultured and the talented. It was a time when Zinni knew everybody and everybody knew Zinni.

But on this quiet August afternoon, Zinni's world is much smaller, diminished by a stroke six months before. For now, his world is limited to his cot, and the occasional walk he takes with the assistance of his stepson Jeffrey.

The longtime owner of Zinni Artists' Materials at 1734 Pine Street in Center City, the place with the palette-shaped sign that's missing a few letters ("Z I N I A R T I S T S' M T E R I A L S), Joseph Michael Zinni is not the man he used to be."

That could mean trouble not only for Zinni and his family. It might also mean a drastic change for his tenants, the people who rent apartments above his shop. For if his business goes, they may have to go, too — that is, if the roof doesn't literally fall in first.

But things are looking up. Two of his tenants — his assistant, Tom Sachs, and Tom's roommate, independent contractor Tony Young — are leading a motley crew of art students and jacks-of-all trades in an all-out effort to give Zinni's world a new lease on life.

And if he ever gets to see how neat they've made his shop, he may never forgive them.

The clutter of Zinni Artists' Materials was legendary.

"There was no open space," remembers artist Sidney Goodman, an old acquaintance of Zinni's and a regular customer. "It was just jam-packed — a dense jungle of art supplies." Another painter, Bill Scott, says that the place reminded him of the infamous lair of the Collyer brothers, the elderly New York siblings who were found literally smothered by the junk they'd amassed over their lifetimes.

There was no possibility of browsing at the old Zinni's. Customers would stand in the one square foot or so of floor space just inside the door, tell Zinni what they wanted, and he'd go find it. And no matter how deeply buried the item had become, Zinni would dig it out.

And Sachs, Zinni's assistant for the last eight years, knew better than to move anything around —"If he couldn't find anything, it was always me."

Zinni's shop has been at its present location since 1952, but he was doing well enough by the late '50s to branch out, occupying for several years a popular spot on the block now occupied by Liberty Place.

"He used to do a business, darling," says Zinni's wife Elizabeth, 67. "I tell you it was a phenomenon." The Chestnut Street store had several employees, a big plate glass window known for its eye-catching displays, and not just art supplies but "drafting, engineering, photographic supplies — everything under the sun, darling."

Part grande dame, part coquette, Elizabeth (or Liz) is a charming chatterbox who looks vaguely like actress Dianne Wiest. She wasn't married to Zinni in those early days — his first wife, Ann, was. But Liz has gotten to know all of Zinni's stories by heart, it seems, over a decade of courtship and 12 years of marriage, and she's only too glad to pipe in.

She raised five children by her first marriage in the house she now shares with Zinni. If the interior is any indication, it's no wonder she and Zinni are soulmates — she's as much of a pack rat as he is. A writer and an artist, Liz says she has more than 2,000 of her paintings in the basement, which is pretty amazing since there seem to be at least half that many in the rooms on the first floor. There are piles of books, too, and knickknacks, and photos, and magazines. And in the middle of it all sits Zinni on his cot.

His deep-set brown eyes are alert, and his speech, though a little mumbly and rushed at times, is coherent. Dressed in a slightly yellowed white v-neck t-shirt, his thick, glossy white hair combed back in the manner of an old-fashioned orchestra maestro, he is ready for his interview.

His interview, he makes clear to his wife as she waxes a little too long about his early years in business.

"I'm shutting up," she says, none too convincingly. "I have a zipper on my mouth."

The conversation turns to parties.

Every Saturday night throughout most of the '50s, says Zinni, actors, artists, playwrights, opera singers and the like would gather in his fourth-floor studio on Pine Street. They called themselves the Order of the Bronze Goat (after a Zinni photograph of the familiar goat statue in Rittenhouse Square), and every week there'd be skits and dancing and card games and jugs of wine — all in a space that even now seems the perfect romantic stereotype of an artist's garret, complete with steep eaves and a big slanted window.

"Everybody knew Zinni," says Liz. Leo Rogers, who worked for Paramount Pictures; oral historian and all-around "ne'er-do-well" Abraham Lincoln Gillespie; actor/ director Jasper Jeeter, the guiding light behind Hedgerow Theater, then at the height of its renown — all were regulars whose names Zinni can still recall.

