Ray Guzman, Oral history interview transcription.

Interviews
Puerto Ricans--New Jersey
Oral history

A transcription of the oral history interview conducted with Ray Guzman.

Christopher López.

Interview conducted on Friday, March 5, 2021.

Courtesy of Christopher López. Copyright held by Christopher López. Restrictions are only in regards to publication; any researcher may view or copy any document in the collection.

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See "Frank Guzman, Oral history interview transcription.," https://puertoricanexperienceinhoboken.omeka.net/items/show/15

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English

Oral history (transcription)

1960s through 1980s

Chris: Explain to me a little bit about your practice.

Ray: It's enamel paint on aluminum. Aluminum background and enamel paint. It's really because of my career. I've been in the sign business since 1986. Hoboken Sign. And then we started brainwave studio in 93. But I started my life as a fine artist, and I spent 10 years pursuing that career.

Chris: Beginning in 86?

Ray: Prior to that, yeah, so for 10 years prior to that, 76 on to 86 I was practicing fine art. I was a young man at the time but I already had a two year old, Noah. And so at that point in my life, and with my wife, I realized I have to do something serious. I almost got into a big, famous gallery and he made me bring all my paintings there, and they were all life sized paintings. They're all gigantic. 10 feet, 12 feet, 16 foot paintings. I mean I had giant paintings. And I brought them to his gallery, and he loved it, but he decided he's gonna, he said, I want to give you another year and see how you mature. I said, I got a two year old. I can't do that (laughs). And I don't come from, you know, family where they can support me and let me put in another year. And, you know, I got to do it right? So that's what I did. I went back, started my business, the sign business. So I continued to paint as a fine artist through the years. We moved to Hoboken, and while here is when we noticed, we started to see the fires in Hoboken that were happening, and it was a very terrible time. I started to do some paintings of the experience. So here I am doing my artwork, and I'm doing the sign business. And the sign business in those days, there was no sign company in Hoboken for 14 years. The last guy retired 14 years ago, the opportunity was there. And I started my business with some friends who invested in me, and I paid them back their money double in six months. That's how good business was. And then I was very fortunate, because Hoboken didn't know what a good sign person was, and I was terrible (laughs). So, but they needed a sign guy, and I started to learn, but I also knew commercial art. So luckily, I didn't know the sign business. I was trained as a fine artist and a commercial artist, so I just said, I'll make my signs you know, commercially. So they came out beautiful. We had a lot of good things through the years. I got better and better and we started to win awards, international awards, in the sign business. And then we traveled all over the country and all over the world in the sign business. And so these paintings that you see here, this is all done with sign paint. So I'm sitting there lettering signs on metal with enamel paint and I said, Oh, I like the way this flows. Let me try painting. So that's how that came about.

Chris: What is sign paint?

Ray: Well, the sign paint is enamel paint, so it's made for exterior and it's very vibrant in color. It's juicy, delicious, and glossy. And it's very hard to paint these kinds of paintings with sign paint, because if sign paint is called one shot, you only do it one shot, put one letter and with the lettering brush and a mall stick, and you do it in one shot. So this paint dries relatively fast. So you can't really blend like oil paint. I work in oil, I work in acrylics. I work in watercolor. So I know how to work all the mediums.

Chris: Where were you coming from before Hoboken?

Ray: We moved to Jersey City when I was 11 years old, from the Bronx.

Chris: Whereabouts in the Bronx?

Ray: South Bronx, where all the Boricuas come from. I grew up on 134th Street and Forest Avenue. Jackson Street Station. That's where I grew up. And then we moved out of there in 66 and I was very upset, because I loved my school, but it was getting bad. Used to be a great neighborhood and then it was getting bad. And so when we moved to Jersey City, the heights I was 11. My grandmother died when I was 11. So we moved there at 11, and we lived first near Journal Square, for, I don't know, three or four months. Hated it there. Then my mother found an apartment in The Heights, and it was like the country. I said, Oh, this is great, you know.

