‘Tuesday’s Crew’ has completed more than 160 volunteer projects across the North Fork

For nearly three decades now, year-round, they have been showing up on Tuesdays.

Not because anyone is paying them. And certainly not because they are looking for recognition.

They show up because a nonprofit needs help. A museum has a failing roof. A historical society has windows rotting out of their frames. An old building on the North Fork is slowly deteriorating while budgets shrink, volunteer pools dry up and restoration costs climb further out of reach.

So the small group of North Fork men known as Tuesday’s Crew keep showing up with coffee, ladders, saws, decades of accumulated experience and an almost stubborn refusal to let important places fall apart if they can help it.

Over the years, the retired volunteer crew has completed more than 160 projects for museums, historical societies, libraries, theaters and nonprofits across the North Fork and, occasionally, the South Fork.

Their work can be found everywhere from Hallockville Museum Farm in Riverhead to the Railroad Museum in Greenport, the Old Town Art & Crafts Guild in Cutchogue, the Southold Indian Museum, the North Fork Community Theatre and countless other organizations that, in many cases, simply could not have afforded the work otherwise.

The current crew includes David Higbee, Gary Ristau, Rob Cammarata, Ben Zukosky, Dick Romeo, Jim Calkins, John Consiglio and Willy Martin. Longtime crew member John Anderson died in the fall of 2024, at the age of 99.

“There is not one area of Hallockville that has not been made better by that hard-working group,” Hallockville Museum Farm executive director Heather Johnson said last week. “Everyone – past and present at Hallockville – would agree with that.”

In a January, 2025 newsletter, former Hallockville Museum Farm board member Christine Killorin wrote that “when the Cichanowicz House was donated to the museum farm, it was – in a word – a wreck. The Crew rehabilitated the main floor from the bottom up, providing for the valuable museum space that now showcases the Polish immigrant experience. They also constructed a rental apartment on the second floor, an important revenue source and often providing needed housing for staff. 

“Likewise,” Killorin continued, “the Naugles Barn was in very bad shape when it was moved to Hallockville from farther down Sound Avenue. The Tuesday Crew ripped out and replaced flooring, and repaired doors and windows. Ditto for the Trubisz and the Sprout Houses. And in the Hallock Homestead, they repaired the flooring in the parlor and dining room using recycled period wood recovered from the Homestead Barn.”

The group’s origins trace back to the effort to save the Regina Maris, the historic tall ship that sat in Greenport Harbor during the 1990s. When the ship was eventually moved to Glen Cove in 1998, the volunteers who had spent a lot of time working on the vessel realized they were not quite ready to stop.

“We [wanted] to stay together and help out museums and so on,” Higbee, a longtime crew member, recalled last week.

And so they did.

‘We did some good here today’

Nearly 30 years later, Higbee still keeps a running record of the crew’s work – a sprawling collection of project summaries that has grown into 66 pages documenting hundreds of repairs, restorations and construction jobs completed over the years.

But spend time talking to the men themselves, and they rarely focus on the volume of work they’ve completed.

Instead, they talk about each other. They talk about coffee, and medications they’re taking. About learning new techniques and solving problems. About the satisfaction of standing back at the end of a day and looking at something tangible that did not exist, or couldn’t function, before they arrived.

And they talk about Anderson.

You cannot really tell the story of Tuesday’s Crew without telling Anderson’s story. For years, he drove over from Sag Harbor every Tuesday, first to work on the Regina Maris and then later on projects across the East End.

At the end of the workday, as tools were being put away and cleanup had begun, Anderson had a habit of pausing to look around at what the group had accomplished. Then he would say, quietly: “Well, we did some good here today.”

Over time, that became the unofficial motto of the crew.

‘A rough day’

That spirit was visible last week inside the Stirling Historical Society in Greenport, where the crew has spent much of the spring repairing severe winter damage caused by burst pipes.

A brutal stretch of cold weather had caused pipes to burst inside the second floor of the building, sending water cascading down through the first floor, and from there into the basement.