His eyes brighten at the mention of his reputation as a ladies' man, but he turns away slightly, saying "Nah." Liz begs to differ: she and Zinni are longtime members of Plays & Players, the community theater and social club around the corner from his store, and when they attend functions there, she says, "I'm telling you I see three or four ladies looking at me with envy — because he is a catch."

She shows me a picture of Zinni in uniform, from when he was a combat photographer and lieutenant colonel during World War II. His hair is black, wavy; the smile is dazzling. "He could stop traffic in his day."

Zinni's first wife was an artist too; she lived in Italy in the latter part of their 40-year marriage, occupying a villa which Zinni built for her. During her absence, Zinni began dating Liz (she had been divorced for several years at the time), but she broke off their relationship for fear of being a "homewrecker." It was only after Ann had died, and Zinni was "grieving terribly," that they got together again. Liz was the one who proposed.

Zinni has never lost his appreciation for the opposite sex.

"If a pretty young girl came into this store," reports Tom Sachs, "he would always give her a kiss — even if he'd never met her."

"He'd stand on the stoop mentally undressing every woman who walked down the street, talking about firmness, etc.... He was a dog."

And an occasionally ornery dog at that.

"Tom! Tom! Tom Sachs!" was the clarion call Sachs would hear whenever Zinni needed his assistant's immediate attention, which was often.

"And he's one of these people," says Sachs, "who'd blow up and then five minutes later be calm and cool. It took a while to get used to."

Sachs, a trim 43-year-old who projects an air of ironic bemusement, had no idea when he and his then-lover Tony Young came down to Philadelphia in 1988 that he'd wind up taking care of a cantankerous old merchant. The couple had left Upper Montclair, NJ, in search of a fresh start. Young had left his job in a plant store because he'd heard of opportunities to work on historic renovations in Philly; Sachs had been working for a college bookstore company that was going out of business.

Scouting out potential apartments, Sachs and Zinni met in front of his shop, where he was standing guard over an outdoor stall of books and prints. When he spotted Sachs writing down addresses, he asked, "You looking for an apartment?" and next thing you know Sachs had a job (helping Zinni) and he and Tony had a place to live.

Was this a matter of being in the right place at the right time?

Over the last six months he's not been so sure.

By the time Sachs came to work for Zinni, the boom years were long over. The old shop on the future Liberty Place site had been torn down in 1967, and after operating another branch for a few years in the 2000 block of Chestnut, Zinni decided in 1974 to move all his stock into the Pine Street location. Three stores worth of merchandise plus photography paraphernalia and the belongings of his late wife — it amounted to a massive amount of stuff.

Zinni's routine was well in place by the time Sachs arrived.

"He was always here, seven days a week, eight or nine hours a day, even trudged here during snowstorms."

Often, Zinni would stay upstairs in the studio or in the second-floor apartment he kept for himself and let Tom wait on the customers — unless it was one of his regulars, one of the oldtimers who insisted they do business with Zinni and no one else. Then Sachs would press Zinni's buzzer five times — the code for old friends.

"I never knew somebody who knew so many people and told so many bad jokes," says Sachs. "And he'd tell the same joke to different people, so I heard them over and over again." (Zinni has also put his sense of humor to official use; he's been judging the comic division of the Mummers Parade for 25 years.)

Zinni's long history of making friends lulled him into believing he could continue doing business without advertising — after all, the people in the know knew to go to Zinni's. But many of those old friends were no longer around — moved or dead or no longer making art. He still had some wholesale contracts, and he still carried merchandise that couldn't be found elsewhere, but his shop was an increasingly anachronistic one in the era of art-supply superstores like Pearl. He was plagued by petty theft, too — once a gang of wall writers broke in and stole all the spray paint.

But all would have trundled along nicely enough if it hadn't been for the book.

Zinni's long-cherished dream was to publish a book about his experiences as a World War II combat photographer. As a member of a seven-man army photographers' unit, he had seen many of his photos published in newspapers and national magazines, including his favorite — a photo of surrendering German soldiers he'd snagged by lying to a German officer that the picture would be for archives only, not for the news media. But he'd never received any individual credit — all army photos went into a pool from which publications chose what they wanted, and the photographers remained anonymous.

