They line the sides of narrow corridors, their doorways overflowing with bales of wire, crockery, wrenches, lights, cutlery, pens, toys, tools, ornaments for the world's holidaymakers and even newly manufactured Middle Eastern "antiques".
In five years, she will attain the status of mechanic, earning $40 to $50 an hour and the authority to delegate grunt work like hauling 90-pound bales of wire to apprentices like her.
This is the world of the entire spare collection: bracing, exposed, ruthlessly mercurial and, for all its spiked bales of barbed wire, laden with extreme beauty.
The hideous bales of concertina wire strangled in old plastic bags that protected the trains from vandalism at the Beach 116th Street terminal have been replaced by serious high fences topped with fresh barbed wire.
The fields and forest were mined with rusted television sets, broken farm equipment, mysterious parts from the broken farm equipment, bales of copper wire, aluminum cans, plastic bottles and dried but fragrant cow patties.
Last week was the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall; the night when, without warning, bales of barbed wire were put up dividing the American, French and British sectors of Berlin from the Soviet sector, followed by the Wall, the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrierr", itself.
Chen: Bales of electrical wires?
Making nails is not complicated: start with a bale of steel wire, shave it down to the proper diameter, then feed it into a punch that shapes the nail, cuts it and spits it into a bin.
Rusty oddments of farming — coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel — hung on nails driven here and there in the thick wood.
At one point, a narcotics officer demanded to know why Hay was in possession of a large supply of baling wire.
Its structures are made of little more than sandbags, heavy-duty tents, plywood huts and Hesco barriers, hulking bales of canvas wrapped in wire mesh and filled with dirt.
