Skip to content

A town square for an unsquare town

redbankgreen

Standing for the vitality of Red Bank, its community, and the fun we have together.

WORKING THE STAIRS

Kulkucki3

She was black, from Jamaica, a woman past 30 who came to the U.S. in 1980 to escape “a hard life.” He was white, a few years younger, a railroad engineer and Solidarity agitator in Poland who fled to the West in 1981, just four months before the imposition of martial law. They met in Brooklyn at a party thrown by her sister on Christmas Eve, fell in love, and five months later got married.

Skin color never entered into it.

Newlyweds Joyce and Chris Kalkucki made their way to Lincroft, where they worked as domestics for a surgeon. That didn’t last. Chris’s English was iffy, but he had superb skills with wood, and metal, and electronics even. There was no shop he couldn’t hold his own in, or quickly learn to; he laughingly calls himself “one of the miracle children of the Communist era.” He found a job at a stair-building company. Not long into it, “I basically came to the conclusion that there’s pretty decent demand for stairs here,” he says.

Joyce did housework for a woman in Holmdel who, when she learned about Chris’s skills and his desire to go out on his own, put him in touch with Jerome Morley Larson, an architect/developer in Red Bank who was then building a riverfront project called The Bluffs.

Larson took a chance on the squat, muscular man with the Andrei Codrescu stops in his diction, giving him a single staircase assignment. This wasn’t charity, or even much of a risk, as Larson saw it. “If Chris had done a lousy job on the first stair,” Larson says, “he wouldn’t have done a second.”

This was not a stairs-from-a-box job. The Bluffs were swank and idiosyncratic, and practically every staircase involved a curved stringer, the outside support timber for the steps. As Kalkucki didn’t have a shop, Larson let him build the stairs on-site. It was an unusual arrangement, but in the end, worth Larson’s trouble. Kalkucki’s work turned out to be of a quality Larson wasn’t used to seeing from the trades.

“He’s a craftsman,” Larson says.

Kalkucki got the job to do all the staircases on The Bluffs, and set up shop in space rented from Larson on West Street. “This was my first break,” Chris says. “I was able to capitalize on it and reinvest.”

The Kalkuckis were in business. They had a house on Sunset Ave. And all this happened by 1983.

Since 1990, their company, B&C Custom Wood Stairs and Rail, has been located at the corner of Drs. James Parker Blvd. and Bridge Ave., on Red Bank’s West Side, just around the corner from their home. For the past ten years, the Kalkuckis have owned the building. They have a 23-year-old son, Keith, who’s on a nuclear submarine with the Navy. Their daughter, Christina, is 21 and works with the business.

The company has eight employees. With some ups and downs by season, business has pretty much been booming, thanks to all the home renovations going on. B&C doesn’t do cookie-cutter, mass-produced work; it’s all custom. Some jobs cost $5,000, others $75,000.

The Kalkuckis like being part of the West Side, where a surge in the immigrant population, mostly of Hispanics, has displaced many African-Americans of long residence. Joyce, an immigrant with black skin that her white husband does not see, is not at all conflicted about this. Seated at her desk, where she runs the business end of B&C, she voices her opinions, come what may. Too many of the black people she saw when she moved here were “lazy,” she says. There were able-bodied men hanging out in front of Coco’s bar, drinking and doing drugs. By contrast, more of the Hispanics—Joyce calls them “the Spanish”—work hard and make the rent. “The Spanish,” she says, “will come in with their money every month, no matter how bad it is.”

Coco’s is gone now. A floor-covering business that replaced it failed, and the storefront has been empty for several years. But the drug users are gone, too. There are some townhouses across the street— nothing spectacular, but better than blight. And all over the West Side are new restaurants and businesses and homes. Property values and rents are soaring. Three years ago, Joyce and Chris sold the house next door to the shop, which they used to rent out for $900 a month. Joyce heard recently that the new owner is charging twice that.

