Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  STORIES IN STONE

  By the Same Author

  The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist

  A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country

  STORIES

  IN

  STONE

  Travels Through Urban Geology

  David B. Williams

  Copyright © 2009 by David B. Williams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.

  Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

  All papers used by Walker & Company are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA.

  Williams, David B.

  Stories in stone : travels through urban geology / David B.Williams.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-802-71981-2

  1. Urban geology—United States. 2. Urban geology—Italy. I. Title.

  QE39.5.U7W55 2009

  550.9173'2—dc22

  2009005609

  “To the Rock that will be a Cornerstone of the House” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume One, 1920–1928, edited by Tim Huntby.

  Copyright 1938, renewed 1966 by Donnan and Garth Jeffers.

  All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press,www.sup.org.

  All photographs by David B. Williams except the following: photograph by David B.Williams, used by permission of the Amherst College Museum of Natural History/The Trustees of Amherst College. Photographs by Adam Shyevitch. Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Crane Library, Quincy, Massachusetts, Parker Collection. Photograph by Horace Lyon, used courtesy of Archival Collection, Tor House Foundation. Photograph by John Cipriani, used by permission of National Park Service.

  Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  First U.S. edition 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  To Marjorie

  Contents

  Preface

  1 “The Most Hideous Stone Ever Quarried”—New York Brownstone

  2 The Granite City—Boston Granite

  3 Poetry in Stone—Carmel Granite

  4 Deep Time in Minnesota—Minnesota Gneiss

  5 The Clam That Changed the World—Florida Coquina

  6 America’s Building Stone—Indiana Limestone

  7 Pop Rocks, Pilfered Fossils, and Phillips Petroleum—Colorado Petrified Wood

  8 The Trouble with Michelangelo’s Favorite Stone—Carrara Marble

  9 Reading,Writing, and Roofing— East Coast Slate

  10 “Autumn 20,000 Years Ago”—Italian Travertine

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Notes

  PREFACE

  Most people do not think about geology when they are walking on the sidewalks of a major city. But wherever I am in the world, whether strolling through downtown Boston or hiking in the North Cascades, rocks are the first thing I see. I can’t walk by a beautiful stone building, or even an ugly one, without touching it and trying to figure out where the stones came from. I go to cemeteries because of the unusual rocks used as grave markers. When I travel I bring back rocks for souvenirs, and I ask friends to pick up rocks from their exotic vacations. When I watch movies, my eyes wander to the buildings in the background to see what stone I can identify.

  My passion for rocks began when I majored in geology in college. I had originally planned to go into engineering, but when I took physics and got 16 percent on a quiz I turned to a subject I had excelled at: field trips. I loved being outside learning about the planet and its history. After college, I moved to southern Utah. My passion for stone grew as I hiked, biked, and explored the red rock landscape around Moab, a geologic paradise.

  When my wife, Marjorie, decided to pursue her master’s degree, we moved to Boston. I hated the first few months. Where I had once traipsed through quiet sandstone canyons, surrounded by thousand-foot-tall cliffs of rock, I now walked through shadowy canyons created by buildings. Where I once hiked on desolate trails, I now crossed busy streets. For the first time in many years I felt disconnected from the natural world.

  And then I noticed Boston’s buildings. Half-billion-year-old slates abutted 150,000-year-old travertines. Sandstone that formed in Connecticut sat on top of marble that formed in Italy. Metamorphic rocks interfingered with igneous rocks. Fossil-rich, sea-deposited limestones juxtaposed mineral-rich, subduction-created granites. Plus, builders had gone to the effort of cleaning and polishing these fine geologic specimens, making their stories that much easier to read. As I began to notice the stone in buildings, I found the geologic stories that could provide the connection to wildness I had lost.

  Now when I need a rock fix, I simply go downtown and wander the business district and look at building stones. I see evidence of continents splitting apart, crashing into each other, and diving deep into the planet; of rivers washing into dinosaur-rich valleys, seas teeming with invertebrates, and hot springs bubbling with bacterial stews; of magma baking limestone into marble, granite carried thousands of miles by plate tectonic movement, and massive trees fossilizing into stunning pieces of petrified wood.

  Geology is half the story; building stones also provide the foundation for constructing stories about cultural history. Granite used at the Bunker Hill Monument led to the construction of America’s first railroad. In the brownstones of New York and Boston, the whims of fashion combined with the realities of weathering and erosion to dictate over three hundred years of architectural planning. And in the cottage and tower poet Robinson Jeffers built for his wife and family, you can see how his years of intimate work with stone grounded Jeffers and helped make him one of the most popular American poets of the early twentieth century.

  Whether it is a lone iconoclast building his home with rocks he found on a beach or a multinational conglomerate importing millions of tons of marble, we employ building stone to convey sentiments as mundane or grand as we desire them to be. Our use of stone reflects the long relationship between people and nature—on levels scientific, emotional, and philosophical. It is a relationship that continues to evolve and to inform our actions.