Chris: How so?

Ray: First off all the buildings got little, right, the heights. And then it was very safe. Even though there was crime it wasn't the crime we knew in the Bronx, so it's like, Are you kidding?

Chris: Like this is paradise (both laugh)

Ray: So I got a bike, and I got a paper route, and I was making friends. We had a lot of friends. I went to number eight school. And it was a great neighborhood to grow up in. Me and another kid, John Ortez, were the only Boricuas there.

Chris: What were the other demographics?

Ray: Oh, it was Italian, Irish, German. Hudson County, old Hudson County.

Chris: I hear stories of classic battles between Italians and Puerto Ricans. Did you ever experienced this?

Ray: I was very lucky. When I was there, I had fights, but you had fights because people were jealous of me. The girls loved me because I was Boricua right, oh this guy's exotic. I've never had a Puerto Rican girlfriend. There were, there were no Puerto Rican girls up there. Just John’s sister and she was too little.

Chris: So you the cute Puerto Rican guy around the way.

Ray: That's it! But I have to say the kids were great. None of them were racist. They weren't. I had a couple of fights. So there was bully shit, you know, but it was never, you know, we hate spics. There was none of that. I never experienced anything like that in Jersey City. When I went to Dickinson High School. That was, that's a big school. Dickinson is in the heights. So if you take Palisade all the way to the end, you see that big building. When you take the tunnel, the Holland Tunnel, and you go up the road. That big building on the left, that's Dickinson High School. Population over 3000 students. 1500 kids graduate a year. I had a great art teacher there, and that was, I have to say, it was a tough experience because the public school system wasn't ready for advanced thinking. So I had a very good education in the Bronx. I had a very good education in the heights public school. My reading skills were really extraordinarily high. My math was not, you know, anything, but I was already an artist. So I was going to art school. My uncle would send me to art school in New York City when I was a freshman in high school. I would go to art school once a week, and I ended up going to art school till I graduated Dickinson. So by the time I graduated, I got a full scholarship to the School of Visual Arts. I'm still an alumni. I try and participate, but I love that school I had a great time, and I have to say that Dickinson was preparing you for college, but they look at college like this. You were going to be an accountant, scientist, bookkeeper, you know, you're not. You know anything about art, right? So when I got the scholarship to SVA that didn't mean anything to them. That was like getting an award from the Lions Club for 200 bucks. That was four years free college is what I got. So I ended up at SVA, and I got into all my other colleges too. At that time, I went to Philadelphia College of Art.

Chris: Well then how is it that you got to Hoboken?

Ray: I lived in an apartment on Ogden in Congress and a good friend of mine lived on the first floor with his family, his mother, his father, his grandfather and grandmother, and his name was Julio Fernandez, I don't know if you know Julio. He's the lead guitarist for Spyro Gyro. But he was going to music school in those days, and we were going to art school. My wife and me weren't married yet. So he's sitting in the front, playing the guitar, and I say, Hey, Julio, how you doing? He's Cuban Puerto Rican. I had a lot of Cuban friends in Jersey City through the years. So Julio says, I'm playing this Friday night. You want to come down and hear us? I said, Where? He said, in Hoboken at Senore’s lounge. So we went Friday night, got on the bus, ended up on Washington Street, which used to be (Senore’s Lounge), but is now CVS, that used to be a ShopRite back in the 70s. So we came to Washington Street, we got off the bus, and the first person I meet, a guy sees me and Renata getting off the bus. And we're looking for Senore’s Lounge. Where is this place? He goes, What are you guys looking for? And we're like, we're here, we’ve come here to hear our friends play at the bar tonight. He goes, Oh, Julio Fernandez? I go, Yeah. He goes, follow me. I own the bar. He says, Hi, I'm Frank Raya. I don't know if you know Pupy? A lot of people have issues with him. I think he's a great man, a great person. People are jealous, he built himself up. He's his own man.

