One Lodge, Six Charters / Island City Lodge No. 586
Brother Louis J. Viehmann helped run a Long Island City furniture business whose factory stood at Vernon Boulevard and 44th Drive. Four decades after his death, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads made a home in the old building and recorded part of Fear of Music there.
A Factory on the Waterfront
In the 1920s the blocks of Hunters Point between Vernon Boulevard and the East River made things. Barges and freight cars brought in raw material, and factories sent out finished goods. At Vernon Boulevard and what was then Nott Avenue, a few hundred feet from the river, a furniture company turned lumber into tables, chairs and household woodenware. Its president was Louis J. Viehmann, a New York-born businessman, a Rotarian, and a Brother of Island City Lodge No. 586.
This is how the newspapers of his own time saw him: a Queens manufacturer, a family man and a Mason. The building he ran his company from has had a longer life. In the middle of the 1970s, long after the chairs had stopped coming off the line, it became a home and studio for two young musicians who were about to change American rock music.
Marrying Into the Business
Louis Viehmann was born in New York City around 1884. Little is recorded about his early years. What shaped his working life was his marriage to Augusta Teepe, the daughter of J. Charles Teepe, who ran a woodenware and housefurnishings business in Manhattan.
In May 1916 the Teepe firm left its plant at 675 to 681 First Avenue in Manhattan for 16,000 square feet of loft space at 15 to 21 Wilbur Street in Long Island City. It employed between 75 and 100 men. It was one of many Manhattan manufacturers drawn across the river in those years by cheaper space, rail sidings and the new Queensboro Bridge.
Viehmann was with the firm by about 1915, and he rose to run it. He joined the Rotary Club of Queens Borough on October 7, 1924, and the club’s 1927–28 roster listed him as “Lou,” president and treasurer of J. Chas. Teepe, Inc., woodenware manufacturer, at Vernon and Nott Avenues. In June 1926 the business was reorganized as the Teepe-Whitney Corporation, a manufacturer of tables, chairs and furniture novelties capitalized at $300,000. Viehmann was its president for the rest of his life.
A Queens Businessman
Viehmann lived the life of a successful Queens manufacturer of the 1920s. He and Augusta raised three children, Anna, Muriel and Jack, first in Astoria and East Elmhurst and, from 1927, in a house at 144 Centre Drive in Douglaston. The family kept a summer place at Wittenberg in the Catskills, near Woodstock.
He took part in the civic life of Long Island City as well. In May 1927, when the borough’s business leaders formed a special gifts committee to raise $1,000,000 for a 225-bed addition to St. John’s Long Island City Hospital, his name appeared on the list of forty-nine industrialists asked to seek the largest contributions.
A Brother of Island City Lodge
Viehmann’s obituaries both mention one more membership, and the newspapers treated it as part of his identity: he was a Brother of Island City Lodge No. 586, F. and A.M.
Island City was the oldest Masonic lodge in what became Long Island City. It received its dispensation in 1865 and its charter on June 18, 1866, and it first met at Hunters Point, the same neighborhood as Viehmann’s factory. By his time it was a large and lively lodge.
In 1915 it bought the old Democratic clubhouse in Long Island City, once the political home of Queens party leader Joseph Cassidy, to start a Masonic club open to all Master Masons. In April 1925 the lodge gave two programs on radio station WEBH. That May its Master, Clarence I. Clark, took a delegation of 88 brothers to Hiawatha Lodge in Mount Vernon, where Island City’s orchestra and glee club gave an evening the host lodge said it would long remember. The lodge also had a military band and a Fellowcraft Club whose outings drew more than a hundred members.
Both obituaries call Viehmann a charter member. The Brooklyn Eagle wrote that he was a charter member of Island City Lodge; the other paper wrote “the Long Island City Masonic Lodge.”
He could not have signed Island City’s charter of 1866, which came almost twenty years before he was born. The description may refer to a later body associated with the lodge, such as the Masonic club organized in 1915, or it may simply be an obituary error. The sources gathered here do not settle the question. His lodge membership and the claim of charter membership must therefore be kept distinct.
A Sudden End
In May 1935 Augusta and the children had gone up to Wittenberg for the summer, and Viehmann was staying in Manhattan at the Railroad Branch of the Y.M.C.A. at 224 East 47th Street. On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 21, he collapsed there and died, apparently of a heart attack. He was fifty-one.