No one has ever broken into the staircase shop or even tried. Joyce has some mild complaints about the borough government and its regard, or lack thereof, for the West Side. “I think everybody has forgotten about us over here,” she says. “I’d like to see a little more attention to us—fix up the roads a bit.” But she agrees that things are changing for the better, and B&C is part of that. The Kalkuckis have lately been sprucing up the exterior of their building with new stucco and windows, and have plans for a nice fence maybe next year. “It’s our Taj Mahal,” Joyce says, chuckling. “We’re not millionaires. Maybe after we sell the building we will be.” Not that they have any plans to do so.

Chris’ English, by the way, is now impeccable, each word a hand tool he’s mastered. “I guess ‘challenge’ is my middle name,” he says.

Jerome Larson believes he knows the secret to the Kalkuckis success, and it takes just a couple of words to describe. “It’s called sheer, hard work.”

Remember: Nothing makes a Red Bank friend happier than to hear "I saw you on Red Bank Green!"
Partyline
RED TRUCKS AT RED ROCK
A small dishwasher fire at Red Rock Tap and Grill was put out quickly by firefighters overnight, causing minimal damage. Red Bank Fire Depar ...
CREATIVE COVER UP
The windows of Pearl Street Consignment on Monmouth Street were smashed when a driver crashed their car through them injuring an employee la ...
THEY’RE BACK!
Ospreys returned to the skies over Red Bank this week for the first time since they migrated to warmer climes in late fall. With temperature ...
SPRING IS SPRUNG
RED BANK: Spring 2024 arrives on the Greater Red Bank Green with the vernal equinox at 11:06 p.m. Tuesday.
RED BANK’S FINEST – AND NEWEST
Red Bank Police Officer Eliot Ramos was sworn in as the force’s newest patrolman Thursday, and if you’re doing a double take thinkin ...
EASTER EGG MAYHEM AT THE PARK
An errant whistle spurred an unexpectedly early start to the Spring Egg Hunt on Sunday, which had been scheduled to begin at eggsactly 11am ...
PRESEASON DOCKWORK
RED BANK: With winter winding down, marina gets ready for boating season with some dockwork on our beautiful Navesink River.
CORNED BEEF AND DISCO FRIES?
It’s Friday, and smart Lent-observing Leprechauns know the pot of gold at the end of Red Bank’s rainbow is actually the deliciou ...
SURFBOARD DITCHED
It’s a violation of etiquette in surfing to ditch your board.  (it could hit another surfer and hurt them). But someone appears to ha ...
ELSIE, TAKE ME WITH YOU!
Soaked by pouring rain with the temperature hovering in the low 40’s, this sign in the window of Elsie’s Subs on Monmouth Street ...
WALK THIS WAY
PARTYLINE: Before-and-afters of a sidewalk cleanup on West Street.
SOGGY NOTION
RED BANK: Breezeway sculpture captured the mood downtown as heavy rains fell Saturday morning.
HOME DELIVERY
RED BANK: After a subdivision, an instant house rises on a new Catherine Street lot.
COMMUNITY PROFILES
For Black History Month, Red Bank's Community Engagement and Equity Advisory Committee has been running a series of local profiles on Facebo ...
HEARTY FAREWELL FOR HARDY
RED BANK: Council to honor DPU supervisor Rich Hardy, who retired recently after almost 39 years of keeping things running.
HOMEBOUND? READ ON…
RED BANK: Can't get to the public library? It's now offering free delivery and pickups for homebound borough residents.
TAMING A BEAST OF A WEEK
RED BANK: After the second snowfall of the week, a borough family finds the perfect use for it – a Godzilla snow sculpture.
RED BANK: LIBRARY CLOSED, BUT THE HILL’S OPEN
RED BANK: Though the library was closed by a snowstorm, kids got to enjoy the riverfront property's steep slope Tuesday.
LIGHT(HOUSE) MAKEOVER
This year, getting ready for spring means a midwinter makeover for Strollo's Lighthouse in Red Bank.
TODAY: LOCAL PUPPY COMPETES ON ANIMAL PLANET’S “PUPPY BOWL”
Red Bank’s very own rescue puppy, Biscuit, is set to compete in Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl this Sunday, February 11, at 2 PM. Th ...