Stories in Stone

Rock Versus Stone: A link to my new blog site

2011-11-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

A few people have asked so here's a link to my most recent posting on my new blog site. It's ponders the eternal question of Rock Versus Stone, is there a difference?

http://geologywriter.com/blog/stories-in-stone-blog/rock-or-stone-is-there-a-difference/

New Blog and Web Site

2011-06-13T07:30:00.000-07:00

Greetings all. Just a short note to let everyone know that I have moved by blog to my new web site and will no longer be posting at this site.

Here is a link to the new blog. http://geologywriter.com/category/blog/stories-in-stone-blog/

And here is a link to my new web site. http://geologywriter.com/

Thanks kindly for your interest and input in my geology writings.

If you go to the new site, you will see that I am working on a new book, about the natural and cultural history of Cairns (the piles of rock that mark trails), and that I am continuing my blog on building stone. I also hope to broaden the scope of that blog to include more aspects of geology.

Sincerely,

David B. Williams

Seattle Stone: Lobby #2, Smith Tower marble

2011-03-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

I would like to return to Smith Tower and look at the other beautiful stone that graces its lobby. It is a classic marble, quarried from Tokeen on Marble Island, just off the west side of Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska. Tokeen was the more major of two marble quarries in the area. First to open was Calder, at the north end of Prince of Wales Island but it closed about the time that Tokeen was being more fully developed by R. L. Fox of Seattle. Marble Island was initially called Fox Island.

In the fall of 1903, Fox and several investors started the Great American Marble Company. Apparently the money men had noble aspirations or visions of grandeur. They definitely had other problems, including financial troubles and interpersonal conflicts. Turns out that one investor, Robert Ball, was actually one Charles Mains, a lawyer from Michigan disbarred for shady shenanigans.

Quarry at Tokeen, photo from Alaska State Library Digital Collections

Meanwhile, the owners of the Vermont Marble Company (VMC), in Vermont, had been hearing rumors of “mountains of marble – ‘quantities beyond calculation’ – and of a quality such that ‘no other marble in the world was superior.” Eventually representatives of VMC made it to Marble Island, verified the rumors, and noted a good potential market for the stone. D. H. Bixler wrote in 1908 to VMC “As for the future of Seattle there cannot be much doubt. It seems as though it will surely grow…The pace has been set for first class buildings and any that follow will have to have more or less interior marble.”

Men at Tokeen, photo from Alaska State Library Digital Collections

With VMC now holding the rights to the marble, they began to develop operations. The initial shipment of 101 tons of marble left Tokeen on July 18, 1909. As many as eight quarries operated with most blocks going to the VMC yard in Tacoma. During the peak years of operation from 1912 to 1915, more than 4,360 blocks were shipped to Tacoma. Cut stone went into buildings from Boston to Honolulu including post offices in Bellingham and San Diego; the Empress Theater in Salt Lake City; the county building in Pittsburgh, and the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital. In Seattle, it went into King County Courthouse, the Hoge Building, the Bank of California and Smith Tower.

Alaska marble in the Smith Tower

The marble comes from metamorphosed layers of the Heceta Limestone, an Early to Late Silurian (430 to 420mya). Subsequent intrusion of a hornblende diorite metamorphosed the limestone into a marble. Parts of the Heceta is rich in fossils, though none are found in the marble beds. The limestone formed mostly on a shallow marine platform with some deeper water deposition, too.

Smith Tower interior and route to safety

In my next posting, I will show a few photos of the third stone in Smith Tower, a fossil-rich limestone. Very exciting!

Seattle Stone: Lobby #2, Smith Tower onyx

2011-02-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

In continuing my short tour of Seattle lobbies, I turn to what is one of the best known lobbies in the downtown area. Smith Tower is also one of Seattle’s more famous buildings. Opened on July 4, 1914, the 462-foot tall building was the tallest building west of Ohio at the time. Over the years, the mostly terra cotta clad edifice has borne the brunt of many incorrect claims. As a fine essay on the historylink.org web site reports, it was never the fourth tallest building in the world, or even outside of New York.

Despite not meeting the aspirations of some, Smith Tower does sport a rather handsome lobby. Two stones dominate, onyx marble from Mexico and marble from Alaska. This post will focus on the Mexican rock.

Onyx is a notoriously confusing stone. True onyx is a variety of quartz. It is sometimes referred to as layered chalcedony or black-and-white agate. The onyx used as building stone is not made of quartz but of calcite and is known as onyx marble. Because such calcareous onyx became popular in the United States through stone quarried near Mexico City, it is also called Mexican onyx, as well, no matter its point of origin. Onyx marble used in ancient Rome and by early Egyptians usually came from Algeria. All onyx marble is popular because of the colorful layering and ability to be highly polished. Color variation depends on the amount of iron and manganese and their oxidation states in the deposits, which become layered as they accumulate in pools.

The Smith Tower onyx panels are from Baja California from an area known as El Marmol. Like all onyx marble, it formed layer by thin layer in springs, in this case cold water springs. Other onyx marbles form in hot springs, too. They can also form as stalactites and stalactites. First quarried around 1893, the El Marmol deposits are about 160 miles southeast of Ensenada and 15 miles from the east coast of the peninsula. (One additional note. After posting this blog, I was reminded that the onyx in Smith Tower is also called Pedrara Onyx, in reference to the company that owned the quarries.)

The Spring at El Marmol (from the Tacoma World web site)

El Marmol achieved a bit of fame for its onyx marble schoolhouse, which was supposedly the only all onyx place of education in the world. Apparently the stones were not polished and by at least the 1950s, the weathered stones were drab and brown. As you can see from this modern shot, it’s not in very good shape.

The schoolhouse at El Marmol (from Tacoma World web site)

When geologist George Perkins Merrill visited the Baja quarries in the early 1890s he found the deposits quite pleasing. “Nothing can be more fascinating to the lover of the beautiful in stones than this occurrence, where huge blocks of material of almost ideal soundness, with ever varying shades of color and veination lie everywhere exposed in countless numbers…The colors are peculiarly delicate, and there is a wonderful uniformity in quality…The rose color is, so far as my present knowledge goes, quite unique and wonderfully beautiful.”

The quarry at El Marmol closed in the early 1960s. An article by naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch theorized that it was due to plastic. He wrote “As with so much that is coming in the world, there is a cheap substitute for something dearer and more beautiful.” Fortunately, we can still see the dear and beautiful at Smith Tower.

Next time, I will look at the Alaskan marble.

Seattle Stone: Lobby #1

2011-02-09T08:11:00.001-08:00

I am starting a series looking at buildings in Seattle. I plan to focus initially on some lobbies that I have long liked. My first is the wonderful art deco Exchange Building. Ironically finished in 1929, the building, as the name suggests, was supposed to house the Northwest Commodities and Stock Exchange. Most of the elaborate motifs feature items that represented Washington state agriculture. It is a lovely building.

For many years, I have taken people to the building on my downtown building stone tour and focused on the exterior Morton Gneiss. If we went on a weekday, I would often go inside and show them the extravagant stone, although I had no clue where the stone originated.

Recently, I was showing Dave Tucker of Northwest Geology Field Trips around Seattle to help him put together a tour for a guidebook he is writing on regional geology. When we stopped at the Exchange Building, his excitement prompted me to try and find out a bit more about the stone. Here's what I learned.

The stone is quarried in Italy near the town of La Spezia, about 14 miles west of the legendary marble quarries of Carrara. The best quarries are on the Tino islands. Initially quarried in the first century and used in religious buildings, the Romans also employed it to pave roads (now that would be wicked cool to see) and in the Luni amphitheater at La Spezia. Quarrying ramped up again after World War II but has slowed down of late. The ancient name was Portovenere and the modern name is Portoro (from Porta oro), with varieties labeled Portoro a macchia larga (large-veined), Portoro di Prima (the best variety), and Portoro a macchia fine (thin-veined).

Geologically, it is part of the vast sedimentary rocks of the Tuscan nappe. The Late Triassic Portoro Limestone is an aragonite mud deposited on a shallow carbonate platform. It is up to 260 feet and consists of black calcite with alternating layers of mixed dolomite and calcite. The complex folding and reworking of the micritic limestone during Miocene deformation, which also metamorphosed the Carrara marble, produced the distinctive and beautiful stylolitic veining that characterizes the stone. Four- to eight-inch-wide shear zones separate undeformed layers up to eight inches thick.

Sorry for the bad coloring. This stone is black. The purple is light reflected from Cherry wood paneling.

The black coloring primarily comes from small amounts of organics in anaerobic environments. Limonite and sulfides produce the yellow banding with dolomite mosaics and hematite forming more violet veins.

The building architect, John Graham Sr., did a splendid job of bookmatching the Portoro panels. He also incorporated Italian travertine and some sort of purple brecciated stone, which I know nothing about. Someday I hope to figure out that part of the story.

Curiously, the Portoro is a stone of warm places, such as northern Africa and Sicily. When weathered, it loses its brilliance and appears "irreversibly opaque, whitened and corroded," according to one study of it. You can see this in Seattle at the entrance to Shucker's Restaurant on 4th Avenue, just north of Seneca.

Next up will be the elegant lobby of the Smith Tower.

Louis Kahn and Travertine

2011-02-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

Last night, I watched a fascinating documentary about the iconoclastic architect Louis Kahn. As the title implies, My Architect: A Son's Journey, follows Kahn's son Nathaniel as he attempts to discover the father he didn't know. Kahn was one of the greatest and most complex architects of the twentieth century. He is best known for his work in the United States, which includes the Kimball Art Museum in Dallas and the Salk Institute in La Jolla. He also designed astounding buildings in Bangladesh and India. What he was less known for was that he had three families, one with his wife and two through long-term affairs. All three produced children. The movie is well worth watching not only for Kahn's fascinating life but also for his stunning architecture.

What I like best about his work is his use of geometric shapes. He punctuates his walls with angles and arches and circles, allowing an ever changing interplay of light and shadow. Each design brings the buildings to life as they change shape throughout the day. His use of geometric shapes also connects his buildings to the landscape, not necessarily in an organic way, but in a way that continues the weaving of the ephemeral and the permanent.

And finally, Kahn appears to have been quite the fan of travertine. His use of it at the Salk Institute foreshadows and seems to have inspired Richard Meier's use of the stone at the Getty Museum. Below are some photos I found on the web that to me are some of the most notable uses of travertine. I hope you'll agree.

Kimball Art Museum (from the Southern Live Oak blog)

Kimball Art Museum detail (from flickr)

Salk Institute (from Daily Icon)

Salk Institute details (from Daily Icon)

Salk Institute seats (from Premier Green)

Yale Museum for British Art (from flickr)

The Crocodile and the Countertop

2011-01-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

Italian paleontologists have been on a roll of late, and they haven’t even had to go out in the field. Late last year came reports of the dinosaur in the duomo. Now, comes the tale of the countertop crocodile. The new story begins in 1955 in Portomaggiore (Ferrara, Italy), when stonecutter Mr. S. Pasini observed what he thought were fossil bones in a block of yellowish-red limestone destined for a countertop. After the cutting the block into four slabs, Pasini saved the stone. A year later paleontologist Piero Leonardi described the fossil as a cross section of a crocodile he called the “Coccodrillo di Portomaggiore.”

Cross sectioned slabs from Gondwana Research (In Press, available online August 7, 2010) Scale bar = 20cm.

Two of the slabs eventually ended up at the Museo Geologico Giovanni Capellini in Bologna, where they they sat undisturbed until 2009 when paleontologists Federico Fanti and Andrea Cau studied them. They concluded that Leonardi’s crocodile was a new species and the oldest member of the Metriorhychidae, a diverse and curious group of marine crocodilians, which existed from about 171 to 136 mya. They were fierce, pelagic, piscivorous predators. Fanti and Cau named the new species Neptunidraco ammoniticus or “Neptune’s dragon from the Rosso Ammonitico Veronese Formation.”

Neptunidracos' streamlined body, Illustration by Davide Bonadonna

Neptunidraco is the oldest known member of the Metriorhychidae group and did not look like any modern crocodile. They had streamlined skulls, a vertical tail, and a hydrodynamic body, all features well adapted to a marine lifestyle. Cau describes Neptune’s dragon as “more like a dolphin than a croc.” Based on their anatomy and teeth, they ate small, swift fishes. They may have ventured onto land to lay eggs. Later Metriorhynchids were more robust and could have eaten armored fish and large marine reptiles.

Happy geologists Cau and Fanti (from Cau's blog)

Rosso Ammonitico, also known as Verona Marble, is a Middle Jurassic age, generally reddish limestone rich in ammonites, hence the name. It formed in deep water as fine grained sediments settled into the Tethys Sea on the margin of Gondwanaland. The specific quarry was near Sant’Ambrogio di Valpolicella, about 10 miles northwest of Verona. (The fossil-rich slabs come from a more yellow part of the quarries, known as “ammonitico giallo.”) Used since Roman times, Rosso Ammonitico can be found at the Arena in Verona, the Battistero in Parma, the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, the Cathedral in Cremona, and the Galleria V. Emanuele in Milan. (On the VertePaleo list serv, the reporting of this story led to some amusing anti-limestone-countertop comments. When I was in Bloomington, Indiana, working on my chapter on the Salem Limestone, I remember seeing builders touting the limestone countertops of a new rental units. To each his/her own.)

Ammonite from Baptistry (Battistero) of Parma (from Wikicommons)

The publication of the story apparently has ruffled a few feathers in Italy. On Andrea Cau’s blog, he notes that one famous Italian geologist offered critical comments on the discovery (saying it wasn’t truly a discovery since the fossil had been known since 1955) and the bigger implication that it provides a new understanding of the evolution of these intriguing marine crocodiles. Cau believes that the conflict results in part from a generational difference and a clash of paradigms, where the young upstarts are willing to reconsider, restudy, and reevaluate past concepts and specimens. He recognizes that their discovery does not change the world but it “is a beautiful piece of a huge mosaic called paleontology.” (Translation from Google Translator.)

Moreover, isn’t what Cau and Fanti did part of what makes science so appealing and such a valuable way to understand the world around us. We should applaud them for looking carefully, for struggling with understanding what they saw, for asking questions, for drawing new conclusions, and for learning from those who came before. And yes, their new discovery is a thing of beauty.

Adaptive Quarry Reuse To the North

2010-12-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

As I noted in September, the afterlife of quarries can be varied. Recently I came across one of the more beautiful second lives of a former stone excavation site. This one is on a knoll known historically as Little Mountain and in modern times as Queen Elizabeth Park, in Vancouver, B.C. The quarries were not large and didn’t provide building stone. Instead the rock, a middle Tertiary age basalt, went into some of the earliest roads in Vancouver.

The larger of the two quarries.

Originally owned by Canada Pacific Railway, the site had been logged around 1890. The quarry, actually two small quarries, was abandoned by 1911, leaving behind a nasty gash on Vancouver’s highest spot. As so often happens in the wet PNW, plants took over the holes and few visited, but in 1928 the city of Vancouver acquired the hilltop and surrounding lands. A visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth prompted the area to be renamed in her honor.