His Masonic brethren conducted rites for him at the Hallett Homestead on Northern Boulevard at 147th Street in Flushing, and religious services followed there. He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Besides his wife and children, he left a brother, John C. Viehmann, and a sister, Katherine Barber, of Colorado Springs.
From Nott Avenue to 44th Drive
The link between Viehmann and Talking Heads runs through a street sign. In the late 1920s the Rotary roster placed his company at Vernon and Nott Avenues. When Queens adopted its numbered street grid, Nott Avenue became 44th Drive. By 1935 his obituaries gave the Teepe-Whitney address as Vernon Boulevard and 44th Drive.
The building on that corner carries the address 9-01 44th Drive. In his Queens Chronicle history of the property, Ron Marzlock identifies it as the Teepe-Whitney furniture factory, known for its colonial Windsor chairs.
The company outlived its president. Marzlock writes that it eventually went out of business as manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Like many Hunters Point industrial buildings, the factory acquired a different appeal as its manufacturing use faded: open floors, high ceilings and space that artists and musicians could adapt.
The Loft
In 1975 three former students of the Rhode Island School of Design, David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, were sharing a loft on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, a few blocks from CBGB. Talking Heads played its first show at the club in June 1975, opening for the Ramones. Jerry Harrison joined in 1977, the year the band released its first album.
Around 1976 Frantz and Weymouth left Chrystie Street for a loft in the old Teepe-Whitney building in Long Island City. A [PopMatters interview with Frantz](Talking Heads Chris Frantz Doesnt Miss a Beat With Remain in Love Story » PopMatters
Talking Heads Chris Frantz Doesnt Miss a Beat With Remain in Love Story » PopMatters Instead of fictionalizing a fascinating period of his life in the mid-1970s that turned into the fabulous rock n roll film Almost Famous, director-writer
dates their move from the Lower East Side to that year.
Industrial Hunters Point suited a band: the space was large, and its surroundings were more accommodating to rehearsal than a conventional apartment building. Frantz and Weymouth married in 1977.
Accounts differ about who lived in the Queens loft and exactly when they arrived. The Queens Chronicle describes it as a home of Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth and gives an earlier move date. This article follows the account associated with Frantz in identifying it primarily as his and Weymouth’s home from around 1976.
Fear of Music in the Furniture Factory
The loft also became a recording space. In the spring of 1979, when Talking Heads and producer Brian Eno were making Fear of Music, a mobile recording truck from the Record Plant parked outside and ran cables into the loft.
Over two days the band recorded the album’s basic tracks there, in the building where the Teepe-Whitney company had once made furniture. Later accounts of the sessions describe the practical advantage of working in the band’s own familiar space rather than beginning in a conventional recording studio.
Frantz and Weymouth kept the loft for years. Frantz later recalled giving it up when Long Island City became “crazy-expensive.” The Queens Chronicle, writing in 2023, reported that the building had sold twenty-one years earlier for $1,550,000.
The Building and the Brother
Louis Viehmann never heard of New Wave, and there is no evidence that Talking Heads knew his story. The building connects them all the same. A Masonic brother of Island City Lodge spent roughly the last twenty years of his life associated with the furniture firm. Four decades after his death, the old factory held the home and working space of musicians making a very different kind of product.
Island City Lodge grew up with the waterfront district around it. Viehmann belonged to that world of benches, lumber and payrolls, of Rotary lunches and hospital drives.
The building his company occupied was later given new uses, as happened to so many Long Island City factories. Before it became part of rock history, it was a place where people earned their living making furniture. For Louis J. Viehmann, that was the work.
Endnotes and Sources
Obituaries and Family Information
“Louis J. Viehmann Drops Dead at Y,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 23, 1935, p. 17.
“Louis J. Viehmann Heart Victim,” Queens newspaper obituary, May 1935. Includes residence in Douglaston from 1927 and the firm’s founding by his father-in-law. The newspaper title and exact issue date should be added when confirmed.
Death notice, Times Union (Brooklyn), May 22, 1935, p. 22.
Business and Civic Records
“The Real Estate Field,” The New York Times, May 5, 1916. J. Charles Teepe’s move to Long Island City.
“Business Notes,” The New York Times, June 26, 1926. Formation of the Teepe-Whitney Corporation.
Rotary Club of Queens Borough roster, Brooklyn Life and Activities of Long Island Society, 1927–28, p. 74.
