Stories in Stone (5 page)
Authors: David B. Williams
If cost was no object, brownstone, especially from Portland, was the stone of choice for mansions, as well.
In 1854 sarsaparilla
king Samuel Townsend erected a four-story cube of brownstone, for some years the largest private residence in Manhattan.
When
George Pullman built his mansion in Chicago, he imported Portland brownstone, even though he could have used a brown sandstone
from Ohio.
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The only building on Nob Hill to survive San Francisco’s 1906 quake was “Silver King” James Flood’s brownstone mansion, built
between 1884 and 1886 from Portland brownstone.
The stone had been shipped as ballast around Cape Horn and was used to construct
the 107-foot-by-127-foot residence, featuring fourteen solid stone columns, each thirteen feet tall by twenty-two inches square,
and twenty-three-foot-long sandstone steps.
The biggest blocks each weighed eighteen tons.
29
Lewis Mumford termed this period the Brown Decades.
He wrote in 1931 that “the Civil War shook down the blossoms and blasted
the promise of spring.
The colours of American civilization abruptly changed.
By the time the war was over, browns had spread
everywhere: mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black.
Autumn had come.” Brown was a sign
of “renounced ambitions, defeated hopes.”
30
Like earlier critics, Mumford specifically bemoaned the East Coast’s chocolate-colored sandstone.
But what damned brownstone was not its critics, it was the builders who made the mistake of not always using seasoned stone,
which allowed water to infiltrate the non-case-hardened blocks.
During the peak years of brownstone use builders had to take
what came their way.
They often received poor-quality stone, more susceptible to weathering, especially in winter, when water
and ice weakened the stone during freeze-thaw cycles.
After municipalities started to salt roads, the salt crystals further
damaged blocks when they penetrated and started to grow in the pore spaces of the sandstone.
The second and more serious mistake builders made involved how they laid the layered stone.
If a builder placed a block with
its layers flat, like a book placed flat on a table, water and salt could not penetrate it.
When a builder stacked blocks
on edge, with bedding planes running vertically, then water and salt could force the layers to peel off the block, like what
happens if you stand a book on its spine and the pages fall open.
This was the phenomenon that I witnessed with the building
blocks at Harvard Hall.
The use of brownstone as a curtain wall on buildings exacerbated the peeling, or spalling.
On most buildings the brownstone
curtain wall blocks were only four or five inches thick.
Builders usually cut the blocks on site themselves and it was much
easier to cut a block along the bedding plane and produce wide, thin blocks than cutting against bedding and producing tall,
narrow blocks.
The wide, thin blocks were the ones that peeled more often in curtain walls because the bedding ran parallel
to the wall.
With the tall, narrow blocks forming the curtain, the bedding was stacked perpendicular to the wall and water
and salt couldn’t penetrate it.
When builders used brownstone for structural purposes, they cut massive blocks, on the order
of twelve to twenty-four inches thick, and generally laid them correctly so the stone didn’t weaken.
Poor maintenance also allowed water to seep into a block and ruin it.
If an owner repointed the mortar regularly, blocks failed
less often, but in the decades following the peak use of brownstone, fewer took care to do so.
No specific date marks the end of the brownstone era.
Fashion was bound to change.
For nearly fifty years, brownstone ruled
New York.
Like the Knickerbocker society that had presided over Manhattan, brownstone gave way to new ways of thinking.
And
just as Hitchcock’s tracks were outshone by dinosaur bones, new stone arrived to make its mark on New York.
However, brownstone did not go extinct.
In 1993 an ex–coal miner named Mike Meehan opened a small quarry on a ledge north
of the water-filled Middlesex/Brainerd quarry.
He knew nothing about quarrying brownstone.
“Being a coal miner, I was more
adept at blowing things up,” said Meehan.
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“But at the end of the day, I knew I wanted to be small scale and to be making a product.”
He got involved with brownstone when his wife was working on a master’s degree at Yale.
Their kids had finished college and
he sensed it was time to get out of the coal business.
During one visit to Yale he saw a new building going up that used reddish
sandstone.
He asked the architect about the rock.
He told Meehan that it cost three hundred dollars per cubic foot and that
it came from Germany.
“I had been selling crap for twenty-five dollars a ton,” said Meehan.
Shortly thereafter, Meehan got a canoe and began to explore the Portland quarries.
He looked at aerial photographs, found
what looked like three quarryable ledges, and hacked his way through eight to ten feet of brush to reach them.
The owner chased
Meehan off the property, but not before Meehan had confirmed the quality of the rock.
He eventually worked out a deal with the owner to establish a small quarry.