Good detail of steps in quarry showing the plug and feather method of stone quarrying.

Little happened in the subsequent decade or during World War II but in 1948 park deputy superintendent William Livingstone began to clear and clean the quarries. Here is the description of what he did from the Vancouver Parks web site.

It is nearly legend at the Park Board how this self-taught individual, the son of one of Vancouver's first nurserymen, designed the new park landscape plan. Retired employees tell how the lanky figure of the Deputy Park Superintendent could be seen on-site, from dawn to dusk, directing numerous bulldozers to reshape the scarred earth, not working from drawings, but from a clear vision in his mind. Rather than reclaim the gullies left by the quarry operation, he used them as backdrop for choice plants, trees and shrubs, and for the placement of his best designs-water features.

The smaller of the two arboreta.

The first, and larger quarry opened as an arboretum in 1953 and the second one in 1961. To build the arboreta, Livingstone blasted out pools, dynamited old walls, and brought in gravel and soil. As you see from the photos they are quite beautiful with a waterfall, lush foliage, and quiet greens. They must be even more spectacular when the flowers are in bloom. The park is also well worth visiting for the panoramas of Vancouver and the distant mountains. And finally, for an historic perspective on Little Mountain, read these reminiscences published in 1952.

A waterfall in the larger site.

Written in Stone, a review and interview

2010-11-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase the old saw, everyone talks about evolution but no one does anything about it. Well, Brian Switek decided to do something, at least he decided to write a book about evolution. Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature clearly shows how evolution has operated on Earth for billions of years. In doing so, Switek hammers one more nail in the Creationist coffin and provides a thoughtful account for any who want to learn more about evolution, fossils, and the cultural history of evolution.

Switek, who blogs for Wired magazine at Laelaps and the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking, takes a two-fold approach. Primarily, he focuses on the fossils and what they tell us but he also weaves in the people who have studied those fossils. This approach allows him to give readers connective tissues to the science. After all, it is far easier to understand the science when you are also following the fascinating personalities connected to the research.

What makes his book valuable is that he not only weaves in history, providing descriptions of sometimes overlooked characters and their contributions, as well as the main players, but he also brings the science into the present with up-to-date accounts of some of the biggest discoveries of recent years. You come away with a better understanding of how science and scientists work and how science is not a black-and-white field but multi-hued with many interpretations. Furthermore, he shows how scientists do not operate in a void and do respond to the culture around them.

Switek is clearly enthusiastic and passionate about evolution and the fossil record. He has thought long and hard about how to tell his stories and how each helps us see another facet of evolution. At times he is a bit dense with scientific names and details (I think this is due in part to his excitement for the subject; he is bursting with information and can't help wanting to share it) but for the most part Switek keeps his stories moving along, constantly showing us the beauty of evolution and how scientists made and continue to make stunning discoveries that flesh out the many stories of life on Earth.

Brian was kind enough to answer a few questions I posed to him. They give a good impression of his writing style and his deep passion for the wonders of science.

1. You cover many intriguing people as you delve into the history of paleontology. If you could meet any of the historical people you write about, who would it be?

Thomas Henry Huxley. Everyone knows him as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” but as I dug into his work I was impressed by the quality of his writing and how he was one of the first to popularize evolutionary transitions in the fossil record (most notably the origin of birds from dinosaur-like creatures, whales from terrestrial ancestors, and horses from small mammals).

2. What would you ask them?

I would love to know more about his quibbles with natural selection; why did he prefer large-scale leaps and why did he propose that many evolutionary transitions took place during non-geologic time? And what made him eventually shift his interests from paleontology to lab-based anatomical studies later in this career? Rather than just pelt him with questions, though, I think it would be fun to update Huxley on what we have learned since his day. I think he would be enthusiastic about the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, especially since he tried to imagine what such a creature would look like over a century before the first ones (excluding Archaeopteryx) were found!

3. If you could see in time lapse photography any of the evolutionary events you discuss, which one would it be?

The evolution of the first birds from feathered dinosaurs. Definitely. We have learned so much about the origins of birds in the past 10 years alone, yet there is still much we don’t know. To put it another way, it is fantastic that we have been able to identify so many avian characteristics in dinosaurs, but those traits are so old and widespread that pinpointing the origin of the first birds is still relatively problematic (even if we know feathered, raptor-like dinosaurs were their ancestors). Plus, on purely aesthetic grounds, I think a photo time-lapse of the origin of birds would be absolutely beautiful given the colorful plumage the animals in question probably had.

4. If you could have been there to find the first fossils of the animals you discuss, which one would you have wanted to discover?

Probably Rodhocetus, Maiacetus, or one of the other whales in the middle of the transition from land to sea (after terrestrial whales like Pakicetus, but before fully-aquatic ones such as Basilosaurus). They are just so wonderfully strange! I can’t think of anything else like them. By the time they were discovered there was already enough context to know that they were early whales, but I am fascinated by the fact that they are virtually caught in the middle of this evolutionary transition where they had a whole suite of traits related to aquatic life but still could have moved about on land. (drawing from Phillip Gingerich web site)

5. What do you think that modern paleontologists can learn from their predecessors?

Always be mindful of what is still unknown. One of the things which became clear as I documented what we have learned about each of the transitions I discussed was how many times evolutionary trees have been redrawn and major transitions have been reinterpreted. The paradox of the fossil record is that it is amazing rich but frustratingly incomplete. Even though we are tempted to fit everything into these neat little conceptual boxes there is still much left to be discovered. This doesn’t mean that we’re going to have trash everything we think we know now – I think we have a more comprehensive view of the fossil record than ever before – but we should take care when we start saying “X species was ancestral to Y species, and that shows that the transition happened like this.” That’s fine as presented as a hypothesis, but what if species Z turns out to fit in that gap and species Y represents part of a diversification which left no descendants? That sort of thing has happened before, and in talking about paleontology to the public I think we should always distinguish between the facts of the fossil record and what we are inferring from them.

6. What is the central point about science that you learned from your research and writing?

That the history of life on earth has been stranger and more wonderful than anyone could have imagined. Who could have imagined something like Pakicetus or even something as familiar as an Apatosaurus had they not heard of them first? And things just keep getting weirder. Having just returned from the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, I can tell you that the more we dig into the fossil record, the stranger prehistoric life becomes. Evolution is not some mundane, straightforward march of lowly little creatures to impressive beasts. It is a wildly branching process which has been cut back by extinction multiple times and has led to the origin of innumerable creatures which have no living counterpart. I appreciated this on a superficial level when I started by research, but the deeper I dug into the science the more I was left in awe of the fossil record.

7. What surprised you most in your research?

How much quirks of history played into the development of scientific thought. The distant reach of European empires, for example, allowed naturalists to travel to far-off places which otherwise would have been inaccessible, and racist notions about the origins of humans prevented anthropologists from investigating the strata of Africa for human ancestors. Imagine what our understanding of evolution would be like today if scientists had stumbled upon the rich beds of feathered dinosaurs from China much earlier; nearly a century’s-worth of debate about bird origins might have been tossed out. Just as the history of life is marked by contingency, so is the history of science.

8. And finally, what did you leave out that you wished you could have put in the book?

I had originally written a short summary of primate evolution for the human evolution chapter, but that part of the book was overlong already and I had to lose it. It was painful to do – especially since human evolution is almost never placed into the wider context of primate evolution – but given space constraints I didn’t have much of a choice. I was able to partially make up for it by talking about Darwinius and other early primates in the introduction, but I still wish that I could have gone into a little more depth about early anthropoids, Miocene apes, and other fossil primates.

Beinecke Library, Green Stamps, and Marble

2010-11-12T08:48:00.000-08:00

For much of the middle 1900s consumers coveted sheets of little green stamps. Known as S&H Green Stamps, they came in a variety of point values and could be redeemed for household items. Now mostly forgotten, the popularity of S&H stamps led to one of the great uses of marble as a building stone, when in 1960, the Beinecke family, owners of the Sperry and Hutchinson company, decided to donate the money for a rare book library at Yale.

Gordon Bunshaft and the Beinecke, from SOM web site

Yale hired Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who proposed what he called a “treasure house” for books. It would have to mix storage, offices, exhibit space, and reading room. It would also have to be secure, equipped with climate control, and not allow direct sunlight to hit the books. Bunshaft’s initial plan was to use onyx, which he had seen at a palace in Istanbul. Specifically he liked how light infused an onyx-walled bathroom in a harem. (Not till later did he learn that those walls were made of alabaster.)

For two years, Bunshaft searched for onyx. He even tried to get the stone during a revolt in French-controlled Algeria, which involved contacting the American ambassador in France to see if the French would send troops to access an onyx quarry. As he noted in a later interview “we eventually gave up on onyx.”

They decided to go for marble but even then Bunshaft had troubles. For example, marble from the quarries that provided stone for the Acropolis “looked characterless, like a lampshade,” and that wouldn’t do. Finally an old man from Vermont told him about marble from a quarry in Danby, Vermont. The stone wasn’t perfect. It was a “last, desperate thing…too strongly veined when you see sunlight coming through inside. It’s too yellow and black.” But it would do.

Interior light, Photo by Richard Cheek, from Beinecke Library web site

Each panel measures 54 x 54 inches and is 1.25 inches thick. Frames of light gray granite from Vermont hold the marble panes in place. The Danby marble is one of several varieties of Shelburne marble, which formed from metamorphism during the Early Ordovician Taconic Orogeny. Other trade names include Royal, Imperial, and Dorset.

Exterior close up of marble, Photo by Richard Cheek, from Beinecke Library web site

I was lucky enough to visit the library several years ago. Although the exterior is a bit dull, warm light suffuses the interior. I disagree with Mr. Bunshaft, I like the richness of the amber hues of the stone. I didn’t know whether to be more awed by the wonderful books, such as a Gutenberg Bible, or the wonderful stone. If you do have the time, I highly recommend visiting the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.

The Duomo and the Dinosaur: Not?

2010-11-02T08:28:00.001-07:00

Finally we have a nice uniting of science and religion and boy has it titillated the Internet. Apparently for the past 350 years or so the fine parishioners of the Cathedral of St. Ambrose (aka Sant’Ambrogio) in Vigevano, Italy, have been praying and genuflecting with a dinosaur fossil in their midst, or so says paleontologist Andrea Tintori. The fossil has been right in their sight, in fact just to the left of the center of their altar, though there are a few skeptics who doubt Tintori's observations. (read further)

Photo from Discovery News, courtesy of Andrea Tintori

University of Milan paleontologist Tintori has determined that the early Jurassic age (~190mya)-stone slab contains the cross section of a dinosaur skull with visible nasal cavities and numerous teeth. Total length is about 12 inches. Tintori also found a second part of the skull in another slab. He hopes to get the first slab removed to do additional work.

Photo from Discovery News, courtesy of Andrea Tintori

Built between about 1532 and 1660, the cathedral, or duomo in Italian, contains a wide array of stone. The fossil-rich slab comes from quarries in Arzo, Switzerland, about 40 miles due north of Vigevano. They were first opened in the thirteenth century but didn’t become widely used till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the stone was used primarily for altars. It is a purple-red, grey-veined limestone with skeletal grains of crinoids and goes by various names but broccatello (brocaded) is the most common. (I wonder why builders wanted this stone for altars. Is there something about its color and pattern that conveys a message suitable to getting closer to God?)

The broccatello became popular as a replacement for the legendary Portasanta stone of Rome, the rock used for the Holy Door (Porta santa) of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Builders often combined the Arzo stone with red and grey limestone from Bergamo, black limestone from Lake Como, and white marble from the Apuan Alps. You can see the broccatello throughout Italy and Switzerland. No other dinosaur fossils have been reported.

In regard to Tintori's dinosaur, one person I corresponded with wrote back. “ALERT: this seems to be a cross-section of an ammonite!”

After my initial posting, I received one more note about the fossil. "Ammonites are well known from the Broccatello Formation, which is entirely marine and devoid of terrigenous sediment derived from the continent. The Broccatello preserves a rich fauna of marine fossils, sponges, sea lilies, brachiopods, bryozoans, solitary corals and the like and has been deposited in waters near the base of the photic zone [down to 600 feet]. The preservation looks also typical for an ammonite. The test [or shell], originally composed of the mineral aragonite, an unstable form of calcium carbonate would have been dissolved and the void filled by calcite, the stable mineral form of calcium carbonate. The photograph is not good enough to see the crystal fabric of the calcite, but I have no doubt about my diagnosis. If this is the head of a dinosaur, I'll give up geology and eat my rock hammer." Perhaps the sexiness of finding a dinosaur in a church made Tintori see more than meets the eye.

If you read the comments on various sites reporting this story, you will see that many note the irony of a catholic church having a fossil in it. Hundreds of church buildings are fossil rich so this isn’t really a new irony to report in regard to religion and evolution. I can only hope though it will get more people to take notice of the stone in their religious institutions, which seems to me to be one of the best reasons I can think of for visiting a church, synagogue, or mosque.

Lions and Tigers and Walruses, Oh my!

2010-10-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Do you ever have the feeling that you are being watched when you stroll through downtown streets? You are probably right. Hundreds of eyes peer out from buildings tracking your actions. These observers are neither human nor electronic. Instead, a host of animals watches you. A tour of any urban core reveals a veritable Noah’s Ark’s worth of carved and molded animals stalking your every step. Since I live in Seattle, I will share some of the beasts gracing our buildings.

The Times Square building (414 Stewart) is a good place to begin a downtown wildlife safari. Built in 1916, during the height of popularity for endowing buildings with animals, the wedge shaped structure sports 61 lion’s heads and 18 eagles. You might not notice them at first glance since none are lower than the fifth story. Keep in mind that this high elevation placement of wildlife typifies many structures.

Because of their symbolism as powerful, victorious, and noble animals, lions and eagles dominate the architectural menagerie. Six massive eagles stare out from the uppermost corners of the Washington Athletic Club and another half dozen with their wings outspread grace the Eagles Auditorium. If you look carefully, you can find more lions in Seattle than on the plains of Nigeria. Sixty feline heads loom out of the Seaboard Building (Fourth and Pike) while a parking garage at 1915 Second Avenue has a lion in profile. You can even see lions toting fruit at 1221 Second Avenue and find a zoological conundrum with a pride of lion reigning 14 stories up on the Alaska Building (Second and Cherry), which was Seattle’s first steel-framed skyscraper.

Animal ornamentation peaked between 1890 and 1940 in the heyday of terra cotta cladding in Seattle. Following Seattle’s Great Fire of 1889, architects turned to terra cotta as a cheap, light-weight, fireproof medium. In addition, because terra cotta was a molded clay block or brick, animals could be mass produced easily. Only four companies dominated the local industry and many downtown beasts probably originated from the same mold.

Architects often used animals to relay information about the building’s use. Over 20 dolphins adorn architect B. Marcus Priteca’s historic Crystal Swimming Pool (now the Crystal Pool skyscraper) at Second and Lenora, while a horse head protrudes out of what was the Pike Place Market Livery Stable (2200 Western Ave.)

