“It’s sort of weird — it’s like a legacy. It’s going to last way beyond me.”

Eugene Orlandini has worked in his family’s plaster-making business for over 40 years. Their beautiful plasterwork decorates many notable structures around Milwaukee including the Pabst Theater, Eagles Ballroom and The Plaza Hotel. Orlandini takes immense pride in his family’s business, displaying their work during Doors Open Milwaukee.

Q: What got you started here?

A: Well, my grandfather started this business. He started in the trade as a young man. He came here from Italy as a little boy, was in the trade, went to Minneapolis looking for work. Got a job with a big outfit that was doing deals with ballrooms, met a cute German girl named Ruth at a dance, fell in love, had my uncle and my mom. And I’ve been kind of around this since we were little kids. At 13 years old he offered me a job and said, “Hey, you want to work the summer here?” and I said, “Sure!” Once I got out of high school, I came on full time, and it’s been 40 years now that I’ve been doing this.

Q: Can you go over the process of plaster making?

A: It’ll start with a drawing that someone brings to us, or we make a drawing. Then we would make a piece out of clay and then make a mold over it. Then cast multiples to then be put up. Sometimes it’s restoration; there’s a bunch of, say, crown molding that’s damaged. And we take out a good piece, put it down, make a mold over it, and then make copies of that and put it back into place, replacing what was damaged or missing. Making it look like it was never damaged.

Q: Is there any artwork or plaster work that you’ve worked on in recent years that you’re the proudest of?

A: That’s a hard one. It’s like asking what your favorite song is. I don’t know. I mean, we’ve done a lot of jobs, but I have been proud of one. It was kind of a fun job. Years back was the Avalon Theater restoration. That’s the theater I went to as a kid, and as a teen. I already knew Eric, who used to run the movie theater. And he would always ask me because the owners wanted to fix this. I really wanted to fix it. Nope, no one else wanted to fix it. Then it sat for a while and then it got caught by the new owners and they really put the money into that. That was sort of a satisfying job because I finally got to fix the Avalon. More beautiful. Yeah. Oh god. It’s amazing. It’s a totally different theater.

Q: Plaster making is kind of becoming more of an obsolete trade, how important is it to keep it alive?

A: I think it’s important to keep it alive on a lot of different fronts. I think it’s something that some people realize it’s there, some people don’t realize it’s there, and they’re missing an opportunity to do things. That can be spectacular. That if you tried to have someone carved out of wood, it would cost you an astronomical amount of money. This is very reasonable, somewhat reasonably priced. I think a situation where you can even do something as simple as just putting a ceiling medallion up to make your house look a little nicer if you’d like that sort of thing. And I think I have been running into buildings that are being built with the idea in mind of, hey, let’s put something like this. That’s been nice to see and to the fact that they’re not tearing buildings down like they used to back in the 80s. They’re fixing them and putting them back together. And that’s been a lot of restoration work that we’ve been doing. A lot of fun, too.

Q: So, is it becoming more important?

A: So, I think there’s too much of our country that has this, that it needs to be there, needs to be kept in shape. And people need to realize this and go into a little ranch home. And that’s some of the stuff my grandfather was doing after World War II was putting small moldings and small centerpieces into just an average everyday house. You don’t have to have a mansion.

Q: Can you share any projects you are currently working on?

A: There’s a couple of churches that we’re going to be bidding on right now to do restoration work. It’s just another church in Green Bay that we’re getting set up to go do some restoration workers and problems with the groin vaults and backing and some other issues of damage that we’re going to be doing that will probably be a chunk of time that’s going to be taken up on that one.

Q: So, I did some research and saw you offer classes?

A: Yes, that’s something I wrote about the pandemic. So, they’ve got squash, and I’ve been meaning to get that running again. But we’ve been busy lately. So, I haven’t gotten a chance. But that’s something I’m trying to get back into again.

Q: Would you say Covid didn’t really affect your business?

A: It did and it didn’t in a weird way. I ended up doing a bunch of work on different churches that needed restoration. And it was the only way it produced that work. Because of these churches, we’ve been meaning to do all these things. And now we can because there’s no parishioners, they can’t have people in here. So that provoked a lot of or made work happen that would have been put off. But now they have an empty church with no parishioners, and it was time to do the work. So just like adults that work from that because of that. But it did slow things down and in certain ways, but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to this business. It ebbs and flows. We don’t necessarily get more work during Christmas time or different holidays. But as my grandfather said, I guess, “Who’s to say that it’s feast or famine, but plaster will feed you.”

Q: How proud are you to be working here?

A: I’m very proud of this place. And I’m very proud that I’m able to do this and I was given this opportunity. It’s sort of weird. It’s like a legacy. It’s going to last way beyond me. There are things I’ve done in this city and other cities that are going to be there long after I’m gone.