So when he received word that Northwest Publishing, Inc. in Salt Lake City had agreed to publish his manuscript, From Omaha to Sussice, he was thrilled — finally his book was becoming a reality. He didn't even mind that he had to pay the company $8,000 for the privilege; Northwest wasn't a vanity press, but a "subsidy press," he says, which meant that you didn't have to pay all the expenses of printing — just some.

He got out his battered leather address book, with its 35 to 40 years of names, and prepared 3,000 letters and envelopes notifying everyone he knew of the imminent publication of his book.

Then the letter came. The company had gone bankrupt. His $8,000 was gone. And if he wanted his manuscript back, could he please send Northwest $55?

"That's a shame," says Zinni now. "Eight thousand dollars I threw away."

And what Sachs found out after Zinni's stroke was that he'd stretched his finances in other ways to support the book project — he'd taken out two mortgages on the house.

When Joe Zinni had his stroke on Feb. 9, he did it in quintessential Zinni-esque fashion — that is, he was alone at the store, he called the ambulance himself, and he made sure before going to the hospital that his social obligations were in order.

Tom Sachs talked to Zinni through the door of his apartment that morning before running to do some errands. His voice sounded odd, Sachs thought, but he decided that was because he didn't have his teeth in yet. Later that day Zinni made a call to Sidney Goodman to tell him he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be attending the opening that night of Goodman's big retrospective at the Phila. Museum of Art.

Goodman noticed that Zinni's usually rapidfire speech was a little slow and slurred. "I thought, wow, I hope he's not getting a stroke."

Zinni knew something was wrong. Feeling numbness and fatigue, he called his doctor, who wasn't in. Then he called 911, and an ambulance took him to Graduate Hospital.

The stroke he experienced that day was the first of three he'd have over the next four days. His entire right-hand side became paralyzed, and his speech went from slurred to unintelligible.

"It came out of the blue," says Liz. "We were totally devastated."

And meanwhile, Sachs was left with the daunting task of running the store — daunting because no one except Zinni knew where anything was.

"Tom panicked after the stroke," says Tony Young. "All Zinni's accounts were calling, wondering where he was."

However, "Zinni dealt with his finances the same way he dealt with his store" — it was all in his head — so tracking down documents and figuring out inventory, let alone keeping the store open, seemed an impossible task.

But it had to be done — otherwise Zinni would be out of business, and he, Tom and Zinni's other five tenants would be without a roof over their heads.

"So this is why I needed the boys," says Young.

"The boys" (and one young woman) are the crew of 20-somethings hired by Young (using his own and Tom's money as well as proceeds from the store) to clean, organize and manage Zinni Artists' Materials over the last six months. Gathered for a photo one day this summer, they seemed a ragtag crew, a cross between a grad student colloquium and the waifish lineup of a CK One ad. But they all had one thing in common: Tony Young.

A stocky, steely-eyed man with salt-and-pepper hair and skin the color of milk chocolate, Young, 49, is a Pied Piper of sorts. A few of his employees, like Walt Amado, 20, and Chris Scheele, 21, are people he also uses for his own independent contracting jobs (everything from private interiors to the Jurassic Park exhibit at the Franklin Institute). But most of the staffers are art students he's chatted up around town and told about the store.

Charles Micklosky, 23, met Young while working as a sales clerk at the now-defunct Nature Company store at 18th & Walnut. A third-year grad student in painting at the PA Academy of Fine Arts, he'd get into conversations with Young on Sundays when business was slow and Young was taking the day off, or he'd run into him occasionally in Rittenhouse Square. He'd already decided to leave the Nature Co. job and go home to Bethlehem, PA, for the summer when Young said, "Why don't you come over to help at Zinni's?" Now he's manager of the store.

Jace Miley, 20, a second-year student at the University of the Arts who does "anything and everything" at the store from clerking to clean-up, also met Young in Rittenhouse Square. They got to talking, and it came out that Miley was feeling depressed, remembers Young. "I told him, 'Look, buddy, I haven't got time for depression. But I got work for you.'"

