When retired concert violinist Olga Bloom of New York City began converting an old coffee barge into a floating concert hall, she knew nothing about construction work or about raising money to support such a hall. But she told the Giraffe Project, “It was like the reverse of Mephisto. I sold my soul to God and then everything I needed came just when I needed it.”

Bloom and her husband had always talked about making a place where fellow musicians would have total creative freedom. When they retired, they mortgaged their home to buy the old barge. But when her husband died suddenly, the dream could have died with him. Instead of pulling the covers over her head, Bloom rented out her house, moved onto the barge, had it towed to the Brooklyn waterfront, and began renovating it with her own hands. She spent the next two years turning it into a peerless hall for chamber music.

According to Bloom, the initial reaction to her project was astonishment. “Everyone at the time thought I was absolutely demented.” But when the longshore workers and sailors on the waterfront saw the tiny woman scraping paint and sawing lumber, they rallied to help her out. As Bloom says, “If you go out there and work, someone will surely come along to help you.”

A big difficulty came in dealing with city officials about licenses to berth the barge; the city had no regulations that covered such a thing. They took so long to figure out which laws applied that when they finally decided it was OK, the barge had been at the Fulton Ferry Landing long enough to be a beloved institution in the city.