Chris: What does he do?

Ray: He was a kid like us in Hoboken and he worked in the, they called it the rag trade. The rag trade is really fabrics. He had a factory that would sell clothes and stuff. He had a vision for himself of someday being an important person in Hoboken, and he did become an important person. He ran for mayor several times, didn't make it. He's very well connected, he's very smart, and he said, one day I'm gonna buy this building that we're in right now because he went to grammar school here. This used to be a public school (Number 8 school). So he ended up buying the building one day. It went for auction. Him and his partner bought it and they developed it. He lives upstairs. And he's been good to me and my wife. When my wife was dying of cancer. We were kicked out of our other place on Jefferson Street because the woman said, We don't want cancer in our midst, so get out of here. Yeah, really talk about cruelty. My wife was freaking out, and I was like, oh my god, so I'm walking down the street. And I see Pupy, Frank, down the street. He goes, Why you look so bummed out? I tell him, Renata got cancer, and we're being kicked out of over there. He goes, you've been kicked out, why? I tell him the story. He says, you know what? He says, you're moving with me. You come in here. He says, talk to my partner we'll get you a space. You'll come here. Well, I said, really, my wife came and saw the space, and she died in 2009 and we were here in 2004. That's how long we've been in this space. So for me Pupy’s, a great man, good guy. And his wife, his kids are all good people. So that's my story. And then Pupy said when we're walking to the bar, he says, you guys should move to Hoboken. This is the art scene. It’s where it's happening. The music scene, everything is going on.

Ray: So the following month, we moved to Hoboken, we moved in, and we didn't know it was the fire capital of the world.

Chris: Well, it just happened to be a coincidence right?

Ray: Yeah, it was a coincidence because other people were seeing greed and money and they didn't care if people were dying. So that was, that was pathetic. That was scary, scary shit. And then when you start to see fire trucks and buildings burnt down. So what the hell is this, this is like the Bronx man. What's going on?

Chris: When the Bronx was burning.

Ray: Oh, for God's sakes, you know, they were burning people out of there too. But, you know, it wasn’t a community. It has five boroughs, so it's a big city. Hoboken is a mile by a mile.

Chris: Did Hoboken change quickly before your eyes? Or is it something that happened gradually and slowly?

Ray: Well, we were part of the change. We came to Hoboken though we didn't know it. We only came here because other artists and musicians were here, and they were all our age. So we go to the bar. Is a cool place to hang out. Everybody's your age, everybody's hanging out. And, you know, we're having a good time. We're going to see here this group. And then there's art scenes going on. I had put on a couple of art shows behind the Elysian Fields, Elysian bar, Elysian Cafe, and we had a lot of cool things going on, and then the fire breaks out here, then we know, okay, then another fire broke out over there, and then before you know it, people died and it's like, what's going on here? It was simultaneous. So the change was in the air. And we realized, wow, you know, people were saying, Oh, you're paying the $500 a month rent. That's a lot of money for rent in those days. And we said, well, this is, you know, pretty good rent but we're working and so, you know, we weren't, I mean we were poor, we were kids, but we weren't poor like other people here, who, you know, had factory jobs and had a lot of kids, rents, and they had to pay a lot of money and and so we weren't like that. We were young, and these people were older, and they were stuck, but the changes were coming fast. There was a lot of construction going on too. A lot of construction happening, and everything is happening at the same time. To this very day I tell people, people say, Oh, you’ve seen a lot of changes. I say every six months, there's a big change in Hoboken.

Chris: What would you say the biggest changes were?