Meehan’s first contract was for twenty-five thousand
dollars’ worth of stone for a restoration project at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.
He quarried the stone and sent
it to Barre,Vermont, to be cut.
The only local stone the university had been able to get was from old railroad trestles.
Institutions
including Brown University, Yale, and Pratt Institute have continued to order his stone.
In recent years, after acquiring
his own milling saw, he has been providing detail pieces, such as steps and lintels, for more and more high-end homes.
He initially began quarrying the old-fashioned way, drilling long holes side by side, and then pounding wedges in to split
off blocks.
Later he discovered a powder, known as a silent cracking agent, that he could pour into the holes.
Mixed with
water the powder expands and splits the rock.
More recently he acquired what is in essence a giant wire cheese slicer, except
that the wire is impregnated with industrial diamonds.
To cut a block, he feeds the wire down one vertical hole, fishes it
out of a connecting horizontal hole, and then uses a machine to slowly pull the loop taut to cut through the sandstone.
To
slice slabs, he takes a block, mounts it on a cart, and wheels it under another diamond-encrusted wire.
This wire travels
between two spinning vertical wheels mounted about twenty feet apart on a steel frame.
By lowering the wheels in tandem up
and down on the frame, Meehan lowers the horizontal wire, which cuts into the block of sandstone.
“About ten to fifteen percent of each block is high-quality stone.
This compares with a fifty-fifty split back in the day.
We still use most of our stone but not for high-end jobs,” said Meehan, who had red dust and red mud spattered on his jeans
and hiking boots.
To get the good stuff, Meehan cuts blocks five feet wide by ten feet long by twenty-three feet high.
On
one block he had marked off the twelve to fourteen inches that he will sell.
The rest of the block had fractures, uneven grain
size, and poor coloring.
The cut walls that ring Meehan’s quarry yard look like a small scale model of the mighty sandstone cliffs of my beloved red
rock country.
The circular lines left by the diamond wire resemble the conchoidal fractures produced when slabs break off
the Utah rock faces.
Adding to the effect were the varied slabs, blocks, and boulders strewn across the yard like talus from
a crumbled cliff.
Meehan showed me a few blocks that have dinosaur tracks.
I felt my circle had tightened further, as I finally
saw in the field ancient tracks that I had previously seen only at the Amherst museum.
Meehan’s brownstone blocks have also been used to restore a row house in Brooklyn.
It is on a tree-lined street just north
of Prospect Park, in a classic string of three-story Italianate row houses.
Most have been restored, including the two on
either side of Meehan's building.
One is reddish brown with tan window molding and an arched doorway.
The restoration on the
left is army tent green.
Their owners clearly put a lot of time and money into them, but compared to the building they sandwich,
they look pedestrian and bland.
Meehan’s new blocks have been cut to emphasize the bedding planes of the Portland rock.
The beds run horizontally, in the
correct direction so that they will not erode quickly.
Each block is different, with variations in grain size, color, and
bed thickness.
They look substantial and have a warmth about them.
This is the first restoration project that allows me to
see the geologic history of the brownstone.
It is by far the best restoration I have seen.
As I sat across the street from Meehan’s blocks of brownstone, I was reminded of a comment he made at the quarry.
“One hundred
years from now, when people see these buildings they will say, ‘That’s a glorious building.’ That’s a good thing to me.”
And nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground.
—Midnight Oil, “Blue Sky Mine”
I
WAS STANDING on what had been a big hole in the ground—a 210-foot-deep, man-made chasm two miles west of Quincy, Massachusetts.
Technically, I stood on a grassy meadow, but underneath the five hundred thousand cubic yards of dirt, a few cars, tons of
trash, and heaps of industrial debris, was an old granite pit.
To reach this grass-covered field, I had driven ten miles south of the tangle of roads known as Boston’s Big Dig.
Route 93
headed past the JFK Presidential Library and over the Neponset River to exit 8 to a nondescript off-ramp and a right turn.
At a small, unmarked parking lot about a mile up, I followed a paved path by a pile of empty Budweiser cans and onto the green
mound.
Granite walls ringed the field.
One on the right sloped steeply up to a flat ledge and one directly opposite rose seventy-five
feet high to a prow-like point, known appropriately as Ship’s End.
Between it and another towering wall of granite to the
left, cattails grew out of an ice-covered pool.
The dominant human influence was graffiti, which so densely covered the walls
in shades of red, blue, yellow, and black that it obscured the underlying rock.
Someone named Joyce, or one of her fans, appeared
to have had a good supply of green paint; at least five shamrocks emblazoned with her name dotted the granite.