Both Micklosky and Miley have come to think of the Zinni project as more than just a job. Micklosky, a genial, rosy-cheeked fellow with round wire rims and curly brown hair, is passionate about doing justice to the history of the place — as represented not only by Zinni's life but by the well-made, even rare merchandise he's discovered there.

The Smalti tiles, for instance. Exquisitely colored handcut glass tiles from Florence and Venice that Zinni purchased during trips to Italy, they're kept in the basement in Maxwell House coffee cans, and are still a big draw for mosaic artists. Micklosky had been planning to attend school in Tuscany someday so he could learn "permanent techniques" like fresco and mosaic. Now he's learning on the job — his first mosaic project is a new sign for the front of Zinni's.

Miley, who has ambitions to be a composer, noodles on the piano in the upstairs studio when he has the time. "I've learned so much being here — not just about art supplies."

There's a downside to the youthfulness of the staff. It makes people suspicious.

The steady stream of young men going in and out of the shop these days and hanging out on the front steps has provoked concerns that Young is running a house of some sort of ill repute — or at the very least is having way too much fun.

"One woman down the street was always growling at me whenever she saw me," recalls Young as he takes a break from clearing out an office space in the shop one Saturday. "I asked her husband why. He says she probably thinks you're sleeping with them all."

Is he?

"Hell, no! I've had my fun. You get this much gray hair, it's over."

And given the amount of work that's been accomplished inside the shop, it seems clear that the main source of fun here has been the satisfaction of pulling order out of chaos.

Micklosky recalls the early challenges involved in excavating and organizing all the buried treasure. The first step in the basement? "Find the floor. Find the walls." On the shop level, a major task was to unblock the windows — until the cleanup, they were completely concealed.

Todd Kaiser, 22, a third-year PAFA student who acts as the shop's assistant manager, says the cleanup process was like "going through a treasure chest or a time capsule. Zinni kept everything."

Screws, pen caps, bent nails that had been pulled from walls. A whole dresser full of masking tape. Fine-art prints stuffed into the four-inch-wide space between wall and radiator. Brushes, brushes and more brushes.

"The place was filled with cigar boxes [containing] beautiful, natural sable paintbrushes," says Micklosky. "Every time we cleaned out a shelf there was a box of brushes back there."

And pen nibs. Zinni used to supply the Philadelphia school system with calligraphy nibs and pens, and the store still fills orders for them (a supply was recently sent to Guatemala), so Zinni had them stored all over the place. "My God, there's another drawer of nibs!" became a watchcry during the cleanup. Now they're all together in a neatly labeled metal cabinet so that when a calligrapher writes and says, "I need a bunch of Estabrook 914s," the staff knows just where to look.

To those who knew the shop as it was before, its current incarnation is startling. After helping with the initial stages of the project, Kaiser spent most of the summer studying on Cape Cod. "When I came back I was just like, 'Wow!' To see all this stuff organized."

Sidney Goodman, who's been back to shop there since the students took over, says the "jungle" he remembered has been transformed.

"They just hacked away the brush."

The revamped space is bright, pleasant and yet still full of character. The neat rows of linseed oils and varnishes, the Rich Art poster paints in bright shades of turquoise and persimmon, the carefully arranged displays of sculptors' tools invite inspection, but there's still a nice sense of crowdedness, like a great old used bookstore. And there are photos and paintings of Zinni placed at strategic points above it all —"so the spirit of the Zinni-meister is still here," says Tom Sachs.

The basement, though much improved, is still a jumble of frames and canvas, its shelves lined with ice cream cartons full of bright pigments and sheaves of paper. Giving a tour of the premises, Micklosky pulls out a canvas holder for landscape artists and a portable sculpture stand —"gadgets that haven't been made in years." He's counting on this "funky stuff" to attract artists who want something unique, who find the bigger, newer stores and their mass-produced merchandise too "cosmetic."