  Stories in Stone offers readers a new window through which to look at urban landscapes. Intriguing cultural and natural history stories are no farther than the nearest building. Building stone did not change the world. Building stone is the world. And it will outlast us all.

  1

  “THE MOST HIDEOUS STONE

  EVER QUARRIED”—NEW YORK

  BROWNSTONE

  In some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the

  whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick,

  with portentous facades of brown-stone, or brown-stonn,

  as the Gothamites have it. —Edgar Allan Poe,

  Doings of Gotham, May 14, 1844

  Little I ask; my wants are few;

  I only wish a hut of stone,

  (A very plain brown stone will do,)

  That I may call my own;—

  And close at hand is such a one,

  In yonder street that fronts the sun.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Contentment,” 1858

  IF AME
RICA IN the late 1800s was the land where the streets were paved with gold, in Brooklyn and Manhattan the streets were lined with chocolate: chocolate stores, churches, and mansions. But above all, row houses, better known as brownstones. They stretched for block upon block, mile after mile, wearying the eye, as one detractor sneered.1 In 1880 78 percent of the stone structures in Manhattan had a front of brownstone; in Brooklyn, 96 percent. Brownstones housed the poor, the growing middle class, and the titans of the Gilded Age, such as William Astor II, J. P. Morgan, and Jay Gould.

  The brown sandstone (hence brown-stone and later brownstone) that faced most of the row houses gave the architecture its name. The stone served no structural purpose; it was the aluminum siding of the day, a four-inch-thick curtain, attached by mortar to the brick load-bearing walls that supported the wood-frame building. Originally a substitute for more expensive marble and first used for decorative work such as lintels, steps, and quoins, brownstone became the most popular building stone in New York by the 1850s and so synonymous with row houses that any row house, whether clad in brick, limestone, or marble, was called a brownstone.

  Typically built on a one-hundred-foot-deep lot, brownstone row houses ranged from twelve to twenty-five feet wide and were three to six stories high. A below-grade servants’ entrance led to the basement, where the domestics cooked and the family ate. Homeowners, or in many cases tenants, entered via a steeply staired stoop, an architectural feature brought by the original Dutch settlers who had required a rise to get above their flat homeland’s perennial flooding. In America the stoop, née stoep, helped people rise above street odors generated by the horse-powered transport system. Later the stoop became a favored place for sitting, hanging out, gossiping, and that venerable Brooklyn pastime, stoopball.

  The stoop led to the building’s formal entrance, often the finest architectural feature of a brownstone. Many entrances had arched openings, a prominent keystone, and an elaborate fanlight. Others were squared off with a detailed console or hood molding. Columns bracketed many doorways and could be Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, or strange combinations thereof. Tall, arched double doors opened into a vestibule or long hallway and led to the first-floor parlor. Oddly, the parlor may have been the least-used part of the home. Society dictated an entertainment space, but most middle-class people rarely used it. Bedrooms and sitting rooms were on the upper floors. Servants lived in the garret. A cornice, often of iron pounded, sanded, and painted to resemble stone, topped the structure.

  Long and narrow, particularly in later years when land prices forced developers to squeeze houses to nearly claustrophobic widths, brownstones would not win a modern-day design competition. Windows illuminated only the front and back rooms; middle rooms were gloomy caverns. Long flights of steep, poorly lit stairs connected the floors, providing a practical way to meet one’s daily exercise needs, although one nineteenth-century critic wrote that this progenitor of the Stairmaster led to “fruitless and health-destroying labor.”2

  And yet, to have a brownstone-fronted home was to live the good life in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as Boston, Hartford, and Philadelphia. Whether rich or poor, immigrant or Knickerbocker, every level of society aspired to live in a brownstone, called by one writer an “almost proverbial synonym for all that is elegant and desirable.”3 So elegant and desirable was brownstone that the world’s richest man, William H. Vanderbilt, who inherited ninety million dollars in 1877, disregarded his architects’ preferred construction material, white limestone, and built between 1879 and 1882 a pair of brownstone mansions on Fifth Avenue. Designed by the firm Trench and Snook, the twin estates cost two million dollars and reportedly required an around-the-clock crew of six hundred to seven hundred workers to build.4

  Despite Vanderbilt’s multimillion-dollar stamp of approval, brownstone did not fare well with critics. They thought the stone cold and unattractive. Brownstone was only a veneer, they sneered, a pretense. Plus, it didn’t carve well, didn’t age well, and made buildings look bloated. In the words of Edith Wharton, the city was “cursed with its universal chocolatecoloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried.”5

  The critics were partially correct. Water and ice can penetrate and weaken the stone’s sandy layers, which peel off the building like sunburned skin. But the stone does not deserve all of the blame: Brownstone failed because builders used poor quality stone or laid it incorrectly. Properly placed brownstone blocks in 150-year-old buildings show little or no degradation.