“It was a rough day,” recalled Carole Monsell, president of the Stirling Historical Society. “I heard the water, and it was just pouring and pouring.”

After stabilizing the damaged kitchen and repairing the immediate effects of the flooding, the crew started noticing other problems. One window led to another. Frames were rotting. Sashes had deteriorated.

As Higbee explained it, some of the wood had become so compromised that portions of the windows were at risk of failing if left alone. What had started as an emergency repair gradually evolved into a much larger restoration effort.

Monsell said the men just kept going.

“They did that without me asking or anything,” she said, while pointing from window to window around the building.

‘No egos’

Just as striking to her as the work itself was the atmosphere surrounding it.

“They love being together,” Monsell said.

Every Tuesday morning, the men gather downstairs at the Stirling Historical Society for coffee, before spreading out through the building. Monsell brings sweets. There is conversation, joking and catching up before everyone gradually settles into the day’s work.

There is also, notably, no conflict. Several members independently described the crew as unusually harmonious for a group of men spending long days solving complicated construction problems together.

“No egos,” said Jim Calkins, a retired forensic scientist and crime scene analyst with the Suffolk County Crime Lab, who joined the crew in 2014 after encountering the group at Hallockville Museum Farm, where he taught wood carving classes. “We check the egos at the door.”

Their collective expertise is part of what has allowed the group to tackle increasingly ambitious projects over the years. The current crew of eight includes a former contractor, an educator, a millwork specialist, a retired business executive and skilled hobbyists, all bringing different strengths to the table.

A ‘creative genius’

Higbee points to Dick Romeo as the crew’s key problem-solver, describing him as someone capable of looking at almost any structural issue and visualizing a solution.

“He’s a creative genius in my view, a carpentry genius,” Higbee said. “There’s nothing that he can’t look at and visualize the solution to, and there’s nothing he doesn’t know how to do.”

Romeo, unsurprisingly, downplays that characterization.

“Everyone brings a different skill,” he said.

Still, other crew members repeatedly credited Romeo’s construction background with helping push the group toward more technically demanding work in recent years.

One of the most challenging projects, Romeo said, involved major structural changes at the Old Town Arts & Crafts Guild, where the crew redesigned a dangerously steep staircase inside an older portion of the building.

“We had to take down a structural wall and hang it from the rafters and attic,” Romeo recalled.

To work through the engineering challenges, Romeo often returned alone on Wednesdays after the regular Tuesday work sessions ended, using the quiet to think through solutions before the full crew returned the following week.

From left to right, Dick Romeo, Gary Ristau, Rob Cammarata, Ben Zukosky, Jim Calkins and David Higbee (Credit: Chris Francescani)

‘Looks good!’

For Gary Ristau, who joined the crew about eight years ago, part of the appeal lies in the sheer variety of the work itself.

“Every place is different,” he said.

Lately, much of that work has centered around Greenport, where Ristau said he has especially enjoyed the interaction with passersby while working outdoors.

“You’re up on the ladder glazing windows and people walk by and say, ‘Looks good!’” he said. “It’s just really pleasant.”

The work also carries a kind of deeper satisfaction.

“It’s the result using your hands, putting something together, repairing something, restoring something, building something anew, which we have done several times over the years, completely new structures,” Higbee said.

“It is looking at the end, being satisfied with the results, and knowing that without our effort that particular restoration or building would not have taken place, so it’s a kind of self-fulfilling endeavor.”

That feeling may help explain why the crew has endured as long as it has. But time is catching up.

Many current members are now in their 70s and older. Ladder work increasingly falls to the younger retirees in the group. Higbee acknowledged the crew could use new blood if it is going to continue.

Still, nobody seems eager to stop, at least not yet. There are still buildings that need help. Still windows to repair. Still projects waiting their turn on Tuesdays. And at the end of each workday, whether anyone says it out loud or not, the sentiment remains the same.

They did some good there today.