Will the customers come? When the crew and staff is gathered all at once (as they were for the photo shoot for this story), they easily outnumber the clientele; a young woman who wandered in to do some shopping during the shoot was just a bit overwhelmed ("We can close up for the day! We've got a live one!" exclaimed Sachs when she entered the space.) But a few weeks later, on a Saturday after the art schools had reopened for the fall, the place was filled with paying customers, says Micklosky.

There's still a lot of work to do and a lot of money to be raised. (Besides the $13,000 Young says he's already put out in paying staff, which he hopes can be applied to his rent, he estimates that Zinni is $25,000 in debt.) Young and his crew attempted to raise some of that money by hauling some of the stuff they cleared out of 1734 Pine over to St. Patrick's Church near Rittenhouse Square for an "estate sale." But confusion about pricing and a scheduling mixup made the sale more trouble than it was worth — the unsold goods were taken to Freeman's auction house, where they were dispensed with much more easily.

There have been a few other snags — Elizabeth Zinni gave Tony Young a letter authorizing him to collect rent from other tenants, then reneged when a tenant complained that Young was pressuring him (that same tenant later evacuated his apartment without bothering to pay his rent at all). But both Zinnis are lavish in their admiration for the two men who have taken the business into their hands.

"You cannot fault Tony or Tom," says Elizabeth. "They've been extremely conscientious and devoted to Joe — no business manager could have handled our affairs with the competency they have shown. They're the only people who ever said to me in my entire life, 'Liz, we want you to have a roof over your head.'"

Fixing that roof is one the many ideas Young has for future projects. "There are a couple of big ideas flying around," says Jace Miley, rolling his eyes. "Really big.") He's hoping to set up a benefit dinner for Zinni at the Art Alliance, but nothing's firmed up yet. He says the National Geographic TV documentary people are interested in including Zinni in a program about combat photographers, but he hasn't had time to get back to them. In cleaning up the upstairs studio, he and his crew tagged and organized Zinni's impressive collection of vintage cameras; they might be worthy of exhibition, he thinks, or they could be sold to pull in the money needed for the roof. Once that's in place, he might be able to proceed with his plans to teach vocal lessons in the studio, or rent out the space for musicians who need a place to record — bringing a spirt of creative ferment back to the studio where, 40 years ago, Zinni and his friends sang and danced.

Comparing the shop's rejuvenation to the nearby development on the Avenue of the Arts, Miley says, "It's something coming out of the rubble, along with the rest of Broad Street."

But a better image might be Charles Micklosky's description of Zinni's favorite pastime. Pointing out a windowsill with a golden sheen, he says, "Mr. Zinni bronzed everything that stood still. He could take a piece of junk and make it look like a million bucks."

Despite the unwelcome order that's descended on his Pine Street lair, Zinni might well appreciate the new polish.

A bright, breezy Friday afternoon in September. The Magee Rehabilitation Center on the riverfront (just south of the Riverview movie theaters), where Zinni is due for his last day of physical therapy. Following a two-week stay at Graduate Hospital after his stroke and three weeks as an inpatient at Magee Rehab in Center City, he's been following a therapy routine throughout the summer at this big, anonymous-looking building on a parking lot off Columbus Boulevard.

"He came in with high expectations," says Bob Ferri, who was his occupational therapist for most of the summer, helping him to regain feeling in his hand through motor control training and stretching exercises. "He really wants things to happen. He's feisty."

Now working with physical therapist Carmen Nash, he's just as determined and just as feisty. Whereas earlier in the summer, he was confined to one floor of his house, unable to go up and down stairs, today he descends and ascends two flights, Nash patiently, firmly monitoring him all the way. "I don't want you to pull yourself. I want you to push yourself."

"Wow," says Zinni afterwards. "I'm tired." But there's more. Standing with Zinni behind a metal railing like a dance teacher taking her student through ballet steps at the barre, Nash shows Zinni the proper way to stretch his legs. It's a struggle — he finds it easier, naturally, to stretch the unaffected leg. "I know [that leg] is better. I'm not worried about that leg."

But, then, in the middle of a difficult exercise, he brightens right up.

"Who's that?" he asks Carmen as a strikingly attractive speech therapist walks by.

The old Zinni is on his way back.