“Special Group Is Organized to Aid Hospital Campaign,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 10, 1927, p. 22.
Island City Lodge Records and Reports
Island City Lodge No. 586 clippings and history:
- Brooklyn Daily Times, June 23, 1915, Masonic clubhouse.
- Times Union, April 25, 1925, radio listing.
- Mount Vernon Argus, May 25, 1925, visit to Hiawatha Lodge.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, report on the Fellowcraft Club outing; exact issue date should be added.
- Island City Lodge, “Highlights in History of Island City,” 1941.
The Factory and Talking Heads
Ron Marzlock, “Talking Heads Couple Took Us to the River in LIC”, Queens Chronicle, June 15, 2023. Identifies the Teepe-Whitney building at 9-01 44th Drive and its later association with Talking Heads. Its move date differs from the account associated with Frantz.
“Talking Heads,” Wikipedia. Band formation, the Chrystie Street loft, first CBGB performance and 1977 marriage.
[“Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz Doesn’t Miss a Beat With ‘Remain in Love’ Story”](Talking Heads Chris Frantz Doesnt Miss a Beat With Remain in Love Story » PopMatters
Talking Heads Chris Frantz Doesnt Miss a Beat With Remain in Love Story » PopMatters Instead of fictionalizing a fascinating period of his life in the mid-1970s that turned into the fabulous rock n roll film Almost Famous, director-writer
PopMatters, July 21, 2020. Dates Frantz and Weymouth’s move to Long Island City to 1976 and discusses their former shared Chrystie Street loft.
- LIC Talk, interview with Patrick Carrajat. Recollection of the Record Plant truck at the Frantz and Weymouth loft for Fear of Music. The interview is associated with the site’s [Talking Heads archive](talking heads Archives • lictalk.com
talking heads Archives • lictalk.com
/a direct article citation should be added when identified.
- Far Out Magazine, Tina Weymouth’s recollections of the Long Island City loft where Fear of Music was written and recorded. Exact article title, date and direct link should be added when confirmed.
A Note on the Sources
- Viehmann was reported as fifty-one when he died in May 1935, placing his birth around 1884. He therefore could not have been a founding member of Island City Lodge under its 1866 charter.
- The Brooklyn Eagle obituary calls him a charter member of Island City Lodge; another obituary calls him a charter member of “the Long Island City Masonic Lodge.” His membership is reported consistently, but the charter-member description remains unresolved.
- One possibility is the Masonic club Island City organized in 1915. No source gathered here confirms that explanation, and it should not be treated as established.
- A Louis Viehmann appears on committees of a Brooklyn Republican club in 1904 and 1919. Nothing in the gathered sources connects that person to the furniture manufacturer, so those references have been omitted.
- The 1927 hospital committee list prints the name as “Louis J. Wehmann.” This article provisionally treats it as a misprint for Viehmann.
- The Times Union gives his sister’s surname as Barker; the other notices give Barber.
- The 1916 relocation notice gives a Wilbur Street address, while the later Rotary roster and obituaries place the business at Vernon and Nott Avenues, later Vernon Boulevard and 44th Drive. His approximately twenty-year association with the firm should not be confused with twenty documented years at the same building.
- The Queens Chronicle gives November 1974 as the Talking Heads move date and describes the loft as a home of Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth. The account associated with Frantz dates his and Weymouth’s move from the Lower East Side to 1976. This article follows the latter chronology.
- The article distinguishes the band’s formation and early rehearsals at Chrystie Street from its later work in Long Island City.
- The exact date when Nott Avenue became 44th Drive is not established by the sources listed here.
- The building connects the furniture company and the musicians through successive use. No personal connection between Viehmann and Talking Heads is suggested.
Continue the Story
Viehmann’s life belongs to the industrial and Masonic history of Hunters Point. These related articles follow the lodge and the changing city around it.
- Island City Lodge No. 586 and the Temple That Served the City — Explore the lodge that counted Viehmann among its brothers.
- How Long Island City Was Created in 1870 — Read about the municipality whose waterfront became a center of manufacturing.
- Joseph H. Nadel of City Lodge No. 408: The New York Mason Who Kept Hollywood Running — Follow another lodge brother whose working life connects Queens to entertainment history.
Explore the Building’s Musical History
Read the Queens Chronicle history of the Teepe-Whitney building
Read the PopMatters interview with Chris Frantz