And, of course, the best known of these motifs is found at Third and Cherry, where a phalanx of walrus heads decorate the Arctic Building, built in 1916 by Seattle’s first round of instantly rich folk to provide a suitable locale to banter about tales of the north. (I have been told that the original walrus heads displayed ivory tusks and that city officials removed them after the 1949 earthquake when one fell. I have never been able to verify this and hoped that in sharing this story someone might reply with additional information.) The tusks were remodeled after that quake. The most recent renovation, in 1997, returned the walruses to their original splendor, with terra cotta tusks.

Other animals found downtown include a metal bison, wolf, and bighorn sheep on planters at the base of the west side of what was the WaMu tower. Two goats and one cougar, as well as a pair of sheep and lions watch you enter the old Federal Building. Priteca also decorated the Coliseum Theater (Fifth and Pine) with 47 bull heads, festooned in bucolic splendor with pomegranates and grapes.

The old Chamber of Commerce building (215 Columbia St.), constructed in 1924, houses Seattle’s most diverse collection of real and mythical beasts. Two pelicans, a duck, and the ubiquitous eagle along with a gazelle, deer, bears, dolphins, and rams share space with two griffins and two hippocamps, a mythical beast with the forelegs of a horse and the tail of a dolphin. Poseidon and his wife supposedly rode these sea horses. In regard to the griffins, supposedly back in the day, a few folks called Seattle the Venice of America. Why anybody thought that, I haven't a clue, but griffins are the symbol of Venice.

This structure was one of the final Seattle buildings elaborately embellished with wildlife. By the late 1930s, Modernism’s stark, brutish, unornamented surfaces had replaced the ornate style of terra cotta. Now, animals on Seattle buildings are only found in relict preserves. Happy hunting, no matter where you live.

The Tweed Courthouse Stone

2010-10-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

It is always fun to come across a bit of corruption and shenanigans in the stone trade. Today, I want to focus on what was one of the most famous building stones of New York City, Tuckahoe Marble. First quarried around 1820, the Tuckahoe outcrops in northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and Westchester County, home of the quarries. The dolomitic marble comes from the Inwood Marble, a 450-million-year-old stone that metamorphosed during the formation of the Appalachians.

U.S. Assay Office NYC, formerly New Branch of the Bank of U.S. (found on this web site)

One of the earliest uses for Tuckahoe was in the New York branch of the Bank of the United States. Designed by Martin E. Thompson, the building became the US Assay Office in 1853 and in the early 1900s was the oldest federal structure in NYC. Such fame, however, didn’t save it from destruction in 1915. Curiously, the Tuckahoe façade was re-erected in Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Tuckahoe also achieved great fame in 1846 when Alexander T. Stewart, who would become one of New York’s wealthiest men, opened the city’s first large department store. Designed by the wonderfully named firm of Trench and Snook, the massive store was faced in Tuckahoe marble and quickly earned the moniker the “Marble Palace.”

Stewart also built a huge mansion with the marble, which unfortunately did not benefit the owner of the Tuckahoe quarry. According to the February 25, 1899 American Architect and Building News: “Mr. Stewart made a contract with the owner of the quarry, fixing a heavy penalty, amounting, practically, to the forfeiture of the quarry itself, for delay in delivery, beyond a specified time, of the marble. The delivery was delayed beyond the time, and Mr. Stewart determined to enforce the forfeiture. According to the story which was current in our younger days, the owner of the quarry went to Mr. Stewart to plead for mercy, but found him obdurate, and, overcome by grief and excitement, fell dead before him.”

Now to the corruption. Our story begins in 1861 with the construction of the county courthouse in New York City. The original budget was $250,000. As happens in many good civic projects, the builders decided to work with local stone, in this case the Tuckahoe marble. But this was the era of William "Boss" Tweed, a man who took corruption, bribery, and payouts to new heights. As he gathered more and more control over New York, Tweed made the County Courthouse into a money mill for himself and his cronies. For example, carpenter George S. Miller received $360,751 for one month of work; "Prince of Plasterers" Andrew Garvey got $2,870,464.06 for his efforts; and one company owned by Tweed charged $170,727 for chairs, all 40 of them.

In 1864, Tweed and pals purchased a marble quarry in Sheffield, Massachusetts for $3,080. Initially, the country ordered $1,200 worth of stone, which by 1867 had somehow morphed to costing $120,000. Over the years of construction, the county shelled out at least $420,000 for new, uncut marble for the courthouse. The courthouse was eventually completed in 1881, at a total cost of $12 million.

Over a century later, a decision was made to restore the courthouse. The initial study found that about 8 to 10 percent of the stone needed to be replaced. Most of the stone for restoration came from Georgia but workers also located 125 marble blocks in the Sheffield quarries. They had been slated for use in the Washington Monument (only four rows of Sheffield are in the obelisk, sandwiched between Texas and Cockeysville marbles) but after Tweed was convicted of wrong doing, no one wanted the stone. Now they are back in New York, apparently at true market cost.

Adaptive Reuse of Quarries: Swimming, Climbing, and Filming

2010-09-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

Like cats, many quarries have multiple lives, or at least continue to be used long after people have pulled out stone for buildings. My most recent reminder of this was an article in one of Seattle’s local newspapers. The story described how the Index quarry, which Swedish immigrant John Soderberg opened in 1904, had been purchased and protected by the local rock climbing community.

The Index granite, technically a granodiorite, was an important building material in Seattle in the early part of the twentieth century. Soderberg took advantage of the proximity of the Great Northern Railway tracks to ship the stone. It went primarily into curbs and foundations, including my favorite building in Seattle, Smith Tower, but like many a local stone, its luster soon faded, other stones came into the market, and quarry closed down by the mid 1930s. And then the quarry was forgotten until rock climbers discovered it as a great climbing area close to Puget Sound.

Hundreds of climbing routes were put up over the years, much on private land, as well as some in Forks of the Sky State Park. Luckily for the climbers, the private owner, as well as the state parks department, were supportive of the climbers but that support may not have lasted so the Washington Climbers Coalition decided to buy the climbing wall site. On August 25, they completed the purchase of the property and named it the Stimson Bullitt Climbing Reserve.

This is not the only adaptive reuse of abandoned quarries. While working on my book, Stories in Stone, I came across several similar sites. The great granite quarry of Quincy, supplier of stone for the Bunker Hill Monument and numerous structures on the east coast, is also a favorite urban climbing area.

Perhaps the most famous ex-quarry is the one that starred in the movie Breaking Away. After the quarry flooded, it became a popular swimming site. When Breaking Away came out, so many people sought out the quarry that the owners regretted that they ever let the filmmakers shoot there. Access to the quarry is now discouraged, prohibited, and forbidden.

Portland, Connecticut's fabulous brownstone quarry also flooded, initially when the nearby Connecticut River overflowed into 200-foot-deep hole. Later, a hurricane pushed water back into the quarry and closed it permanently. The property had been slated for development--the plan called for cutting a channel to the river and opening a marina--but then the real estate market crashed. The city of Portland bought the property in 1999 and it was designated a National Historic Landmark the following year. At present, the quarry and site have been opened for a variety of adventure activities, including snorkeling, mountain biking, and zip lines. I am not sure such use truly honors the people who worked the quarry and supplied stone for buildings from Boston to San Francisco but it is a creative use of the land.

P.S. Just got a short note from Dave Tucker at NW Geology Field Trips that reminded me of one other swimming pool quarry. Here is what Dave wrote: "The public pool in Tenino, WA, occupies the old quarry south of downtown. It is closed for the season now. Some water runs through a pipe above the quarry to form a waterfall into the pool. I talked with a local high school kid who was sneaking a smoke by the pool, he said it is ‘hundreds and hundreds of feet deep’. I thought he was just smoking tobacco, but after that comment, not so sure. Just east of the pool area is a stack of big sandstone blocks with splitting holes visible on the edges. All stacked up to form a maze and play area."

Moab's Building Stone: Questions Remain

2010-09-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Ah, Moab, My Moab. For the first time, I decided to see what I could find out about the local building stone. I hadn’t noticed the stone much during the nine years that I lived there in late 1980s and early 1990s. Why would I? I had the most stunning rocks in the world to look at all around me. Now that I am older and wiser, I looked more closely at the few buildings of rock in the land of red rocks.

The best known building of stone is Star Hall. The locals used red rock, what those in the east call brownstone. At present, Star Hall is used for plays, concerts, films, and the like. It is a simple, yet elegant design with a gambrel-style roof and arched windows. Some have called the building Richardsonian Romanesque though it lacks the true rough hewn nature of blocks that I associate with that style but then I am not an architectural historian.

As one might expect of a building erected in 1905 in rural Utah, it was built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or the Mormons. These wild and crazy early pioneers sought a meeting and recreational hall. In Grand Memories, a history of the area published by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, it states that Will Shafer, a carpenter, designed the building; Steve Day quarried the stone; Will Bliss hauled the stone (making four trips a day with his wagon team); and Angus Murray Stocks, a well known mason, dressed the stone. They began working sometime in the spring of 1905 and finished in May 1906.

According to Grand Memories, Day and Bliss got the rock at the “Goose Island stone quarry about a mile above the river spring.” The spring has long been known as Matrimony Spring and until 2008 emerged out of pipe a few hundred yards up Utah SR-128. (Southeastern Utah District Health Environmental Health Scientist Jim Adamson declared the spring contaminated and closed it to public access. At present, you can still access the spring, which now flows directly out of the wall. By the way, if you look carefully under the water at the spring you can see several three-toed tracks, probably dinosaur but possibly pterosaur.)

View of Kayenta Formation at Goose Island

During my visit to Moab, I tried to locate any evidence of a quarry at Goose Island. The area is the first broad bench of rock up the Colorado River and dominated primarily by the Kayenta Formation, a Jurassic age fluvial sandstone. I could find no evidence of any quarry though I did find a neat piece of metal buried in the sand. I suspect that there was no formal quarry and that Day probably just blasted or broke off pieces of rock, which Stocks shaped on site at Star Hall. I also tried to locate any evidence of why Goose Island is called Goose Island and had the same lack of luck.

View from area above Goose Island (where are the geese and where is the island?)

I was also told by a local resident that the Star Hall stone was quarried further up river at Jackass Canyon. The canyon is across the road from the Hal Canyon campground. This area seems less likely as a quarry spot because the slopes consist of rocks of the Moenkopi Formation and Chinle Formation, neither of which would make good building material. Both units are too soft. Of course, Day could have cut stone from debris blocks that had fallen from the rock units above the Chinle and Moenkopi but there is no way to verify this. Plus why would Day travel five miles further to get rocks.

Ultimately, I have to go with the original source of Goose Island though I write this without complete confidence. The stones in Star Hall don’t really look like the Kayenta; they seem too pink but they are fresh, cleaned surfaces as opposed to the weathered rocks found in nature. Any additional insights would be appreciated.

Back to the Beginning: A Reading in Moab

2010-09-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

Long ago when I graduated from college, I ended up in Moab, Utah. It was here that I truly fell under the spell of rocks. For the next nine years, I hiked, biked, canoed, backpacked, and explored the red rock country of southern Utah. It was a geologist's paradise with few of those pesky green things called trees getting in the way of seeing stone.

Now, for the first time since my book Stories in Stone was published I am going back to Moab. While there, I will give a reading at one of my favorite bookstores, Back of Beyond Books. The sister store to Arches Bookstore, Back of Beyond (or Bob, as I call it) focuses on regional books, with new, used, and antiquarian selections, including first editions of many Edward Abbey books. It will be an honor and pleasure to talk about how my time in Moab led me down the path to focus on the cultural and natural history of building stone.

The reading will be at 7:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 9. It should be a fun time!

Fossils in our Nation's Capital

2010-09-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

No, the title doesn't refer to the ancient beasts roaming the halls of Congress though I do wish some of them would go the way of dinosaurs. Instead, I want to highlight a web site I just learned about. It is Fossils in the Architecture of Washington, DC: A Guide to Washington's Accidental Museum of Paleontology. The site has been put together by Christopher Barr, a lawyer who has lived in DC since 1979. As the name implies, the site's goal is "to describe, or at least list, all of the public fossils occurring in Washington's architectural landscape."

A Jurassic ammonite from the Reptile House at the National Zoo (pinched from DC Fossils)

Barr has done a first rate job of assembling a thorough list of the fossil-rich buildings throughout the capital. For each building, he provides an introduction on what you can see, where to see it, and a history of the building. In some cases, he also speculates why a particular stone was chosen. He then provides photos (with helpful scales) of the fossils, which he describes in detail, providing geologic background. Finally, he documents who helped him and where one can obtain more background information. Nowhere else have I found such a well-put-together site about urban fossils.

An Ordovician nautiloid in the National Gallery of Art (pinched from DC Fossils)

Urban fossils are amazing resources and offer an excellent way to get people interested in fossils, deep time, evolution, and geology in general. Plus, as Barr has done, these fossils are a great way to get people to think about human history. He does list a many of the guides that are available but it is such a small list considering the wonderful fossils found in the urban environment. I hope that Barr's site can inspire other urban paleontologists to do the same thing in their cities.

Edward Drinker Cope: His Home Inside and Out

2010-08-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Probably every geology-oriented person knows about Edward Drinker Cope and his well-financed, nasty battle with Othniel Charles Marsh but probably fewer know about his stone-fronted house in Philadelphia. Today, I aim to try and fix this sorry dearth of knowledge by focusing on said home. Like many aspects of Cope’s life, a bit of controversy surrounds it.

From Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science blog

Cope owned two adjacent row houses, at 2100 and 2102 Pine Street. They are classic Second Empire with a mansard roof pierced with dormers and prominent projecting bay windows. He acquired the property in 1885 and initially lived around the corner. 2102 Pine served as his laboratory. The house sounds like a wonderful chaotic mess. His friend and biographer Henry Osborn once wrote:

“The first floor became a storeroom for boxes and cases. At the back of the second floor was Cope’s study and the editorial room of the American Naturalist [Cope purchased the magazine in 1877 and owned it until his death. During that time he wrote 776 articles. Ironically, Marsh’s uncle, George Peabody, had provided the money that funded the Peabody Academy of Sciences, where the magazine was initially published.]…This room always contained some of the more interesting fossils, which were brought in from the storeroom when Cope was working upon them. The front room on the second floor was entirely filled with shelves on which stood paper boxes, containing the smaller objects in Cope’s Permian and Pampean collections. On the third floor back was the preparation room, presided over by the genial Jacob Geismar…Around the floor of Cope’s study there always wandered a venerable tortoise. To the left of his study table was a vivarium, which contained a ‘Gila monster’.”

The controversy centers on exactly what type of stone clads the three-and-a-half-story row house about a mile south of the Academy of Natural Sciences. According to the nomination for the National Register of Historic Places, written in 1975, the house is faced “with a green stone peculiar to Philadelphia.” This would mean a serpentine, a stone first used in the early 1700s. Several local quarries provided the building material, which historian Berenice M. Ball wrote “suited the romantic architectural ideas of the late 1800s perfectly.”

