Marble

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - Luxury appointments abound in the 7,000-square-foot, 12-year-old Victorian-style mansion overlooking Great Bay, such as a marble fireplace that once graced a Biddle estate mansion, a crystal chandelier that at the touch of a button lowers from the 30-foot foyer ceiling for cleaning, and boat slips big enough to berth a pair of yachts. A "smart house" system controls window treatments, lighting, heating, air-conditioning, and music. Slate-covered turrets, little secret gardens, and gingerbread-laden porches make the exterior look more like Cape May than Ocean City.

Daniel J. Gerlach, 40, of Haddon Heights, an architect whose marble work is in numerous commercial buildings on the East Coast, including the First Union Center in Philadelphia and the Trump casino-hotels in Atlantic City, died Friday afternoon while running on a treadmill at Bally's health club in Deptford. He died just four weeks after the birth of his son, Paul, an event that had the father of two daughters "on cloud nine," said Mr. Gerlach's father, Paul J. Gerlach. In 1993 Mr. Gerlach cofounded Doyle-Gerlach Inc., a Philadelphia company that imported fine natural stone, specializing in marble and granite, from all over the world.

Tony Trezza, a Valley Forge sculptor, looks at a large block of white marble and knows there is an image in there that he wants to extract. "You go after it . . . carefully," said Trezza, who has learned the craft of sculpting marble from the masters in Pietrasanta, Italy. Wearing an apron and glasses to protect against the flying white chips and spray of dust in his studio, Trezza demonstrated how he uses his air hammer to refine an abstract piece that he calls the "clamdigger.

Tourists pocketed marble fragments that had flown off Michelangelo's statue David when a failed Italian artist attacked it with a hammer on Saturday, the superintendent of Florence's art works said today. Pietro Cannata, 47, broke a toe of the 13-foot-high statue in the Tuscan city's Galleria dell'Accademia. Superintendent Antonio Paolucci said two Italians and a French tourist picked up some of the marble pieces and made for the exit but were stopped by security guards and forced to empty their pockets.

Last year, it was an auto-repair business that Renato Sacco wanted for his garage on Mount Carmel Avenue in the North Hills section of Abington Township. He went before the township's Zoning Hearing Board and was granted permission. Alas, it didn't work out. So now Sacco has new plans: He wants to use the garage to store marble imported from Italy. Sacco appeared before the Zoning Hearing Board Monday night, this time seeking permission to lease the 34-by-50-foot garage to Joseph D. Giungo Sr., who imports and installs marbles in churches and other commercial buildings.

Clothing fashions change from season to season and year to year. So what clothing should a sculptor drape his subjects in when he is fashioning a marble carving designed to appeal to viewers hundreds of years from now? To give his figures a timeless quality, George Carr decided on loose, flowing garments that have a vaguely classical look. "One of the architects calls it 20th-century peasant," he said with a smile. "I think it turned out all right. " Carr, of Silver Spring, Md., is sculpting a huge marble bas-relief that will be installed in 1998 in the main chapel at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.

Two Penn Center office buildings have been refitted with Italian marble to enable them to better compete with the sumptuous trappings of the new crowd of office towers rising west of City Hall. Last week, the completion of a $9 million, two-year renovation at Two Penn Center Plaza was celebrated. A two-story glass pavilion has extended the lobby 20 feet into the plaza behind the building, and the lobby's green marble walls have been covered with dark blue and light blue Italian granite.

Sue Romanyszyn grabs the attention of her sixth-grade students with hands-on projects such as building robots and designing tracks to race marbles. "They're always learning, but don't realize they are - not till the end," said Romanyszyn, a teacher at the Klinger Middle School and a finalist for a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics. Romanyszyn, who has taught at the Upper Southampton school for seven years, will find out in April whether she is one of the 50 state winners of the award, administered by the National Science Foundation for the White House.

Mark Oxman has followed a personal course as a sculptor for decades with art that is fascinatingly eccentric and individual. With the return of interest in sculpting and painting the human figure, his work, on exhibit at Rosemont College, may be considered "in style" right now, but it is really not stylish and never has been. Actually Oxman, a longtime teacher at the American University in Washington and former teacher at Haverford, is a traditionalist (but not stodgy) who reveres the old masters.

