Bethpage's Len Mulqueen serves community with woodwork, sculptures

To walk around Len Mulqueen’s verdant property, just off Broadway in Bethpage, is to encounter an unexpected, enchanted land of intricately designed metal sculptures.

There’s the whimsical skier with ears fashioned from golf club heads astride the garage roof, the water feature made with a bicycle wheel covered in redwood, the large circular gate laced with a spider web design, the silver palm tree that seems to be growing in the garden, a trio of spray-painted cacti and the shiny aluminum guitar attached to a tree.

The al fresco metallic gallery is just the entrée to Mulqueen’s inventive universe. Inside his home, the living and dining rooms are filled with an endless variety of wood creations: bowls, boxes, sculptures, bangles, pendants, lamps and urns crafted from black cherry, fragrant Brazilian tulip, Australian lace, maple, African ebony and zebra, purple heart, redwood and black walnut woods.

“I’ve always worked with my hands,” said Mulqueen, 80. “I enjoy it. I get a lot of satisfaction out of making things.”

Mulqueen, a lifelong Bethpage resident who lives in his childhood home, said he got interested in woodworking more than 40 years ago, when a contractor putting an extension on his house never returned to finish the job. To complete the work, he said, he had to learn carpentry on the fly. Soon after, he built his porch, a dining table and chairs, a coffee table made from a piano, a bar, a wall unit and shelving. Before long, he said, he was creating decorative objects out of wood.

He was inspired to work with metal through his job as a metal fabricator at Chivvis Enterprises in Copiague, where he worked for almost 40 years before retiring at 75.

“Part of my job was to fabricate for customers who were artists but did not have the facilities to do the work themselves,” Mulqueen said. “So I decided that if they can do it, I can also do it.”

Today, Mulqueen’s work can be found throughout Bethpage, including the 9/11 memorial displayed at the Bethpage LIRR station, a “Gateway to Recreation” sign and, until last year, a 9-foot-tall stainless-steel menorah that for two decades was lit each Hanukkah. (The menorah was stolen last year.)

The giving trees

Most of the wood for Mulqueen’s creations comes courtesy of a couple of friends who are tree surgeons. Occasionally, the wood has an interesting back story, like the mahogany he acquired from the original bar at the Oak Beach Inn or the trees with distinctive burls he found at a construction site in Plainview.

“I went with a crane which had a 20-foot bed on it and lifted pieces of wood up with the crane,” Mulqueen said. “It filled up the bed of the crane and two pickup truck loads.”

In many instances, Mulqueen gives away his designs, even though crafting a small wooden bowl can take about six or seven hours, from start to finish. Once, a tree surgeon friend took down a tree that had special meaning to a woman: Her father had planted it years earlier, and she was reluctant to have it removed, Mulqueen said.

“He gives me a branch and says, ‘Make something for her,’ ” Mulqueen recalled. “So, I make a bowl and I give it back to him. I see him again the following week and he says, ‘Lenny, I hope you’re happy. You made another woman cry.’ ”

Several people have asked him to make urns that one day will hold their ashes. In each instance, he said he wouldn’t accept payment for his efforts.

“How do you take money for something like that?” he said. “I can’t. I can’t.”

When Bethpage State Park’s Black golf course was being renovated in 2000, Mulqueen, as president of the Central Park Historical Society of Bethpage, was on hand to document the changes made to the course. Observing the black walnut and maple trees that were taken down, he asked the park’s superintendent, David Catalano, if he could have some of the wood.

To show his gratitude, Mulqueen, who had been making pens as gifts for years, said he made one for Catalano engraved with the words, “Bethpage: Home of the Black Course,” into it.

“I give it to him and I said, ‘This is wood from the golf course.’ He’s a Bethpage guy: He was almost emotional. I said, ‘Maybe I got something here.’ ”

That something turned out to be 2,000 commemorative pens, which he said he made and sold for the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black.

The next time the golf tournament returned to Bethpage, Mulqueen was not so ambitious. Rather than do the work himself, he said he shipped wood from the golf course overseas to have 1,000 pens made by machine.

“When it came around in 2009, after you make 2,000 pens you never want to make another pen in your life,” he said.

Letting the wood ‘speak’

Operating from his subterranean workshop with a variety of lathes, sanders, saws and other woodworking tools, most days Mulqueen labors for hours, cutting, drilling, shaping, carving and gluing the wood into all different types of designs.

“When I first started out, I had a handsaw and this saw,” Mulqueen said, pointing to a Sears Craftsman radial arm saw.

Wood can surprise you, Mulqueen says — like the time he started cutting into some maple only to discover it was infested with ants. After getting rid of the ants, he built what he described as an “exquisite” coffee table from it.

“I tell everybody, you never know what you’re going to get out of a piece of wood until you get into it,” Mulqueen said. “I let the wood speak to me.”

Often, he collaborates with his wife, who provides drawings or fabric from her own projects that he places inside his wooden boxes and epoxies into place.

“Unbelievable,” is the word Laura Mulqueen, 77, uses to describe her husband’s work.

“The man is like magic,” exclaimed Merrill Zorn-Jensen, 61, owner of Zorn’s of Bethpage, a takeout food and retail store.

During the store’s renovation, Zorn-Jensen had to remove a pear tree in front that had been growing there since she was a little girl visiting her grandfather on his farm, which would later became the site of Zorn’s. She asked Mulqueen to make whatever he wanted out of the tree.

“Len made so many unbelievably gorgeous things out of this tree: frames, bowls, pens, jewelry,” she said. “The man is so — I don’t even have words for how talented he is.”

Presenting Mulqueen with plumbing fixtures from the original store, Zorn-Jensen asked him to make two light fixtures out of them.

“I did buy things, but he also gave them to me as gifts because the tree was so sentimental, and he was so kind,” said Zorn-Jensen, adding that he also made her a jewelry holder.

“For someone to do something, knowing what it meant to me, was so cool,” she said. “He’s just talented beyond, beyond.”

Unorthodox techniques

Mulqueen said he never thought of teaching woodworking because he doesn’t feel qualified to do so.

“A lot of things I do are probably very unorthodox,” he said. “You shouldn’t do it that way.”

Still, Mulqueen has been working with his cousin’s 13-year-old grandson for the past several months, teaching him how to make pens and other items from wood.

“He’s liking it, so it’s good,” Mulqueen said.

Constantly trying out new designs and projects, Mulqueen said he gets some of his ideas from YouTube videos as well as from the Long Island Woodturners club, of which he is a longtime member.

“You’ll see something that somebody did and say, ‘Wow, I’d like to try that.’ I don’t copy it exactly,” he said. “I just get an idea, inspiration, you spin off of it a little bit — the way they textured it or carved it.”

When he joined the woodturners club in 1985, Joel Rakower was living in Dix Hills, and Mulqueen was the club’s president.

“I refer to him as ‘Yoda,’ because he was the guy that was guiding me,” said Rakower, 65, a retired CPA who now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. “What’s amazing about him is he’s self-taught and he comes up with all these ideas on his own, so everything you see of his is his design. He’s got very much the artist in him, and he’s a mechanic, too.”

Despite the breadth and diversity of his work, Mulqueen realizes that art is subjective: Everyone has their own taste, and his work might not be to everyone’s liking.

“My father used to say: ‘To each his own, the old lady said as she kissed the cow,’ ” he quipped.

These days, Mulqueen still accepts some commissions but for the most part, he said he creates what he likes, when he’s in the mood.

“I’m retired now,” he said. “I do whatever I want when I want.”