I am not sure, however, what the person who wrote the nomination was thinking. All recent photos of the building clearly show that a white stone faces the house. (The building was not refaced, as you can see that the 1975 image and modern one have the same stone.) Perhaps the author did not visit the house or was colorblind.

From National Register of Historic Places Nomination

As I started to ask around, I found that no one knew what the white stone was. One person suggested that it might be Cockeysville Marble, a stone I previously wrote about for its use in the Washington Monument. An architectural historian thought that a local limestone from Montgomery County, PA, clad the structure. Both are possibilities as both were used in the area, although the Cockeysville appears to have been less popular. My trusty 1880 census of the building stone industry notes that the Montgomery limestone (actually a marble found locally within the limestone belt) was popular from the late 1700s till at least 1840 so. It was used for the U. S. Customs House and U.S. Mint, as well as for the sarcophagi of George and Martha Washington.

If anyone knows what stone was used, please let me know.

Unfortunately, failed mining ventures in New Mexico and Colorado depleted Cope’s wealth and around 1881 he mortgaged the laboratory at 2102 Pine and in 1885 leased his Pine Street residence. He and his wife moved around the corner. Cope eventually sold much of his collection to the American Museum of Natural History but as a visit near the end of his life from the artist Charles Knight reveals, the house was still full.

“Inside, everything was unique and completely dust covered. Never have I seen such a curious place—just like the kind Dickens would have loved. Piles of pamphlets rose from the floor to ceiling in every narrow hallway, leaving just enough room to squeeze by them and no more…Dust lay thick here as elsewhere, and the place was absolutely bare of furniture and hangings. No pictures, no curtains, nothing but petrified skeletons of extinct monsters…”

Cope died at home on April 12, 1897. He was 57 years old. Jane Davidson in her revisionist biography of Cope notes that the houses are now subdivided into six to eight apartments each. A sign identifying the house and Cope stands in front of the building.

From Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science blog

Mystery Solved: Bones found in Bridge

2010-08-19T08:48:00.000-07:00

On August 19, 1969, a short article appeared in the New York Times about the solving of an 85-year-old fossil legend. The story began on October 20, 1884, when workers at a small quarry near Manchester, Connecticut, discovered fossils in several blocks of brownstone. Word of the bones soon reached legendary paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, but before all of the fossil-rich blocks could be saved, several went into a bridge over Bigelow Brook in South Manchester. They remained there until the Connecticut highway department decided to replace the bridge, when Yale professor John Ostrom acquired the blocks and found the long lost fossils.

The bridge over Hop Creek at Bridge Street, now demolished. While stone for this bridge was being quarried at Buckland, dinosaurs were found." Photo by Sylvian Ofiara in The Manchester Evening Herald. Published in A New England Pattern by William E. Buckley, 1973. Used courtesy of Manchester Historical Society

The quarry, owned by Charles O. Wolcott, pulled stone out of the Portland Formation, a 200-million-old sandstone deposited into a rift valley on the eastern margin of North America. Out of quarries of this stone in other parts of the Connecticut River Valley came most of the brownstone used in New York City and Boston. The major quarry was in Portland, Connecticut, about 15 miles southwest of Manchester. A shopping mall now covers the Wolcott quarry.

According to Marsh’s notes, the block was “half as large as an ordinary dining table.” It supposedly contained the front end of a dinosaur that Marsh initially named Anchisaurus major, which he changed to Ammosaurus in 1891. He was able to name the dinosaur from the remains of the hind end that had been found in a block saved for him. Over the next few years two other dinosaur specimens came out of the same quarry. Marsh named them Anchisaurus colorus and A. solus, in 1891 and 1892, respectively. Both also were renamed later. A colorus became Yaleosaurus and A. solus became Ammosaurus solus.

The Times article reported that Ostrom spent two years surveying more than 60 bridges in the region and finally concluded with 95% certainty that the notorious block had gone into a bridge over Hop Brook. (A study by Peter Galton in 1976 noted that there had been some confusion in the records, which lead to the search.) When news reached Ostrom about the bridge’s soon-to-happen destruction, he contacted the highway crew, which readily agreed to allow Ostrom and a crew to examine some 400 sandstone blocks over a two-day-period. Local elementary school teacher Richard Sanders found the first bone, a rib. Shortly thereafter, laboratory technician Rebekah Smith noticed a larger bone, a femur.

Over the next few years Peter Galton conducted a detailed study (Postilla 169, 1976) of all of the prosauropods (now called basal sauropodomorphs) from North America, including the new bones found in the bridge blocks. He again revised the names of the dinosaurs collected from the Wolcott quarry. Now, just two species remained, what Galton called “the slender-footed Anchisaurus polyzelus” and the “broad footed Ammosaurus major.” The rib came from Ammosaurus but the femur could not be clearly identified.

Skelton of Ammosaurus major from Galton's 1976 study. Based on bones from Wolcott's quarry

Galton's study, however, did not end the confusion over the fossils from Wolcott's quarry. In the subsequent years, various paleontologists have debated which species the bones came from. Were there two species as Galton initially concluded, or one (A. major) as Paul Sereno (Special Papers in Palaeontology 77, 261-289) concluded in 2007 or one (A. polyzelus) as Adam Yates (Palaeontology 53:4, 739-752) concluded in 2010? Clearly the legendary bones still contain a bit of mystery.

Family Hour in Seattle: Squirrels and Crows

2010-08-18T14:44:00.000-07:00

Warning. This post has nothing to do with geology.

It has been a busy hour for families in my neighborhood. For the past ten minutes or so, I have been watching a strange little manifestation of urban flight as a family moved up the block in what appears to be a case of escaping a bad situation. I first noticed the migration when I saw a gray squirrel trotting along the telephone wires across from our house. From my desk, I could see that the squirrel carried something large in its mouth, but I wasn’t quick enough to get out my binoculars before it disappeared into a dense spruce.

Twenty seconds later, I saw the squirrel again, headed in the opposite direction across the wire. This time it climbed up a pine, about thirty feet south of the spruce. I had noticed squirrels going into this tree over the past few weeks and figured it harbored a nest. In a half a minute, the squirrel descended and leapt onto the wire. This time I had the binoculars out and could see that she was carrying a baby squirrel, one small arm extended out over mom’s head. Again, she climbed the spruce and vanished in the foliage.

She proceeded to carry over two more youngsters. Each time she seemed to be in a hurry, moving quickly over the wire and only pausing periodically. When she stopped (I know she was a she because I could see nipples), she looked like she was catching her breath. Now she is gone, apparently having moved all of her kids.

What prompted her move? A mammalogist I know speculated that some body or some thing had disturbed her nest. Curiously, we also have a nest of Cooper’s Hawks on our block. They live in a huge Douglas fir down the block. I have also been watching and hearing them. The youngsters, like so many, are easy to tell because they have a whiny sort of call, which I find appealing. The hawks have definitely been causing havoc amongst the other, wilder residents.

Last week, I watched one of the beautiful long-tailed birds sitting high in a Doug fir in our yard eating a smaller bird. I couldn’t see who had become breakfast, but as the hawk bent over and grabbed at the meal in its talons little feathers would flutter down.

A second possibility for the move suggested themselves five minutes or so after the squirrel’s exodus. Two crows landed on the wire above the squirrel’s travel route. They stood a few inches apart before one of them shimmied over and began to use its beak to pick at the neck and head of its neighbor. The one being pecked had that head down look I have when I am getting my neck scratched. AAAH, that feels good.

Crows are known predators and scavengers of other birds and squirrels. In fact, they often get blamed for much urban wildlife depredation, mostly because they operate during the day and get seen with their meals, whereas other carnivores, such as raccoons, generally do their work at night. I know there are raccoons in the area as I saw a large one across the street during the day a few weeks back.

I won’t speculate as to who caused the move. It was fun to watch. And in just a few more weeks, those young squirrels will be on their own, without mom’s protection. Such is the life for all of us.

Arizona Red: Red Rock and Brownstone

2010-08-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Lee Allison at Arizona Geology recently sent me a link to a nifty article about a sandstone quarry in Flagstaff. The article details the history of the use of the Moenkopi Formation sandstone, which sold under the name Arizona Red. Construction of a new fire station prompted the story as it will be built on the site of the old quarry.

The quarry opened in 1888 providing massive blocks of stone for the growing town and quickly attracted the attention of builders around the west. Many buildings with Arizona Red still stand in Flagstaff, including the Coconino County Courthouse, the Babbitt Brothers building (which also contains brick made from Moenkopi derived soils), and a host of structures on the Northern Arizona University campus. By 1910, however, Arizona Red was no longer popular.

Residents of Flagstaff were not the first to use the Moenkopi for building. Beautiful structures with it can be found just north of Flagstaff in Wupatki National Monument. The Sinagua people first started to build here around 675 CE. They moved out of the area just prior to the 1064 eruption of nearby Sunset Crater.

As Marie Jackson noted in her wonderful book Stone Landmarks: Flagstaff's Geology and Historic Building Stones, more than 500 boxcars of Arizona Red were sent to Los Angeles for its county courthouse in 1889. Unfortunately, damage from a 1933 earthquake led to demolition in 1936.

LA County Courthouse From Books about California web site

LA County Courthouse From www.courtinfo.ca.gov/courts/trial/historic/losangeles.htm

Another well-known California edifice made of Arizona Red is the Whittier Mansion in San Francisco. Built between 1894 and 1896, the mansion has had a colorful history of ownership, including shipping and mercantile magnate William Franklin Whittier; the German Reich, for use as a consulate; the United States Government, which seized the building during World War II; and the California Historical Society. It is now a private residence, curiously painted an odd tan/yellow. Perhaps that is why either the ghosts of Whittier or his son have been reported to haunt the house.

Whittier Mansion 1919 from www.noehill.com

Whittier Mansion modern From www.noehill.com

Jackson describes the stone as "rather soft...in which the sand grains are not especially well cemented." This weakness contributed to the stone's downfall in areas wetter than Flagstaff. In particular, she noted that Arizona Red did poorly on the Whittier. That weakness, however, also made it easy for masons to carve elaborate detailing, which can still be seen in buildings in more arid regions.

The Moenkopi Formation extends across the Colorado Plateau and formed between 242 and 237 million years ago. Deposition occurred on a wide coastal plain in a semi-arid environment. Around Flagstaff the sands came from the overflow of streams onto the sand and mudflats. In other areas, the mudflats preserve excellent trace fossils, such as raindrops and reptile tracks. Fine layers of Moenkopi make up the base of many slopes in the canyonlands region of southern Utah.

One final note that ties back to my title for this posting. When I first moved to Boston in 1996 away from Moab, Utah, I sorely missed the red rock canyons of the desert, but as I noted in my book Stories in Stone, I happened upon the brownstone base of Harvard Hall on Harvard's campus. After doing my part as an agent of erosion, I made the simple observation that brownstone and red rock are basically the same thing--a sandstone colored by iron. It was a wonderful day for me as I realized that I could make a deeper connection to geology through building stone.

The Toads of Mount St. Helens

2010-05-18T07:56:00.001-07:00

Today being the 30^th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, I wanted to describe a visit I made to the mountain several years ago. I was out in the field with Charlie Crisafulli, a researcher for the U.S. Forest Service. We were heading to small lake about eight miles north of the crater when Charlie told me “Be careful where you step as we approach the lake.”

At first I didn’t understand why he warned me; the terrain was level and we were walking on a four foot wide path. As we got closer, though, the ground began to move. Dark, half-inch-long toadlets hopped everywhere. Scores crossed the path. More moved along the sides and others disappeared into the dense green understory. At the lake, we found thousands in pulsating piles collected along the water’s edge.

When I looked closely, I saw that many of the little hoppers had yet to loose their tails. Charlie, who had been studying the mountain since the eruption, explained to me that they were recently metamorphosed boreal toads and that they soon would head up into the hillsides that surround the lake and continue one of the most amazing stories at the volcano.

During Charlie’s first ten years on the mountain, he had noticed large numbers of boreal toads. This surprised him because the toads, warty, four to five-inch long, brownish green hoppers, had been on the decline throughout the west. (They are listed as “endangered” in Colorado and New Mexico and designated as a protected non-game species in Wyoming.) Trying to determine why the toads thrived at the volcano, he surveyed every lake in the national monument in the early 1990s and found that four lakes had far and away the areas of highest toad density.

In an ongoing study of the one lake where we had tiptoed through the toads, Charlie discovered why so many toads now lived at the volcano. Each June, he and his crew hike out to the partially frozen lake, where hundreds of toads and a handful of northwest salamanders hop and crawl across the snow. The researchers then wade into the water, push aside rafts of ice, and wait. Males arrive first. After the females arrive, pairs mate quietly (the male lacks the typical toad mating call), and produce teeming masses of eggs, up to 12,000 per female. Eggs hatch 7 to 10 days later. The toads we saw had recently crawled out of the water and were preparing to disperse into the mountains surrounding the lake.

“We think that this is what happened in 1980. During the eruption, the frogs were hibernating underground and emerged a month or so later and continued their normal life cycle,” said Charlie. In the long term, the toads benefited because the eruption blasted down all of the trees around the lake, making the water warmer thus increasing food resources during the summer and allowing tadpoles to mature more quickly. The blast also removed most of the toads’ predators, so more toadlets and adults survived.

Thirty years later, the toads are still thriving at Mount St. Helens. In doing so, they have contributed to a new understanding of ecological recovery. In landscapes where geologic and ecologic change is the rule and not the exception, disturbance plays an important role in the life of the ecosystem. Fires, volcanic eruptions, and floods regularly reshape broad swaths of the American West. Sometimes, entire ecosystems are devastated. But every time a cataclysm happens, the plants and animals recover.

It’s a lesson, perhaps, in patience: What we see today as a natural disaster may not be a disaster at all, just a natural clock resetting, a cycle starting over again. Lessons come in all shapes, sometimes even little green ones.

Giro d'Italia and Carrara

2010-05-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

In honor of the Giro d'Italia ending in Carrara today, here's a take on the town. I first saw Carrara and its quarries from a car window, while I was driving north out of Pisa. My wife, a couple friends, and I had stopped in Pisa to look at the Leaning Tower but left after about 45 minutes. It’s not made of Carrara marble and the commercialization was offputting. I didn’t need to buy boxers with Leaning Tower located in a prominent place.

We were about 25 miles or so from the green foothills of the Apuan Alps. Broken clouds created a pattern of shade and light punctuated by several bright white splotches. Earlier I had read guidebooks that explained that “No, that isn’t snow, it’s marble,” so I knew I was seeing the Carrara marble. I was quite giddy at seeing it, but as we drove closer to town my excitement began to fizzle. Where were the charming old buildings? Quarries had been worked in these mountains more or less continuously for the past five centuries and I expected quaint structures made of the local stone. Instead, the road felt like many other industrial/shopping mall districts I had driven by, with warehouses, car dealers, and restaurants creating a monotonous blur of banal buildings. I enjoyed seeing all of the stone mills, each with stacks of marble blocks, pallets of sliced stone slabs, and massive cranes for ferrying the stone, but they looked like any stone mill I had seen in my previous travels.