Atop the thirty-foot-high slope to the right of the field, iron bolts, dead-man anchors, eye rings, and rods stuck out of
the rock like some slightly out-of-whack Arthurian challenge.
Additional iron bits jutted from a waterbed-sized granite block—the
base of a derrick—cemented to the granite surface.
There was evidence of derricks at other high spots, as well as beer cans,
broken bottles, fire rings, trash, and clothes.
In the distance, from one high point, rose the tall buildings of Boston.
Wandering along the granite walls and then through the quiet meadow, it is hard to imagine that this field covers one of the
great industrial sites on the eastern seaboard.
Out of this now-filled-in hole, known as the Granite Railway Quarry, came
the gray granite used to build the U.S.
Navy’s massive dry docks in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and Norfolk, Virginia; the
great customhouses in New Orleans, Boston, and Mobile, Alabama; and most important, the Bunker Hill Monument.
This 450-million-year-old
granite led, in 1826, to the first commercial railway in the country, and it was the Granite Railway Quarry that made granite
the
quintessential building stone of the early and middle 1800s.
The popularity of this quarry eventually led to fifty-three additional
quarries opening around Quincy and gave the town its moniker, the Granite City.
These quarries west of Quincy (pronounced
Quin
-zee) operated from 1826 to 1963.
By 1838, one-sixth of the town’s residents worked in the vast holes.
They came from Finland,
Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Sweden, and Canada.
It was dangerous and debilitating work.
The constant drilling left
many of the workers partly deaf.
Steel cables and iron chains snapped and whipped into the men as they dug.
Blocks of rock
fell from derricks or exploded from the walls.
Derricks collapsed and workers got crushed.
Men froze in winter and baked in
summer.
They breathed toxic dust.
Appalling conditions aside, the quarries must have been an awesome sight during their heyday.
Men clambered over walls of
debris to ledges where they cut deep grooves with hammer and chisel or pneumatic drills.
They pried out enormous cubes of
granite and attached them to long cables dangling from derricks that dotted the quarry’s rim.
Other groups of men transported
the titanic masses down to a railroad that took the blocks to finishing sheds.
And the entire time, pumps sucked out the water
that wept continuously from the quarry walls and threatened to flood the twenty-story-deep orifice.
Now, all that remained
of the Granite Railway Quarry was this bucolic setting of grass, graffiti, and granite.
* * *
In his magisterial
A History of Old Braintree and Quincy
, William Pattee wrote that “the first building of any architectural pretensions” made from Quincy granite was King’s Chapel,
a small church completed in 1754.
1
Now dwarfed by more recent granite, steel, and brick structures, King’s Chapel is the oldest extant granite building in Boston,
but not the first building to incorporate granite.
As early as 1650, builders had used granite in structures but mostly for
foundations, lintels, and sills.
Not until John Hancock’s uncle Thomas built a brownstone-accented, masonry house in 1737
was one made with solid granite walls.
Nor is King’s Chapel the first use of stone on this site in downtown Boston.
Slate gravestones, many of which are slowly sinking
back into the earth, fill the cemetery next to the chapel.
Established in 1630 and formerly the town burying ground, the cemetery
is the resting place for both the famous—John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company—and the forgotten—William
Dawes Jr., one of the other two people who alerted colonists that the “British are coming” on that fateful night of April
18, 1775.
But King’s Chapel is clearly the principal stone edifice of the block.
Architect Peter Harrison designed what many consider to be the finest example of Georgian church architecture in America.
Twelve painted wood Ionic columns, six in front and three on each side, support a plain entablature topped by a railing.
A
flat-roofed tower with an arched window rises from ground level and extends one story through and above the railed portico.
The main body of the chapel is simply a rectangle with a hipped roof.
With its linear, symmetrical design,King’s Chapel is
the type of building that probably gives architect Frank Gehry nightmares.
Take a closer look, however, and the chapel reveals an enchanting complexity, at least in its building stones.
Not only are
the blocks a mix of colors, ranging from oatmeal through ash to dark gray, but also a mix of sizes, from stubby to long and
lean.
This diversity gives King’s Chapel a more organic feel than modern stone-veneer buildings where uniformity reigns.
In
addition, hammer marks have left the stones’ surfaces stippled, as if the little church has goose bumps.
Heterogeneity was not necessarily a design feature, but a result of how the blocks were quarried.
The King’s Chapel granite
came from boulders (or bowlders, as it was often spelled in the 1700s) scattered on the ground in Braintree, a mile or so
from what would become the Granite Railway Quarry.
Masons split the stone by building a fire on top of a boulder, which weakened
the rock.