  Its reputation weakened by the critics’ complaints, brownstone suffered a decisive blow to its popularity at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, commonly called the White City. Daniel Burnham’s array of snow white, classical buildings returned marble and limestone to their former place of supremacy in the building world. White was in and brown was out. Brownstone would not become popular again for another hundred years.

  I first fell in love with brownstone in 1996. Marjorie and I had recently moved to Boston so she could attend graduate school. During my regular walks to get away from our dreary apartment, I wandered among town houses made of brownstone in the Brahmin bastion of Beacon Hill. The brownstones were distinctive, exhibiting warmth and character. I liked that I could see geologic features such as bedding and erosion, and during those occasional sunsets when the light bounced off low clouds, the stones seemed to be lit from within.

  Several months after moving to Boston, I chanced upon what would become one of my favorite brownstone buildings. Built in 1766, Harvard Hall sits on the western edge of the Harvard campus. It is a stately Georgian structure with simple lines, arched windows, and a two-story portico. Although primarily brick, Harvard Hall sits on a base of brownstone, with brownstone stairs that gently rise on either side of the main door.

  I distinctly remember walking up to the stairs to look at the stone work, which had been laid incorrectly and had begun to succumb to weathering. Making sure that no one was looking, I stroked the crumbling stone. Sand grains accumulated in my hand. They immediately transported me back to my beloved Utah.

  Although I had looked at brownstones for months, it wasn’t until the sand grains of Harvard Hall nested in my hand that I made the connection: What I had known as red rock in Utah, easterners called brownstone. Both are sandstone colored by iron, which in an oxygen-rich environment rusts and coats individual sand grains like the skin of an apple.6 I learned later that my favorite Utah rock layer, the Wingate Sandstone, and Harvard Hall’s brownstone were deposited at the same time, during the waning days of Pangaea, and that both contain dinosaur tracks, possibly from the same species. I finally felt like I was making a connection to Boston.

  A decade later I headed to the heart of brownstone country, New York City. Specifically, I went to Brooklyn, because many of the brownstone row houses and most of the great brownstone mansions in Manhattan were gone. Some neighborhoods, such as Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, and Harlem, still have chocolate row houses, but these isolated pockets cannot compare with the street upon street of brownstone-fronted buildings found throughout Brooklyn.

  I stayed in a Brooklyn brownstone with a childhood pal and her family. It was a classic five-story row house, with one apartment on each floor. My friends lived on the top floor, so I got to experience the fruitless and health-destroying labor of stair climbing.

  The morning of my first day in Brooklyn, my friend Megan and I strolled through the Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, and Brooklyn Heights neighborhoods. Walking through canyon after canyon of sandstone felt like returning to Utah, except I saw a lot more people and I could buy good pizza. Some buildings had smooth, precisely cut rock; others had rusticated blocks; and a few had stippled stones. Moss and lichen covered many of the low walls that fronted patio spaces next to stoops. A few walls had a black patina similar to the desert varnish that coats Utah’s cliffs.

  A fractured brownstone pile next to a stoop vividly reminded me of a cliff of rock slowly decaying and crumbling. I grabbed one piece and put
it in my backpack. I took dozens of photos of buildings where wind and water had smoothed elaborate window and door details to shapeless blobs. On one building, erosion had so weakened the rock that the front door console had fallen off, revealing the brick and wood structure underneath.

  Across the street from Fort Greene Park, on South Portland Avenue, was a classic stretch of row houses, their repetitious and receding lines of stoop, doorway, and window looking like an art student’s first attempt at perspective drawing. Despite the uniformity of the buildings, they formed a balanced and elegant beauty, further enhanced by the block’s tall London plane trees and bluestone sidewalks.

  One of the chief complaints of nineteenth-century detractors was the tedium of brownstones. Junius Henri Browne, a critic wearied by brownstone, wrote in 1869, “One longs [for] . . . some change in the style and aspects of the sombre-seeming houses, whose occupants, one fancies from the exterior, look, think, dress and act alike.”7 Perhaps in Browne’s day and in the subsequent decades, regularity doomed the buildings, but now this same consistency stands out as a coveted feature. Time Out New York recently named South Portland Avenue the best block in New York, citing its unbroken row of brownstone town houses.

  South Portland was a wonderful block, but it also showcased a disturbing trend. Many of the buildings no longer had brownstone facing. Instead, stucco covered them. This process of putting stucco over stone began in the 1960s.8 In neighborhoods where brownstones were run down and unsafe, a few pioneers recognized the beauty and history of the buildings, which were cheap and available even if bankers wouldn’t extend credit. Buyers had to move fast because city agencies had started to demolish brownstones. Ironically, demolition led to the open spaces now utilized as community gardens throughout Brooklyn.