PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFERY SALTER
You recognize the plaid shirts, the soothing voice.
The constant calm and encouragement. Bob Vila
taught and entertained homeowners for decades.
But what is the first true reality-TV star up to now?
Building the future of Bob Vila.
HEN BOB VILA moves
uptown—through the rain
and morning foot traffic, into
the cold November breeze—he does not stop
ta lking. This is Manhat tan, at 10:40 in the
morning. The sidewalks on the Upper East
Side, near Vila’s home, are jammed with
Christmas shoppers. Vila’s voice carries
into a morning tumult of cellphones and
overcoats, shopping bags and umbrellas.
He’s discussing the problem of restor-
ing Ernest Hemingway’s house outside
Havana, which now stands as the Heming-
way Museum at Finca Vigía. He’s been
serving as a consultant on the project for
over a decade.
And he is nothing if not a narrator.
Because it’s Vila—or perhaps because of
Vila—it’s a story we are familiar with, told
in the particular fits and starts of the
teardown, assembly, and construc-
tion of an old house. “The roofing
tiles are a good example. The pallets
of tile that arrived on the building
site were too brittle. They couldn’t even be
installed. Their manufacture was trapped
in an entirely outdated process.” Vila turns
his shoulder and ducks past a pair of win-
dow shoppers. “Cuba, of course, was still
using seventy-five-year-old technologies
in the manufacture of building materials.”
At the corner, Vila hustles forward to cross
traffic with the light, speaking over his
shoulder. “This created a lot of problems in
the climate control and HVAC, the museum
end of things, where they had letters and
manuscripts that demand pretty strict cli-
mate control in their storage.”An icy wind blows through the cross
streets. Vila presses forward. At the first
corner, and again at the next one, just every
once in a while, someone turns for a look at
the guy, toward his familiar voice. Bob Vila,
narrating a construction problem. It must
be like sighting a rare bird. Natural enough.
But what else would he be doing? In this
case, he delivers the solution for the roofing
tiles two blocks farther uptown. “In the end,
we found some really terrific tiles manufac-
tured in Ohio of all places,” he says.
He extends his arm expertly. And,
miraculously, a taxi seems to appear out ofW
By Tom Chiarella
P o p u l a r
Me ch a n i c s
May 2019
Page 77