The men then dropped iron balls, called beetles, to crack the boulder into rough blocks.
Additional hammering and
chiseling squared the stones.
King’s Chapel, Boston, built 1754.
In an 1859 speech describing the history of building stone in Boston, Massachusetts, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw said “When
this work [King’s Chapel] was finished, it was the wonder of the country round.
People coming from a distance made it an object
to see and admire this structure .
.
.
But it seemed to be universally conceded, that enough [stone] more like it could not
be found to build such another.”
2
Yet only a hundred years after the erection of King’s Chapel, when Justice Shaw made his speech, granite had become commonplace
in Boston.
The change occurred because of a carriage ride in 1803.
Massachusetts lieutenant governor Edward H.
Robbins, a
member of the commission in charge of building the Charles Bulfinch-designed State Prison in Charlestown, was traveling through
Salem when he noticed a building made of rock cut in a manner new to him.
On the basement walls, he found tool marks in the
rock spaced about seven inches apart.
Since one of Robbins’s goals was to find better cut-stone prices for the prison, he
stopped and asked for the owner of the building.
He referred Robbins to the contractor, who told the lieutenant governor that
a Mr.
Tarbox had provided the stone and that he lived in Danvers, two to three miles away.
3
Robbins headed to Danvers and found Tarbox living in poverty in a small house.
With prodding from Robbins, Tarbox described
his method of cutting stone.
First, he drilled a line of holes into the rock.
He formed each hole by hammering a sharpened
steel rod, or drill, turning the drill, and cleaning the hole with a specialized spoon.
He hammered, turned, and spooned until
he reached a depth of two to four inches.
He then inserted into each hole two metal, half-round shims, each bent at the top
to prevent them from slipping into the hole.
Between the shims, known as feathers, he placed a square metal wedge, the plug.
To separate the rock, he pounded the plugs in succession until a slight cracking noise alerted Tarbox that the stone would
fail on its own.
Flabbergasted by what became known as the “plug and feather method,” Robbins asked Tarbox if he would travel to Quincy and
teach the local stonecutters this new and novel technique.
Tarbox replied that he couldn’t go because he had a family to feed
and no proper clothes to wear, whereupon Robbins offered to take care of Tarbox’s family, pay him two to three times the wages
of the best stonecutters, and go into Salem and buy him proper clothes.
Within three months every stonecutter in Quincy and
nearby Braintree cut stone in the Tarbox method.
Others, however, claim that the credit for inventing the plug and feather method should go to three Quincy men, Josiah Bemis,
George Stearns, and Michael Wild.
In his history of Quincy, William Pattee wrote that in 1803 the trio split stone with plugs
and feathers.
“So elated were these gentlemen on this memorable Sunday, that they adjourned to Newcomb’s Hotel, where they
partook of a sumptuous repast.”
4
The plug and feather method was a radical improvement over the fire and hammer application previously used by Massachusetts
stonemasons, but neither Tarbox nor the well-fed Quincy men invented the technique.
In 1757 one of my heroes,America’s first
great naturalist, John Bartram, described in a letter how he built four houses with a plug and feather method.
Bartram wrote
that with this technique “you may split them as true almost as sawn timber.”
5
Egyptian builders, however, predated Bartram by at least four thousand years.
They either inserted wood wedges in the holes
and pounded the wood or soaked the wood with water and let the expanding wood fracture the stone.
Finnish stonemasons employed
a parallel method but one more suited to a northern climate.
Late in the year, they filled drill holes with water and capped
them tightly.
When the water froze it expanded and cracked the stone along the line of holes.
An 1889 report noted that this
process separated four-hundred-ton blocks.
6
Justice Shaw, however, credits Tarbox alone as the creative genius responsible for his city’s recently hewn granite face.
Despite his august accomplishment, no one seems to know Tarbox’s first name.
Neither do we know when he was born nor when
he died.
We do know, however, that within a few months of Tarbox’s journey to Quincy, the price of cut stone dropped 40 percent,
setting the stage for the Granite Railway Quarry and ultimately a fundamental change in the look of cities across the eastern
seaboard.
One of my most pleasant discoveries when Marjorie and I moved to Boston in 1996 was the prevalence of granite as a building
stone.
I had come east expecting the worst.
I was leaving twelve-thousand-foot-high mountain ranges and towering cliffs of
sandstone for a landscape whose only geologic feature that I knew of was a boulder that a boatload of religious renegades
supposedly stepped onto in 1620.
When we got here, though, I found granite curbs, benches, and bridges, as well as a beautiful
pink granite library and gray granite post office and museum.