When a truly great piece of Americana turns up at auction, it is difficult to predict how high the price will go. A case in point is the whopping $594,000 paid late last month for a marble-top pier table in the classical style. The price was double the presale estimates and nearly twice the previous record for a piece of classical furniture, the $303,000 paid in January 1987 for a secretaire a abattant. The pier table, which is supported by two carved and gilded winged figures, was made in New York about 1815 by Charles Honore Lannuier.

Question: I am a victim of my own creativity. Several years ago I put a faux marble finish on my basement floor and covered it with a polyurethane. I would like to repaint it. I tried just floor paint. The paint never dried. I mopped it off several days later. The paint adviser at Lowe's recommended paint remover or sanding. Do you think epoxy paint would cover it? All other options seem like a lot of work. Answer: On the one hand, I like to hear that a product - in this case, the polyurethane - is doing its job by protecting your faux floor.

Play it again, LSU and Alabama. The No. 2 Crimson Tide (.9419) edged out No. 3 Oklahoma State (.9333) in the final round of voting and will play the top-ranked Tigers in an all-SEC BCS National Championship Game on Jan. 9 in New Orleans. It's not exactly a rematch the public was clamoring for - at least outside of Southeastern Conference territory. And it certainly will do nothing to quiet the critics of the Bowl Championship Series or the calls for a college football playoff.

Two online auctions ending this weekend will offer stay-at-home bidding on a variety of collectibles, including coins - and toy banks to put them in. The coins, plus some currency, will be offered by the Auction House Inc., formerly Audubon's Auctioneers, at a sale where online bidding has already begun at www.Auctionzip.com . Live bidding will start at 11 a.m. Saturday at the gallery at 100 W. Merchant St. in Audubon, N.J. The 70...

Auction-goers can get glimpses of the bygone days of life in the slow lane next weekend with suburban sales offering such items as a library ladder and collections of marbles and tea strainers. The library ladder is a highlight of Briggs Auction's sale of fine and decorative arts beginning at 5 p.m. next Friday at the gallery at 1347 Naamans Creek Rd., Garnet Valley. Library ladders - and home libraries themselves - are going the way of the buggy whip, as floor-to-ceiling bookshelves get shorter and their contents give way to e-books.

The curving bay windows are still papered over at Shane's Candies, a century old in Old City, tucked between Front and Second on Market. Only months ago it appeared the venerable place might go out of business entirely, the Shane family's next generation having found other pursuits more to its liking. But the Berley brothers, Ryan and Eric, who run the vintage Franklin Fountain ice cream parlor a few doors up, swooped in, bought the deteriorating store, and have been scrupulously restoring its old glass display cases, carved moldings, and marble counters.

Question: We recently had our bathroom remodeled and chose marble countertops as well as accents in the shower. The marble began to discolor. We called the company that did the remodel and they sent in their marble people to repolish the marble. That was about a month ago, and the stains have reappeared. What can we do to restore, clean, polish, and prevent this from happening? We do try to keep the marble clean and free from water spots, and have used just about every commercial product available to us with poor results.

A 134-year old bust of Bishop Richard Allen that was once lost was recently found in the library of America's oldest black-owned college. Perched atop the library reference desk at Ohio's Wilberforce University was the 3-foot tall white, Italian marble bust that survived a train wreck and a tornado. "This is the first African-American public sculptural project," said Susanna Gold of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. This was "a public project that was provided by, and sponsored by African-Americans and dedicated to an African-American.

A legendary marble bust of Richard Allen, widely thought to have been lost or destroyed - if not forgotten entirely - at last has returned to Philadelphia, where it was originally displayed during the final days of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park. The bust of Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the seminal figures in American history, stands about two feet high and is believed to be the first work of public art completely conceived and sponsored by African Americans.

When Betty Gainsborough bought her circa-1875 Italianate house in Philadelphia's Fishtown section in 1995, it was love at first sight. The tall doorways and cornice brackets, arching marble trim around the doorway with a keystone at the top, and three bay windows proved irresistible. "As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was the house for me," Gainsborough recalls. Cherry-stained pine flooring, chandeliers, a marble fireplace, intricately crafted ornamental plaster skirting the ceiling, and beautiful plaster ceiling medallions were just icing on the cake.

Ronn Shaffer is not an authority on the history of labor, and he's never belonged to a union. But the 71-year-old semiretired businessman does know a thing or two about the landmark 1806 trial, Commonwealth v. George Pullis, et al., in which a band of brazen shoemakers who organized to demand higher wages were convicted of criminal conspiracy. He also has a great story about the time he wrote a letter to Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley in the 1970s and how he learned the power of treating union workers with respect.