Finally, as we drove closer to the mountains the wide, industrial street gave way to a confusing maze of narrow, often one-way, poorly marked roads. After circling around, getting lost, backtracking, and hoping we knew where we were, we crammed our little rental car into a spot along a lane about twice as wide as our car. A typical Carrarese building, a four story, plain stucco-covered structure, stood about two feet from my front door. On the other side of the road, and twenty feet below us in a concrete-sided trench, ran the Torrente Carrione, Carrara’s couple-inch-deep trickle of a stream.

Abandoning the car, the four of us wandered toward where we thought our bed and breakfast might be. The streets closed tighter, eventually getting too narrow for cars. Above us rose canyon-creating buildings, many with windows festooned with drying laundry and hanging planters. Not every building was made from marble, but I had no doubt we had entered a hub of the marble universe. Not that the locals respected their great stone; graffiti covered many marble walls and several marble statues.

The next morning, I met with Dr. Paolo Conti, a geologist at the Center for Geotechnology at the University of Siena. Paolo had graciously offered to take me up into the mountains to learn more about the quarries and the geology. Getting in his car we drove three miles or so into the Apuans. We parked in a lot next to the Ponti di Vara, a handsome, five-arched, brick-and-marble bridge. Originally, a route for the railroad that crisscrossed the quarries, the Ponti di Vara is barely wide enough for the hundreds of trucks that zip across it each day.

From where we stood, we could look directly up toward the quarries of marble. They glowed a blinding white in the sunlight and had crept half way up Mount Maggiore, which rose 3,000 feet above us. Across the road, yellow signs pointed to several quarries, including the legendary Fantiscritti, quarried since Roman times. Another sign read “Visita la cava in galleria piu’ bella del mondo.” Visit the most beautiful underground quarry in the world.

Pulling out several, very cool and colorful geology maps, Paolo showed us that we were at the base of the Miseglia valley, one of three quarry valleys around Carrara. To the north lay Torano and to the south Colonnata. Each cut back into the Apuans for several miles and each had quarries first operated in Roman times. No one knows how many quarries have pierced these mountains but I have read an estimate as high as 650. One of Paolo’s geologic map from 2000 listed 187 quarries.

Since I wanted to see more of the quarries, Paolo suggested we head up above the next valley north, Torano. After driving for ten minutes or so, Paolo swerved the car across the road on a hairpin turn, and pulled off on a very soft shoulder. His driving seemed like a typical geologist’s, veering abruptly to see rocks, combined with an Italian’s sanguinity at cutting across a blind turn.

“I often bring students here,” said Paolo, perhaps explaining his driving calm. “It’s one of the better spots to see the thick beds of limestone (the 200-million-year old source material for the marble).” We got out, I looked both ways, and crossed the road. Oaks and beeches, some of which had begun to change color, grew out of the gray, massive rock. I had encountered limestone like this before in many places. I called it tearpants limestone, in reference to its sharp, resistant edges. “We haven’t found many fossils in this rock but this is one place we have,” said Paolo. I looked but found nothing other than a few snails crawling across the broken edges of lackluster limestone.

Up and up we drove as the road climbed and wound steadily through the foothills. We passed through zones of pines, under a canopy of rust colored beeches, before stopping near a small lodge, where we hoped to find lunch. Since it was closed we walked across the road and hiked up a trail to the Refugio Carrara, one of the elaborate huts that one can stay at throughout the Italian Alps. We did find lunch there and I got to accomplish one of my goals for the trip.

Over the past few years, a cured pig fat called Lardo di Colonnata has achieved a certain status among epicures, but for Carrara’s cavatori lardo has been a staple of their diet for centuries, a cheap, abundant food that tasted cool and refreshing on a hot day. I knew I couldn’t quarry stone, but at least I could eat like a quarryman. The Carrarese make lardo in their dank basements by curing raw pig fat in a tub of marble. Additional flavor comes from a combination of rock salt, pepper, garlic, and rosemary. Like the cavatori, I ate my thin slice of lardo with onion and tomato on bread. It had a creamy, translucent texture and melted deliciously in my mouth. I followed it with a shot of espresso. Geologizing doesn’t get any better than this.

Energized by pig fat and caffeine, we headed back out to find rocks. Paolo whisked us down the road to a spectacular viewpoint into the Torano Basin, where I could finally get a sense of the scale of quarrying. In the center of the valley, fifteen hundred feet lower and a three quarters of mile away, a ledgy quarry, known as Polvaccio, stairstepped up the valley face. Polvaccio has been worked since Roman times and was where Michelangelo quarried his Pietá block. Getting out my binoculars, I counted 18 ledges of marble, each of which Paolo explained was between 15 and 30 feet thick.

Nearly every inch of the valley walls around Polvaccio had been ravaged by quarries. Road after road zigzagged up the nearly vertical faces, faces covered white in marble by years of quarry debris. The bends on the quarry roads are so sharp that trucks cannot turn and instead back down every other switchback. More roads climbed the valley wall below me, as well as the smaller valleys south and east of Polvaccio. At the high points of the southern and eastern valley ridgelines, quarries had lopped off the summits, creating openings shaped like gun sights. “I remember when there was a mountain there,” said Paolo. The view was one of the most spectacular and disturbing I have ever seen.

Greystones: Chicago's Answer to Brownstones

2010-05-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

Many people, including me, have written extensively about the classic brownstones of New York and Boston. Recently, I learned about a similar building style popular only in Chicago. Architects and historians call the buildings greystones. The term refers to structures built primarily between 1890 and 1915 and most often in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale. A survey published in December 2005 for the Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative estimated 1,714 greystone buildings in North Lawndale.

North Lawndale has an incredibly rich social history. By 1930, only Warsaw and New York had more Jewish residents. Forty nine synagogues dotted the neighborhood. By 1960, however, African-Americans made up 91 percent of the population. As Charles Leeks of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago wrote in The Chicago Greystone in Historic North Lawndale “If Lawndale’s Greystones could talk, they would tell us” of Golda Meir, Dinah Washington, Benny Goodman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Clarence Darrow making a vibrant, dynamic neighborhood.

From: www.nhschicago.org/content/greystone.php

Like the brownstones of the east coast, Chicago’s greystones were two- or three-story, commonly 2 or 3 flats (though there could be up to 6), flat roofed, brick buildings with a façade of more fancy stone. There also were greystone mansions and one-story greystone “shoeboxes,” but not so many as to define a unified style. More then 93 percent have fewer than five residential units. Working class people of modest means, with some more affluent middle class folks, were the primary buyers and tenants. Some streets are entirely greystones flats, whereas others may contain just one or two greystones.

On the eastern seaboard, the stone embellishment was the 200-million-year old Portland Formation. Chicago builders, in contrast, took advantage of their proximity to the great limestone quarry region of Indiana and enhanced their brick with the 330-million-year old Salem Limestone. I won’t write more about these stones because I have covered them thoroughly in previous blog posts.

The survey found two stages of style. Initially between 1890 and 1905, primarily Romanesque buildings with rusticated limestone dominated. They featured arches and robust cornices. Next came a Neo-Classical look incorporating smooth limestone blocks, bay and Palladian windows, and columns. Throughout the era, many builders also built purely brick buildings in the same styles. Curiously the color of the brick changed from red to tawny.

From: www.greystonepreservationllc.com

Beginning in 2006, a consortium of groups banded together to form the Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative to preserve these wonderful buildings. Composed of community residents, non-profits, business, academic, and government partners, the Initiative promotes renovation and protection, through technical and financial assistance. They are doing vital and critical work. I wish them continued success.

Marble Madness and Mayhem

2010-04-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago I received an interesting email from a Danish engineer in regard to my story about the Aon/Amoco/Standard Oil building (Big Stan) in Chicago. He was concerned that I had given a jaundiced picture of marble as a cladding material. “You forgot to write that there are a very, very high number of marble facades performing extremely well in all kinds of climatic zones,” he wrote. He is absolutely correct that the vast majority of buildings clad in marble do not experience the panel bowing problems found on Big Stan. Marble is generally a sound choice, when used correctly.

But in the article co-written by my Danish correspondent, it is also clear that there have been what seems to me an unusually high number of buildings where marble cladding has failed. (Durability of Marble Cladding—A Comprehensive Literature Review, in Journal of ASTM International, v. 4 no. 4, 2007) These include La Grande Arch de la Defénce (see photo below) and SCOR Tower, Paris; Richmond City Hall, Virginia (all marbles panels removed and replaced by steel, painted aluminum, and granite); and IBM Tower in Brussels.

Two buildings stand out for the most notorious warping. One is the 310-foot tall Zagrepcanka tower in Zagreb, Croatia, unaffectionately dubbed “The hells tower,” due to falling panels that led to construction of a tunnel to allow employees to reach the entrance. (The smaller photos are of the Zagreb tower, by Jan Anders Brundin.)

The other is Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall, designed by the great architect Alvar Aalto. Completed in 1972 with 7,000 square meters of Carrara marble, the panels started to deteriorate with bowing, cracking, and spalling. The fine citizens of Helsinki decided to replace the panels and chose to reuse Carrara again. Within six months these new, supposedly ultrastrong, ultrasecure panels began to warp. Curiously, they warped convexly; the original panels warped concavely. To this day no can explain why.

Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, with Carrara marble panels, image from Wikipedia

Building stone has failed across climates from northern Europe to Cuba to Libya to Canada in marble quarried in areas equally as diverse, such as Vermont, Greece, Greenland, and Norway. Carrara marble, however, leads the field, in part because it is the most widely used marble in the world.

In their report, the authors made several observations:

The higher the temperature variations, the higher degree of bowing.
Higher humidity can lead to problems when water penetrates pore spaces.
There is no correlation between panel size and thickness and tendency to bow.
Bowing tends to be more pronounced on the southeast and southwest facades.
More pronounced bowing occurs on the upper parts of buildings.
No link has been found between anchoring system and bowing.
Marble color doesn’t impact bowing.
Pollution doesn’t impact bowing.
At least a half-dozen previous authors have noted that bowing depends on the grain boundaries of the marble, which ultimately depends on the geologic history of the stone.

The authors recommend the development of a series of guidelines to choose, test, and produce marble panels. They conclude that “technically acceptable properties should…have very high priority when choosing a marble type for a building project, whereas today aesthetical properties are often considered as being of greatest importance even though the aesthetic problems will change rapidly for a nonsuitable marble as it deteriorates.” In other words, no matter how pretty and elegant the Carrra marble looked on Big Stan, when they failed, it was a monumental screw up that could have been avoided if the builders had been more concerned with function over style. Once again, it pays to pay attention to geology.

Talk at Rick Steves

2010-04-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

A quick last minute posting. For those in the Seattle region, I will be giving a talk on Thursday night (April 22) at the Rick Steves' Travel Center in Edmonds. The talk will run from 6 to 7 p.m. and will focus on the building stones of Italy. I will highlight the travertine quarried in Tivoli and used for the Colosseum and the marble of Carrara, best known as the favored sculpting medium of Michelangelo. I will also discuss the brilliance of Roman architects and engineers and look at how well they understood the building properties of the different building stones found around Rome.

The talk is free and open to all. It will be fun and informative, or so I like to think.

Even Dante was impressed with the Carrara marble. This quote is carved into a panel placed above a quarry in Carrara, which the great poet visited.

By combining tuff and travertine, the Romans were able to take advantage of each stone's strengths to build amazing structures, such as the Theater of Marcellus.

This panel of travertine is from the cutting yard of the Mariotti family quarry, which supplied the stone for the Getty Museum complex in Los Angeles.

Castle Car Wash: Part 2

2010-04-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Following up my posting about Castle Car Wash, I have learned a bit more about the stone used in the structure from Dave Clark, who operates a web site and blog devoted to Chicago and its transportation history, particularly along Route 66. Clark reports that much of the stone did indeed come from quarries in Joliet and Lemont, about 15 to 20 miles southwest of Chicago. Known variously as Lemont Limestone, Joliet Limestone, Lemont Marble, Joliet Marble, and Athens Marble, it is a dolomitic limestone deposited around 415 to 420 million years ago. Quarries are in the Sugar Run and Joliet formations.

Workmen excavating the Illinois & Michigan Canal discovered the stone in 1846, but it “was not then considered of superior quality,” according to A. T. Andreas’ History of Chicago. Within a decade, however, the buttery yellow limestone began to appear in buildings in Chicago, giving the city “a light, bright, and almost French appearance.” One of the most famous structures is the Chicago Water Tower built in 1869 and described by Oscar Wilde as a “castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it.” ( I wonder if the water tower inspired John Murphy to build his castle.)

And then that persnickety old cow of Mrs. Leary kicked over the bucket that caused the fire that burned Chicago to the ground and revealed that perhaps the original discoverers of the Joliet stone were right. (I know that this version of the fire is most likely an apocryphal story but I like it.) By the way, if you hadn't figured it out, the water tower survived the inferno.

The great conflagration had disastrous affects on the Joliet rock, which “seemed as though [it] actually burned like wood,” according to a newspaper account. Builders were so prejudiced against the local stone that in the first 30 days after the fire, most ordered brick, from as far away as Philadelphia. Yet by 1876, when the City of Chicago and Cook County teamed up to build a combined courthouse/city hall, to replace the buildings lost in the fire, the Board of County Commissioners adopted a resolution that builders had to use limestone.

One could look on the Board’s decision as local pride and an interest in helping local businesses but that would be naïve. The Chicago Tribune called the process “utter absurdity.” This was Chicago in the 1870s, where corruption had become an artform. The Board’s initial choice of contractor put in a bid of $895,000, or what would amount to a “at least a quarter of a million steal.” When that bid failed, the Board hoped to make their money by finding an architect who would help plunder the system. Despite repeated editorials in the Tribune against the “Ring,” the Board chose to use Lemont Limestone for building the courthouse.

Two years later, when work began on the City Hall part of the building, the Tribune again railed against the Board’s decision. The Alderman “cannot but bring disgrace upon the city and turn the public building of our enterprising young city into a monument of imbecility and stubbornness.” Eventually, builders turned to the Salem Limestone, which became the dominant stone in Chicago.

Clark wrote that no one knows where or how Murphy acquired his stone for his castle. Nor is it known when exactly he applied the stone façade, which is a two to three-inch thick veneer. It may have been part of the original 1925 building or during an expansion in the 1930s. And finally, Clark notes that there are some blocks of Salem Limestone, along with pieces of granite and marble, making the building even more intriguing in my eyes.

Castle Car Wash: Limestone? Sandstone?

2010-04-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

I have long had an interest in strange little buildings made of stone, as evidenced by my obsession with the petrified wood gas station in Lamar, Colorado, thus I am happy to report on a recent discovery of mine. It is another odd rock-clad structure, this time in the North Lawndale section of Chicago. The building has held various names and businesses but seems most often to be called the Castle Car Wash.

