Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Julian Lucas's "A Real Gas"

This is just a quick note to spotlight Julian Lucas’s delightful “Talk of the Town” story "A Real Gas," in this week’s issue. It’s a mini-profile of Carlita Belgrove, also known as the Famous Stove Lady. She’s an ingenious repairer of old stoves. Lucas visits her at her workshop in Mount Vernon. He writes,

She was sanding down an L-shaped knob for a client in the Hamptons, who’d hired her to modernize his nineteen-thirties Magic Chef. Behind her was an Aladdin’s cave of more than a hundred and fifty venerable gas ranges, some with polished chrome fixtures and others nearly rusted through. There were Chambers, Garlands, Crowns, and a hulking, buttercup-yellow Roper that resembled a muscle car. In a world going electric, the Stove Lady keeps their flames alive: “Nobody—not nobody, anywhere—does what I do.”

Lucas also accompanies her on a house call in Long Island to fix a stove called the Magic Chef, “a six-burner with an extra side oven shaped like a rolltop desk.” Restoration of stoves is a great subject. I enjoyed this piece immensely.