Ray: It's like I said, every six months you notice another change. So the bodegas are gone, the grocery stores are gone. The fruit markets are gone. Now it's a nail salon, dry cleaner, bars and restaurants. Anything that helps you to live better. As far as you know, food shopping now you gotta, you have ShopRite and you have Kings, but you don't have any markets or any fresh vegetables, right, anywhere. That you can walk to, except the big supermarket Acne, ShopRite. All the Koreans are gone. They closed down. They had the best fruits and vegetables. We used to have Indian markets on Hudson Street. You can buy all the spices you want. You walk in there with bags from burlap, from all over the world, spices and curries, because we had a big Indian population. So we had the Boricuas, we had the Indians, it was very mixed. And so that's the other thing you missed. So it's very homogenized now. Everything is, you know, one flavor fits all. And so the changes have been big and hard. And I'm lucky, Sissy and I are lucky that we're still here. We still have a lot of good friends here, and a lot of old school Hoboken. They're still holding on.

Chris: That distinction is so often made right? That you got the oldtimers and then you got…

Ray: I belong to St Francis church. And that's a parish that's down on second and Jefferson. But I like that church. It's a little church, and it's a great church, and they have an Italian mass, and I would go to some of the Italian masses. I have a lot of Italian friends. The Holy Name society. So there's a lot of Italian guys there. I grew up in Hudson County, so you got to become Italian in some way. Cooking food, friends, you grew up in this environment, and you so you become. You become part of it.

Chris: So you've done paintings that involve fires. Why?

Ray: Some of them. And I have to say that, because I've always wanted to be a fireman. I always wanted to be a fireman, and so I got close with Billy Bergen, a great man who passed away, I think, now, probably two years now. And Billy was the one who would tell us, because I was growing up in Hoboken, right, came here my 20s, and he goes, Yeah, yeah, Ray come on, get in the fire department. Let's go we need guys like you. So he'd come to my shop on Jefferson Street, and my wife was was working with me, and he walked in because I was lettering the fire trucks, I was gold pinstriping the captain's car. And I love doing the gold leaf on the on the fire trucks and on the on the captain's car. And so I got a lot of, you know, work from the firehouse, and I always wanted to be a fireman. Come on, let's go. So my wife says, no, no, no, that's not gonna happen. I said, why? She goes, No, it's too dangerous. We got a two year my son was probably, probably three or four by that time, and she goes, and with all these fires that are going on here, you know. Billy said, Well, it's dangerous, but you get trained for this. Its not like you go in, we send you in with a hose, put on this helmet, and go in there and do something. We get training, there's always training. So a lot of my friends became firemen.

Chris: What's the inspiration here?

Ray: Fireman at the door. Noah's got the original painting, and it's very powerful. And again, I was dramatic and trying to picture myself doing that job. And seeing my friends doing that job. I mean, you know, they worked all the time, and I would go around. I started in Jersey City too. I would go around with my camera and follow the fire trucks. So I took some pictures of fire trucks and firemen doing their thing out there. And so this is all from my imagination. He’s wearing a mask of oxygen. He's got a crow hook and the flames are in the background.

Christopher López

Ray Guzman, a celebrated Hoboken artist, was born in 1954 in Manhattan, New York City. His grandmother, Henrietta Townsend-Rodriguez, migrated to NYC in the great migration from Puerto Rico in the 1940’s. Ray was raised in the South Bronx by his parents mother, Rachel, and father, Raymond Guzman Sr before moving to Jersey City when he was eleven years old. Ray’s mother worked as an off-set printer and father was a gifted cabinet maker and musician. Ray moved to Hoboken with his wife, Renata, at the height of the city’s gentrification. Influenced by the period and his desire to be a fireman, Ray depicted many fires in his paintings throughout the years. Over the course of more than forty years in Hoboken, Ray became a master sign maker and owned and operated his sign business Hoboken Sign on 7th St. between Jefferson and Adams. Ray has received both regional and international acclaim for his paintings and is noted as one of the most famed muralists in Hoboken having recently in 2023, created the mural for his friend, and greatly revered Puerto Rican citizen, Tom Oliveri, to commemorate his life of service to the city at a park named after him on 13th and Willow.