Photo by David G. Clark (His web site has more info on the building.)

Castle Car Wash began life in 1925 as the John J. Murphy Gas Station. Murphy had purchased the triangular property on the corner of S. Hamlin Street and W. Ogden Way in 1924. According to a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) nomination written in 2005, Murphy sold gas from 1927 to 1964. The property sold in 1970 and variety of gas stations, auto repair shops, and towing companies filled the premises until it evolved/degenerated into the Castle Car Wash in the late 1970s.

Murphy built the station on Ogden Avenue to exploit the road’s recent designation as US Highway 66, better known as Route 66, which terminated a few miles east of Murphy’s business near the shore of Lake Michigan. The early days of Route 66 were an exciting time as Americans began to rev up and hit the road. Between 1920 and 1930 the number of gas stations exploded from 15,000 to 124,000. By 1927, more than 20 stations dotted Ogden Avenue, along with garages, repairs shops, and dealers.

As I quoted in my chapter in Stories in Stone about Lamar’s filling station, “The gas station…is undoubtedly the most widespread type of commercial building in America,” wrote Daniel Vieyra in Fill er’ Up: An Architectural History of America’s Gas Stations. What had begun merely as a way to distribute gas, evolved into the full-scale sales and service center so familiar to the American roadside.

Vieyra breaks station designs down into four recurring themes. Most elegant were the Respectful buildings, which often resembled a Greek temple. Functional buildings catered to a motorist’s sense of efficiency, as exemplified by the simple, streamlined box. Domestic stations satisfied those seeking a more familiar or rustic look, such as an English or Tudor-inspired building. Domestic, Functional, and Respectful buildings did share one common theme; large companies designed them to foster a corporate image.

Some station owners eschewed corporate branding and endeavored to attract motorists with whimsy. They built stations out of old planes and modeled them after lighthouses and windmills. They made them look like tank cars, oversized gas pumps, Brobdignagian oil cans, and colossal shells. Vieyra labels this architectural style Fantastic and delineates its golden age as 1920 to 1935.

No one knows what inspired Murphy in his design but his little “castle” is definitely Fantastic, though the NRHP nomination describes it as Late Gothic Revival. The stone veneer building, with its corner tower topped by a crenellated parapet, must have been quite the sight in its glory days.

Photo used courtesy Charles Leeks

From a geological point of view, I cannot determine what stone was used on the building. It is clearly a heterogenous mix and I have been told that some of the rock is Salem Limestone but I have not seen such gray and yellowish blocks of Salem. Some of the blocks could come from limestone quarries in Joliet and Lemont, however, I am not familiar with what color stone comes from those sites. (Any observations that anyone has would be great.)

Photo used courtesy Charles Leeks

Like many other older, whimsical buildings, Murphy’s station has suffered through vacancy and minimal upkeep. And what has been done hasn’t been good, including boarding up windows and removal of the parapet, apparently for safety concerns. A recent survey has revealed that the castle is the only Late Gothic Revival station remaining on Route 66. In response, Landmarks Illinois, a non-profit devoted to historic preservation, listed the castle on their Chicagoland Watchlist in 2008.

Photo from Landmarks Illinois web site. Photo by Janine Wilkosz

Fortunately, the stone gas station building has apparently been protected, at least for now. A new owner has plans to open it as a restaurant and has hired an architect to help with restoration. The roof has been replaced and the building cleaned and tuck pointed, though the parapet is still gone. I do hope it will be preserved; the castle is a unique reference back to an important era not just of Chicago’s history but of our country’s history when the automobile was just beginning its long run into the fabric of our lives.

One last note, in researching John J. Murphy’s wonderful little gas station, I have discovered that North Lawndale is famous for its stone buildings, most of which were made from Salem Limestone. I plan to follow up soon with further information.

Writing a Book: Part 4, Promotion

2010-03-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Ah, sweet joy. Your new book is out in the world. Now, you can sit back, relax, and let the reviews, acclaim, and cash roll in. If only life were so wonderful and you could take some well-deserved rest after book publication, but unless you are Mr. King, Ms. Steele, or Mr. Gladwell, you will still have much work to do, particularly if you want others to read and buy your book.

Promoting Stories in Stone began long before it arrived in book stores. My first attempts at drumming up interest in the book began with social media. I started this blog and set up Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Obviously, I have kept working on the blog, figuring that each posting has the potential to attract someone new who might be interested in the book. I also write the blog because I enjoy it and am still a bit nutty about building stone. Facebook and LinkedIn have required less work, but still I had to seek out people and try to create connections to them. I know that using social media has been very successful for some people, who set up elaborate tours through their contacts.

I was fortunate that my publisher sent Uncorrected Proofs out to a long list of potential reviewers, such as newspapers, magazines, and radio shows. (For those not familiar with this edition, also referred to as a review copy or bound galley, it is basically a cheap paperback edition of the book, and about the last time a writer can make changes in the book.) Sending out the proofs does not guarantee a review as newspaper book review editors often receive dozens and dozens of books every week. These review books usually come several months before the book is published.

I also came up with my own list of specialized places for book reviews, such as science, stone, and architecture magazines. I continue to keep my eyes open for new places for reviews, and then ask my publisher to send hard bound copies of the book. Other outlets for potential promotion and reviews include talk radio, newsletters, blogs, and web sites, all of which require me to find and contact them. I have had some success with this though more often I have gotten no response. (And there are the games you can try to play with amazon.com, such as asking all of your friends to write reviews.)

I was lucky that I had the time and interest to do this. I have other writer friends who have hired people, generally college students, to be their publicist. This tactic still required the author to do work, such as approve promotional copy.

In addition to sending out the bound galleys, my publisher asked me to come up with a list of names of people that they could send a promotional postcard to. The idea being that if I knew the person, they might be more likely to look at the postcard and buy the book. The list was supposed to have 2,000 names. I was happy I could scrape together 400 or so.

Then there are the book readings. My publisher did some work on this but basically I set up all the readings that took place. I did not travel much for the book, though I tried to set up an east coast tour but it fell through. I had to come up with a list of stores, find contacts, contact them, pick a date, and try to spread the word about the reading. I didn’t and haven’t limited myself to bookstores, which can be hit or miss. (At one book signing, I was tucked into a small chair with a very small sign alerting people to me. The only interested parties were family members. This was also the same store that when I arrived the owner asked me if I had brought copies of the book to sell, which made me think, “Isn’t this a bookstore and isn’t that what you do?”)

In regard to bookstores, I know one author who regularly goes into stores and introduces himself to the staff. He offers to sign the books and if the store doesn’t carry the book, gently lets the staff know about the book. Of course, there is always the tactic of taking your book from its lowly, hidden spot and putting it in a more prominent location.

I have found better success by targeting my talks to groups that have regular meetings, such as geology department seminars, geology groups, and other interested clubs, which leads to a more guaranteed audience. (Another advantage is that I sell my books at the readings, which provides a little additional income.) I generally tailor my talk to such groups. For instance, on April 22 I will be giving a talk at the Rick Steves Travel Classes about building stone in Italy.

As some readers know, I also set up a virtual book tour, where I contacted other bloggers. I asked them to read the book and review it or set up some way for me to connect with their readers through my book. This was a great way to get the word out to others, including to a few blogs that had nothing to do with geology or stone.

Getting the word out on my book has been an on going process. It can be frustrating and challenging but I knew that if I didn’t do it no one would. I realized this the first time I saw a previous book of mine spine out in a bookstore and wondered how would anyone find my little book amid so many other books. I did do the simple thing of pulling my book out so people could see the cover but that was just the beginning. Good luck.

Writing a Book: Part 3, Answering some Questions

2010-03-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

I wanted to address some of the points raised in the comments section on Brian’s blog. Stan raises several interesting questions.

How did you solve the balance between themes that you personally found interesting, versus themes that would appeal to a wider audience? -

This gets to the heart of writing. I once saw Tony Hillerman give a talk in which he said “Don’t write what the readers won’t read.” Good advice, particularly if you spent hours or days tracking down some random bit of information or some side story; it is very hard to not put that fact or story in the book. One way around this is to use endnotes, which is a sly way of slipping in your research without having it break up the story line. (This change often didn’t come until much later, after I had the time to better consider my cool fact and to realize it probably didn’t need to be in the main body of the book.) I have found that if I have to struggle to put something in that interests me, then it probably shouldn’t go in the story. Another way around this is when you do feel a theme is necessary but perhaps is less interesting to you, then couch it through something that interests you.

How much and how often did you involve friends and family in the process, especially before getting an agent and editor? -

I do get friends involved. As I wrote earlier, I often bounce ideas off them to get their reactions. I did have friends read various chapters, not for editing purposes, but to see if they thought the chapter flowed and if they thought it was interesting. I did get good advice from friends but also recognized that they would not be completely honest if they didn’t like it.

How did you balance time between research and writing? I find there is *always* one more book or article to read, and have to force myself to sit down and just write. -

Yes, there is always more research to do, particularly if you are looking to procrastinate on the writing process. One way to stop researching is to have a deadline. I gave myself two months to research and write my chapters, which definitely forced me to close the books and start writing. And, ultimately, I figured there was no way I could get every fact and figure in so I might as well move on.

Some people have suggested going with a NaNoWriMo-style approach of "write first, edit later." How carefully did you proceed when first writing, and how much editing did you do afterwards? -

I write. I edit. I write. I edit. I edit a lot when I write and am not very good at letting go and simply putting stuff on the page. I do, however, write lots of material that never goes forward. I have found that doing so does allow me to get things out of my brain and allows me to move the process along.

In regard to editing, I have a couple of things I like to do. I do edit on the computer as I go but for more serious editing I print out the document. I also will read it aloud, which helps with structure and flow. And, finally, I let the material sit overnight or even longer. I want to get the writing out of my system and try to approach it with fresh eyes.

Practical tips: What software did you use along the way? (I'm trying DevonThink and Scivener. Bookmarks in Delicious.)

And what was your daily writing practice? (Always at certain time of day? Always in certain cafe? Warm up exercises? Write on paper, then transcribe into computer? Did you print out drafts along the way for editing?)

I am not sure exactly what you mean by this. I write on an iMac and use MSWord.

I don’t really have a daily writing practice except to consider it a job. I am usually on the computer by 7am and off it by 5-6pm. I don’t work well at night. I usually take a nap in the afternoon. Some days I write. Some days I do research. Most days it was a combo. I write on the computer though when I am really bogged down I will write on paper. And, yes, I killed trees on a regular basis printing out drafts for editing.

Thanks for all of the questions.

Writing a Book: Part 2, the Writing

2010-03-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I wrote a bit about the early process of writing a science book, focusing on converting an idea into a proposal. Michael and Brian did the same and then addressed the writing itself. As Michael observed, each writer takes a different approach, and mine was unlike his or Brian’s.

Building stone was a subject that had long interested me. I wrote my first article on it for Harvard’s alumni magazine in 1997. Over the next half dozen years I wrote another 8 or 9 stories so when I began to think about my book, I had a lot of good background material. Still, I needed more stories and more stone to focus on. I knew that I wanted each chapter to focus on a different type of stone, which led me to the GeoRef database. If you’re not familiar with GeoRef, it’s THE database of geology with over 3 million references stretching back to the 1600s.

Through this research, plus some searching of the web, I ended up with 10 chapter ideas. Several principles guided my choice of stones. I knew I wanted the book to reintroduce general readers to the three types of rock—igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary—as well as to fundamental geological concepts, such as plate tectonics, geologic time, and fossil formation, that most people probably haven’t thought much about since their high school science class. Furthermore, in discussing the geological phenomena and how the earth’s changes affect the look, feel, strength, and distribution of particular rocks, I wanted to provide the background necessary for understanding the long relationship between people and stone, on levels emotional, philosophical, and prosaic.

And finally, from a practical standpoint, I chose building stones that are widely and commonly used, so that a reader who is interested in looking at a particular rock firsthand can probably find it on his or her next visit to a major city. Some were rocks I knew well, such as brownstone, Quincy granite, Salem Limestone, east coast slate, and Italian travertine. Others were new to me (or at least the specific rock units were new), including petrified wood from Colorado, coquina from Florida, and marble from Italy. And one, the granite in Robinson Jeffers’ house, I chose simply because I loved the house and wanted to learn more about it and Jeffers.

Now that I had the subjects, I dove into the research. I wrote people who studied the rocks. I tracked down obscure documents. I looked for history accounts. I tried to figure out how the different rocks connected to each other and how to order them in the book. Should they be geologically chronological, chronologically based on when the buildings were built, or geographically organized.

As I noted in my previous posting, my agent wanted me to provide a reason for the reader to continue reading, in essence a beginning, middle, and end to the book. Despite my efforts, often pained, I couldn’t really figure out a logical way to progress the book. What I ended up with was a somewhat subtle way of connecting the chapters. The first chapter, on brownstone, introduces me and the subject and why I am passionate about stone. I ended the book with travertine because it sums up and exemplifies many of the subjects I covered.

In between these book ends (ha-ha), the chapters are paired. My second chapter focuses on a granite that transformed architecture, transportation, and business across the entire eastern seaboard. In contrast, my second granite chapter illustrates how stone can transform a single man, poet Robinson Jeffers. Set two pairs the most commonly used building stone in the country with a stone used in only one structure. My third set of chapters contrasts the oldest commonly used building stone in the world and one of the youngest building stones. The next pair of stones contrasts practicality with grandiosity.

The first chapter I wrote was about Quincy granite, mostly because I knew it well from my time living in Boston. It has a compelling mix of history and geology. I wrote the remaining chapters in no particular order. For each, I gave myself two months to write, do additional research, interview experts, and visit the quarry and/or building.

None of the chapters came easily. A few had somewhat natural story lines to follow, particularly those concerning a specific building with a long history but for most I simply started to write about what I had learned, not always going in any direction. I found that as I did this the chapter would start to develop a natural rhythm, though this required writing, rewriting, and rewriting again.

I did have a goal of making each chapter have a different structure. In addition, I didn’t want to have a section on geology then one on history; I wanted a balanced approach where the topics intercalated. I don’t know or really want to know how many times I wrote each chapter.

When each chapter was finished I would pass it on to my wife for a first round of edits. Fortunately for her, she is neither a geogeek nor was her head filled with all of the chapter-related trivia I had, so she was ideal to comment on whether the chapter was too technical or if I wrote something and left out key details, which were in my head. After her edits, I worked on the chapter again and when I was finished with it, I would go through and footnote it to make sure I knew where every reference came from. I would then set it aside and start the next chapter.

The manuscript that I turned in was basically the one I proposed. Like Brian, I wondered what my editor would do. After reading the first chapter she had one major observation. There was too much of me personally in the book. As she put it “The reader wants to see what you are seeing, he/she doesn’t want to see you seeing it.” Taking this to heart, which was hard because I thought that the use of I gave my writing a strong voice, I did what she said. And, of course, I now think that she is right.

Similar to what Michael wrote yesterday about humor (or humour), a little bit of me can help the narrative but too much slows the flow and takes away from the story telling. I agree with this. I also removed many of my attempts at humor in the book.

Finally, I turned in round two of my complete manuscript and again had the pleasure of waiting for my editor’s comments. They were smart and helpful and I disagreed with very few of them. And in the one case where she suggested a big change, she was absolutely correct. The entire process from writing the first chapter to final edits of the manuscript was about three years.

Following Michael’s sage lead again, enough for now. Any thoughts would be wonderful.

Writing a Book: The Idea, The Proposal, and Publishing

2010-03-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

As I noted the other day, Brian, Michael, and I are starting what we hope to be a conversation about science books, science book writing, and science book publishing. The initial topic is on how to make a technical (and possibly, seemingly obscure) topic accessible, exciting, and of interest to a publisher, as well as to readers. As with Michael’s post, this turned out a bit longer than I expected.

This is an idea that writers constantly wrestle with; most of us recognize that we will be more passionate about a subject than most of our readers, so how do we entice/interest others in our topic. To me a key word is passion. If you can’t convey your passion for the subject, why would anyone else want to follow you.

For Stories in Stone and for the book proposal I am working on right now, I have tried to put this to the test. I talked about my book topic to friends and family and saw what interested them. What aspects of the story did they pick up on? What did they want to know more about? When did their eyes glaze over? Talking about the subject also helped me realize when my eyes were glazing over, when I didn’t fully understand what I hoped to write about, and what just didn’t feel right.

Good research is one means of expressing your passion. Dive into your topic, learn as much as you can, see how others have written about it, find the connections. These can help show a publisher that you are serious about your subject and that you are willing to do the work to tell a good story. Research will also give you the characters to flesh out your story and to pull away from the purely technical or obscure.

Readers like to relate to people. The best science writing doesn’t hit you directly over the head with the science. You will have a better chance of enticing people into the subject if they can connect with the human element. One way to think of this is to think of slipping science in the back door or weaving it into the overall fabric of the story through the people who experienced the science.

That being said, it is critical to keep the science in the book. Don’t dumb it down or omit it just because it is challenging. If we don’t put in the science, who will? Think of it as a conversation. Sure you can drop in the big words, but do so sparingly. Challenge your readers and maybe have some fun with them by using humor.

Ultimately, what is going to make a complicated or obscure subject appeal to publishers and readers is the story you have to tell. As my agent puts it, give the reader a reward for following along. Don’t just list all the cool things about your subject but write so that the reader wants to get to the end, to see how the story plays out. If the reader can learn something or have a new way of viewing or relating to the subject, that is even better.

The reason that Michael’s book has been so well received is that everyone has seen sand and can relate it, and after reading Sand, every reader will look at sand with new eyes and a new appreciation. Furthermore, it is clear that Michael is a bit nutty about sand and that he has done the research to tell his story. As I read the book, I could easily imagine wanting to be out the field with him and hearing him tell me about sand.

Part 2 - The proposal.

The basics of the proposal are somewhat formulaic: what is the book about, who you are, or why you are the person to write the book; marketing; inspiration and competition. My proposal for Stories in Stone ran to around 60 to 65 pages. It started with a broad opening to the subject, followed by a short section on how I would approach the subject. I also included a brief outline, detailed descriptions (600-900 words) of each chapter, and one full chapter. The chapter isn’t always necessary but for an unknown author it is. You have to show that you can write. The marketing, about the author, and inspiration and competition sections took up just four pages of my proposal.

A few thoughts on agents. You must have an agent to work with a national publisher. For my previous books, The Street-Smart Naturalist and A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country, both of which were published by regional presses, I did not have an agent. I just sent the standard proposal in to the publishers. I was rejected numerous times for each.

In regard to my agent, I was fairly lucky finding one. A fellow author and friend had recommended me to his agent, who was open to me sending in a proposal to her. I submitted a very short proposal (about three pages) and after she agreed to represent me, we spent the next six months fashioning the one she sent out to publishers. My agent was critical in helping me put together this proposal. It wasn’t always fun as I was reduced to tears at times trying to come up with a compelling way to show that my technical/obscure subject would be interesting to more than just a few geo-geeks.

Publishers:

Regional and university presses: As noted earlier, you can usually submit a proposal without an agent to these presses. The down side is that such publishers usually offer a smaller advance, have a smaller marketing budget and perhaps less editing. And, at least in the case of my book, The Street-Smart Naturalist, the company could go bankrupt. The advantages can be the reputation of the press, particularly for a university press and that you are a bigger fish in the sea so you may get more energy devoted to promotion.

Self-publishing: This has certainly gotten easier in the past few years but still has some pitfalls. Newspapers might not review self-published books, not that newspapers are the only reviewers. There may be some skepticism about “Oh, you couldn’t get someone else to publish it so you had to do it yourself.” Also, you have to pay for things like editing, design, and indexing. You have to handle all publicity and marketing and store the books. That being said, my one experience, which is maybe not reflective of the industry as whole has been good. In the early 1990s I produced a guide book to a very popular mountain bike/4wd trail, which has sold upwards of 10,000 books. We have had dumb luck in that no one else has produced another guide and the area we wrote about became highly regulated so that all who go on the trail have to pass through a national park visitor center, which carries the book.

Again, any thoughts on my comments or Michael’s (Through the Sandglass) and Brian’s (Laelaps) would be great.

Writing a Popular Science Book: How-To Next Week

2010-03-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

Starting next week, I will be teaming up with my fellow bloggers and book authors, Brian Switek (Written in Stone, to be published in November 2010) and Michael Welland (Sand: The Never Ending Story) to discuss the process of writing our books. Each of us will write about our work and Brian will then collect the links. Our goal is to generate a conversation about science books and science writing. This seems quite apropros considering that a science book, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, just won the National Book Critics award.

Our initial discussion will focus on the process of taking an idea and making it appeal to a publisher without sacrificing the science and accuracy. We will also consider what goes into a book proposal. Please feel free to send in questions.

Mariner Tower Update

2010-03-10T14:04:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago I posted a short piece about the use of Morton Gneiss in Art Deco buildings. One building I mentioned was the Mariner Tower in Milwaukee. I have found out a bit more information about that building plus I have obtained a few fine photos of the stone. The building's original name reflects the name of its builder, John W. Mariner, a Milwaukee businessman. The scion (isn't that a great word?) of a pioneer family, Mariner graduated from Harvard in 1891, where he was the member of the Hasty Pudding club. (I only mention this to be able to write that funny two word club name.)

Mariner's father bought the original building property site for $100. Work began in 1929 with the building opening in 1930, not long after John Mariner died of a heart attack in June. The Morton Gneiss only clads the base. Long called the Mariner Tower, it has been known as the Wisconsin Tower for many years.

In 2004, the building was sold and converted into 73 condominium units. As has happened in many real estate markets, condo sales have not gone as well as some would hope. Perhaps if the owners had better emphasized a curious rumor about their building, more units would have sold. According to an 2006 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, by Jim Stingl, the sales pitch for the new condominiums in the 22-story building stated: "Ask to see the infamous dirigible landing on the rooftop tower." After visiting the 40-foot steel structure atop the tower, Stingl tried to track down any truth to the story and found none. Apparently the story is another urban legend. Any additional information on the building or on its dirigible landing zone would be appreciated.

Morton Liquor Update

2010-03-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

Flash! A quick update for those following the perturbations of my favorite liquor store. (By the way, I just want to clarify that having a favorite liquor store does not mean that I keep a list of favored liquor stores or that I have, say, a life list of liquor stores; it's merely that I really like the building in Morton.) Jonathan Moore, who sent me the photos of Morton Gneiss at the Redwood Falls McDonald's, has sent me some new photos of the Morton Liquor Store. Now there is even more reason to visit the building. The new owners have updated the place, dubbing it the Morton Pub and Eatery, and started serving a broader variety of food. Also, please note the historic photo, which shows the building before it was clad with the 3.5-billion-year old gneiss. The building was originally a mercantile built by JH McGowan and RB Hinton in the 1890s.

Upper photo courtesy of Jonathan Moore. Lower photo from Renville County Historical Society.

Roxbury Puddingtone: Boston's Church Stone

2010-03-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

Over at Mountain Beltway, Callan’s post about the Leesburg Conglomerate reminded me of one of my favorite building stones in Boston. It also happens to be the most common surface rock with good outcrops in Brookline, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. That rock is the Roxbury Conglomerate, designated in 1983 as the State Rock of Massachusetts.

Roxbury Presbyterian Church

Also known as puddingstone, the Roxbury consist of varicolored pebbles, cobbles, and boulders suspended in a fine grained matrix. In the field, the rock ranges in color between light blue-gray and dark gray. Water often stains the iron in many of the blocks to a red-orange color. This rock might be more properly called 'church stone'; over 35 churches were built in the Boston area with Roxbury Conglomerate in the 19th century. These include Christ Church in Brookline, First Church on Elm in Jamaica Plain, and St. James Episcopal Church in Roxbury.

Close up of the puddingstone

The Roxbury is to geologists what the dropped 'R' is to linguists, a sign that you are in Boston, for the puddingstone only occurs in and around the Hub. And like this linguistic trait, no one knows exactly where these rocks originated. It shares some affinities with rocks in west Africa. But it also shows traits of South American rocks. About the only thing that geologists agree on is that the Roxbury was deposited between 570 and 600 million years ago.

Like most sedimentary rocks, the Roxbury Conglomerate is the product of the breakdown of other rocks. Recent analysis indicates that it may have originated in a landscape that looked like modern-day Japan, with a range of volcanoes separated from the sea by a flat plain. Like all mountains, they were involved in a battle between uplift and erosion. And like all mountains, erosion won. Streams washed these eroded bits and pieces into a chaotic mix of sediments at the base of the mountains. In some places, gray to green lava flows abut the puddingstone, indicating that some of the volcanoes were active with molten rock flowing off their slopes.

The Roxbury sits in the middle of a suite of rocks that includes granite found in Dedham and muddy slates that occur in Braintree. These rocks formed between 650 and 505 million years ago on, under, and in oceans bordering the drifting land mass known as Avalon. In its slow movement toward North America, Avalon may also have picked up a hitchhiker or two, which further complicates its history. Ongoing research, especially finding precise dates for all these rocks, continues to clarify details of the Avalonian picture.

Others though do not even agree with these theories. In The Dorchester Giant, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

They flung it over the Roxbury hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester, too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw:
They tumbled on thick as rain.
Giant and mammoth have passed away,
For ages have floated by;
The suet is hard as a marrowbone,
And every plum is turned to a stone,
But there the puddings lie.

No matter what you want to call the stone, it is a nice looking rock and apparently a better stone to work with than the Leesburg Conglomerate.

The Tenino Stone: One of the big three Washington state building stones

2010-02-23T12:03:00.000-08:00

Like many cities, Seattle can trace its use of building stone to fire. On June 6, 1889, John E. Back, described in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as “a thick-set blond of mediocre intelligence,” let his pot of glue boil over and onto the stove in a downtown, basement-level cabinet making shop. Acting eagerly but incorrectly, Back tossed water on the flames, which spread the fire to wood shavings on the floor. Soon the entire wooden structure was burning. Before Seattle’s Great Fire could be contained, it burned more than 115 acres and destroyed the downtown retail and industrial core. Within days the earnest little town vowed it would rebuild, but this time with a material that could better withstand fire—rock.

Two types of rock entered the city: sandstone and granite. A quarry in Index, 35 miles northeast of Seattle, supplied the salt-and-pepper granite. Sandstone came from three quarries. Bellingham quarries supplied the Chuckanut, while other quarry sites near Tenino, 12 miles southeast of Olympia, and Wilkeson, 15 miles east of Tacoma, provided rocks known by their locality name. The quarries succeeded because they combined proximity to water or rail transport with a homogeneous, well-cemented, low-porosity rock.

Despite the 125 miles separating the quarries, they share a related geologic history. The great beds of western Washington sandstone were deposited 40 to 50 million years ago in the Eocene Epoch when a subtropical climate dominated. Palm trees, swamp cypresses, and tree-sized ferns grew in the moist (40-100 inches of rain), bayou-like environment. The area that would become western Washington lacked the dramatic topography that now dominates. Instead, a broad, low-elevation coastal plain extended eastward into central Washington. Rivers and streams meandered toward a coastal lowland dotted with seasonal lakes, swamps, and lagoons. As the water spread toward the ocean, it deposited bed upon bed of sand, eventually building up several thousand feet of sandstone.

Recently, I toured the Tenino sandstone quarry, which reopened in the early 1990s, after being shut since 1938. It is now owned by Marenakos Rock Center, which sells split pieces for a variety of uses and also sells stone for restoration work.

The Tenino quarry, February, 2010.

Samuel Fenton and George Van Tine opened the town’s first quarry in 1889, after they had to spend the night near Tenino because they missed the last train to town. That quarry has become the town swimming pool. The present quarry, just west of town, opened in the early 1900s. Resident stone carver Keith Phillips showed me around the site.

Compared with some quarries I have seen in Indiana and Minnesota, the Tenino quarry is quite small—basically a 140-foot-high cliff face. As you can see from the photo, our warm, wet PNW climate has led to mosses and ferns growing on the former cutting planes. The low wall of dirt and debris in front of the quarry blocks the present cutting zone, where the front end loader sits. Just two men work the quarry, relying on machinery to do the dirty work of drilling channels, driving in the plug and feathers, and pounding the plugs. The drill is carbide tipped and spins and pounds to cut a channel about two inches wide. Each layer is bit under four feet deep. After quarrying the stone is shipped by truck to the Marenakos yard in Preston, Washington. In the old days, a train spur went directly into the quarry yard.

The quarry process. Hydraulic drilling machine, drilling bit, cut channel, inserted plug and feather splitting method.

The Tenino was used primarily in the northwest, including the east wing of the Washington state capitol, the old and beautiful, main branch of the Seattle Public Library (destroyed long ago), and the Bailey, or Broderick Building. Other non-local Tenino buildings include the Northern Pacific station in Missoula, Calvary Presbyterian in San Francisco, and the main high school in Stockton, California.

Bailey, or Broderick Building in Seattle, 1892.

The Tenino heyday did not last long and by the early 1910s, quarry owners turned to a different use of stone for their quarry. On February 17, 1912, they placed 43,100 pounds of black power and 1,200 pounds of 60% dynamite into two tunnel systems stretching hundreds of feet under the quarry. The “Big Blast,” as it was called, shot massive blocks hundreds of feet, covered the rail spur, and injured spectators. It also generated 500,000 tons of rock, much of it too fractured to use. Still enough good rock resulted from the blast for the Tenino quarry to supply up to 1,600 tons daily, but unfortunately World War I led to the cancellation of the contract and the quarry owners went bankrupt.

Tenino blocks come in two colors: an unoxidized blue, or dark grey, and an oxidized buff. Quarry owners discovered though that people didn’t like the heterogeneity and figured out that if they applied a phosphoric acid treatment, they could prevent the color from changing over time. The acid could help alter heterogeneity within the rock as well.

Stained (on the left) and unstained blocks of Tenino sandstone

My tour guide Keith Phillips has worked at the quarry for many years. He is a master stone carver and uses many tools from earlier generations of stone masons. His work is quite stunning and beautiful. His best known projects were for the Temple of Justice and lantern on the State Capitol, both in Olympia. If Keith is any indication, Tenino sandstone will continue to be one of the premier Washington state building stones. For more information on the Tenino quarries, there is an excellent article by geo-historian Dave Knoblach in the July 1999 issue of Washington Geology.

Some of Keith's work.

Ontario, Canada: A Heritage in Stone

2010-02-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

I recently received a very handsome book in the mail. It came from author and architectural conservationist Nina Perkins Chapple. The book is A Heritage of Stone: Buildings of the Niagara Peninsula, Fergus and Elora, Guelph, Region of Waterloo, Cambridge, Paris, Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough, Hamilton and St. Marys. In clear prose, Chapple describes the fascinating development of the stone architecture in southwestern Ontario in the nineteenth century.

Filled with excellent photographs, the book details 114 examples of stone buildings. They range from the simple Burlington Canal Lighhouse (1858) to the elaborate, Gothic Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception (1876-1888); from the massive Galt Foundry and Machine Works (1875) to the one-story McDougall Cottage (1858); and from ashlar to cobblestone to rough hewn blocks. Each building includes information on the history, builder, and designer, along with an address.

Below is a sample of some of the buildings described in the book. They reveal once again how the underlying geology influences architecture and helps to create a local aesthetic. Chapple’s book makes me want to go this area to explore the amazing stone architecture, certainly some of the most diverse and intriguing that I have seen.

Paris, Ontario has an unusual legacy of houses built with cobblestones. The style was popular in nearby western New York from the 1830s to 1860s. According to Chapple, a cobble "can be held in the palm of a hand." Cobbles served no structural purpose and instead were used as a thin veneer. (photo from Ontario Architecture web site)

House of Heads (1858), carved out of limestone by English mason Matthew Bell. Bell built several homes for his children in the town of Guelph, including one of which may include a bust of Charles Dickens. (photo from Ontario Architecture web site)

John Brubacher house (1850), a classic Mennonite home making use of stones cleared from nearby fields. The split granite stones were not laid in courses. Dozens of such simple farmhouses still stand. (photo from Mennonite Historic Society of Ontario web site.)

Galt Post Office (1885) - High Victorian style - One of many structures built with local granite fieldstones, which glaciers had transported and deposited on the plains surrounding the area now designated as Cambridge. The former town of Galt is known as the "granite city."

The Art Deco Stone

2010-02-10T10:57:00.000-08:00

From McDonalds' bathrooms to Art Deco, the Morton Gneiss has a colorful history of use in architecture. I discovered this during my research for Stories in Stone, when I began to develop a list of buildings built with the 3.5-billion-year old, metamorphic rock. I was struck by the Morton's popularity in the 1930s and specifically in Art Deco or Moderne style projects, where the gneiss was an ideal stone. Several of the buildings later were honored with designation on the National Register of Historic Places.

Adler Planetarium, Chicago, built in 1930, designed by Ernst Grunsfeld, National Register Historic Places

Architectural historians debate the exact dates of Art Deco's popularity but basically the period between World War I and II was the heyday. The term comes from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industrials Modernes, held at Paris in 1925, and applies to "modern" buildings incorporating exotic motifs, often dramatic, colorful, and playful. Art Deco style design elements also appeared in many non-architectural forms, particularly in machinery and machines.

Oklahoma Natural Gas, now Noble Drilling, 1929, Tulsa, National Register Historic Places

Builders incorporated the Morton for several reasons. It fit the Art Deco aesthetic for unusual colors, particularly as a counterpoint to the light and monochromatic stone, such as Salem Limestone, often used above the base. (By highlighting the dark/light contrast, builders created an unconformity, or missing time gap in the stone record. In the case of the Morton-Salem contact, the missing time gap covers over three billion years, what geologists would refer to as great unconformity. One of the fun aspects of building geology, I think, is to find these artificial unconformities. If readers find others, perhaps they could let me know and I could post a list.)

The Morton’s swirled surface provided a natural counterpoint, as well as complement to the era’s prevailing fascination with machines, geometric patterns, and abstract organic forms. These shapes include Egyptian-stylized form, zig-zags, and chevrons, and are part of define Art Deco. The Morton's complex texture of light and dark bands typifies gneiss, a type of metamorphic rock formed from great heat and pressure. In the case of the Morton, the major period of metamorphism occurred when its parent rock rammed into the North American continent around 2.7 billion years ago.

Because of the Morton's color and texture, quarries sold it under trade names such as Oriental, Tapestry, Variegated, and Rainbow Granite. Some people also refer to the Morton as marble. It does have a marbled texture but is not a marble, which is also a metamorphic rock, but one that forms from limestone.

Dark gneiss also helped distinguish a building and set off the base from the surrounding city. Builders may have used the gneiss only at the base because the stone was harder to work, had to be transported long distances, and cost more. In addition, it was more resistant than limestone and sandstone to urban degradation, such as road salt, soot, and noxious vehicle emissions. Each of these factors contributed to builders using the Morton only at the most visible, public ground level.

Close up of Seattle Exchange Building, 1929

And, the Morton was simply an interesting stone to look at. It drew people's attention. It gave the building life; nothing about the Morton feels static or inert. It bestowed complexity; no two panels are the same. As I noted in my book, the dynamic nature of the Morton makes it the most living rock I have seen, quite a claim for what is probably the oldest rock that most people will ever encounter.

A Short List of Art Deco buildings with Morton Gneiss

Adler Planetarium, 1930, Chicago, (NRHS)

David Stott, 1929, Detroit, (NRHS)

Central Bank Trust, 1913, Cincinnati

Watts Building, 1930, Birmingham, (NRHS)

Mariner Tower, 1930, Milwaukee

Pythian Building, 1930, Tulsa

333 N. Michigan Bldg, 1928, Chicago,

Old State Library, 1938, Richmond, VA, (NRHS)

Wisconsin Gas Bldg, 1929, Milwaukee

Cincinnati Telephone Bldg, 1930, Cincinnati

Williamsburg Savings Bank, 1929, Brooklyn

Hartford Gas Co, Hartford, CT

Cincinnati Union Terminal, Cincinnati, 1933

Bankers Life Building, Des Moines, Iowa

Northwestern Bell Telephone (now Qwest), Minneapolis, MN, 1930

Originally the Bankers Life Insurance building, Des Moines, Iowa, built in 1939

David Stott building, Detroit, 1929, close up of entrance below, National Register Historic Places

Gneiss and McDonald's

2010-02-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

I don't normally recommend that people go to McDonald's for anything beyond their bathrooms, but I would like to go against my normal impulses and will put in a plug for visiting the famed food pusher. Of course, I am not suggesting that one go eat; instead, go for the geology, for at the McDonald's in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, the counters are made of Morton Gneiss, a stone that I have previously noted as the oldest, commonly used building stone in world. The gneiss is 3.5-billion-years old and the quarries are about seven miles from Redwood Falls, in Morton.

I like to think that the employees are very proud and quite aware of the famous stone that graces their work place. Wouldn't you be that way?

No matter what, I would like to give a word of praise to McDonald's and whoever designed this building. They didn't have to honor the local geology and history but they did. Nice work on the gneiss!

Later this week, I will follow up with some additional observations about the Morton Gneiss and its use in Art Deco architecture.

The following shots are used courtesy of Jonathan Moore, who is a master's degree candidate in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota.

Sand: Michael Welland Responds!

2010-02-02T16:57:00.000-08:00

Michael was also kind enough to respond to a few questions I posed to him about his book, Sand: The Never Ending Story. As you can tell, he is a careful and thoughtful writer.

And, in case you just happened in to this site, I am participating in Michael Welland's blog book tour. More info is available on his web site.

1. Throughout your book, you write of the many ways that people incorporate sand and its effects into their vocabulary. Why do you think sand is a particularly rich geologic feature for language?

My view is that this is because sand provides so many images and contrasts. First of all, I think that it’s very much about scale (and, of course, that’s what was captured by William Blake – “To see a world in a grain of sand”). An individual grain of sand gives us a reference to something incredibly small – but it’s something we can still see; anything smaller leads us into the world of the truly microscopic, invisible to the naked eye – a grain of sand is a kind of portal to the unimaginably small. At the same time, a vast accumulation of sand grains on a beach is a visibly accessible, but not countable, image of an unimaginably large number – anything larger is a severe test of our imaginations. Hence the continuing resonance of Sagan’s question as to whether there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth’s beaches (a friend just sent me correspondence in the current issue of Astronomy magazine, continuing to debate this question).

Then I think that sand is compelling for its ephemerality – sand is constantly on the move, shape-shifting in your hand or sculpting landscapes. It provokes images of impermanence – sandcastles being washed away – and this is what makes land art, such as that of Jim Denevan’s beach sculptures, so fascinating, so somehow romantic. And yet, despite the advice not to build our houses on sand, we do – successfully. At the beach, sand is a material that flows through your fingers and yet you can walk on it. The wonders of granular materials!

And then there’s sand as the primeval and everlasting – not to mention mundane and ubiquitous – material. I was recently reminded of yet another saying, “pounding sand” – pointless labour or the related phrase of 19th Century American slang, “not enough sense to pound sand down a rathole.”

Finally, let’s not forget the hourglass and the sands of time. I started this rather lengthy response with Blake, and I’ll end it with Longfellow:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

2. You are obviously well read, which informs your work and makes it appealing on so many levels. Who inspires you? Are there fiction writers, science journalists, poets, sci/fi writers, etc. that have helped you become a better writer?

I’m afraid this is going to be a rather eclectic list! Any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, which you find hugely enjoyable is, by definition, a page-turner. There’s something about the structure, the style, the story-telling, that is compelling. And so it’s only after finishing it that you can reflect on why this was – and the answer is often elusive, intangible. But does something subconsciously “rub off”? I suspect so.

I’ll try to describe writing that I’ve found compelling – and inspiring – by genre, with an example or two for each (leaving a couple specifically for the next question). First, fiction. I admit that I’m a sucker for a good thriller/crime novel, and few books beat the Stieg Larsson trilogy (and I see that I’m not alone – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first in the trilogy is number 8 on Amazon and has 779 customer reviews). Also in this genre. Anything by Fred Vargas. There’s something about the pace and the extraordinary drawing of characters that these writers are simply brilliant at. I also enjoy periodically dipping into science fiction, in particular short stories – I think that the genre lends itself to this form and the challenge of the compactness of a short story is something any writer can learn from if it’s done well. A recent and much-enjoyed sampling has been The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3 and I’m right now in the middle of When it Changed, a collection edited by Geoff Ryman. For other kinds of fiction, recently enjoyed have been Allegra Goodman’s Intuition (one of the few novels that superbly gets to the heart of how science and scientists work); read because I shared a radio program with her, Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul was astonishing – again, character and pace, and the all-important story-telling; Milan Kundera’s Immortality is one of the few books that I’ve read more than once – it’s actually time to read it again.

Travel writing, if done well, can be inspiring. Anything by William Dalrymple, Wilfred Thesiger is the classic; although I read it decades ago, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways remains utterly memorable (Prairie Earth is on my – very crowded – “to read” shelf, and probably belongs in the answer to the following question).

Science writing: the classics – Feynman for the way he conveys the excitement and, of course Steve Gould. Phillip Ball; Jan Zalasiewitcz and The Earth After Us, Per Bak and How Nature Works. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (boy do we have a lot to learn from that book). Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist (How We Decide is on that crowded shelf). And, although I must admit that he’s an old friend (we were students together), I think Richard Fortey’s books (especially The Hidden Landscape, now being re-issued) are superb.

3. And along that same line. You make a number of references to non-geology writers and how they incorporate geology imagery in their writing. What can we geologists and science writers learn from how non-scientists use geology as metaphor?

I think that we as geologists automatically and professionally take, in the first instance, an analytical view of a landscape. We can learn a great deal from writers who observe the same view through different spectacles, and encourage us to stand back, dump the terminology and the reductionism, and look at these things with a sense of, for want of a better word, the romantic. And yes, the metaphorical. We can effectively learn from non-geologists that the same story can be told without the jargon and with a sense of wonder – isn’t this, after all, a key reason that we’re geologists in the first place?

John McPhee was one of the original masters, but for me there’s one recent book that illustrates this superbly and provocatively: Mountains of the Mind is Robert Macfarlane’s homage to mountains. He’s a Cambridge academic (the English faculty) and a climber. It’s often claimed that this is a book about climbing, but it certainly isn’t. Climbing is simply the route into wonderfully descriptive writing on rock and orogenic belts and the historical role of mountains in our imaginations (“the sublime”). His second book, The Wild Places, also contains some sublime geological writing -- for example, the miniature wild places to be found in the weathered fissures of a limestone pavement.

My second example arose in the conversation of your “virtual book tour” on my blog: Dan Snow, Listening to Stone. He’s arguably the finest dry stone wall builder in the US – and a superb writer. Here again, we’re looking at geology though a non-geologist’s eyes, but also his hands and his imagination. One of my favourite quatoations:

“The stones provoke the thoughts and the thoughts give birth to the form. A finished construction is a thought process petrified. Within a wall are all the moments that created it. They remain there like hidden messages slipped between the stones as they were placed. The finished wall’s character is defined by the spaces between the stones as much as it is by the stones themselves.”

If that doesn’t inspire a geologist writer, I have no idea what would.

4. You write “The underlying problem, which we shall return to, is that we have developed an unnatural desire to live in places we shouldn’t.” Any proscriptions for how we can address this fact, such as legislation prohibiting building in certain flood plains?

A couple of years ago, flying in to Philadelphia, I took this photo of the Jersey shore (no, I’m not singling out New Jersey, it just happens to be an appropriate photo). This is a barrier island, and barrier islands are among the most dynamic landforms on the planet; it is in their nature to move, to be over-washed by storms, to be broken up by new inlets as old ones sand up.

Every square metre is covered by development, the dunes, an integral part of the system, have gone, and the beach inevitably has to be “nourished.” This story is repeated around essentially all inhabited sandy coasts, and the population density in coastal areas is increasing dramatically. This kind of issue arises in the UK: the coast of East Anglia is eroding naturally – and extremely rapidly. One classic case involves an individual (sometimes referred to as today’s King Knut) who has recently lost, on appeal, a court case preventing him from continuing to dump hundreds of thousands of tons of soil on to the beach in front of his home (the details of the case are more complex – the cliffs are designated an area of Special Scientific Interest and it seems that the individual had not sought legal permission for his activities). The illustration below (from the Daily Mail) shows the situation – in the foreground is all that remains of this “coastal defence” and remnants can be seen as the grey piles at the foot of the cliffs.

The very idea of “coastal defences” strikes me as being, more often than not, nonsense – and the UK Government tends to agree, especially since it’s a very expensive nonsense that never lasts. Compensation and retreat seems to be a more sensible policy. Furthermore, interfere with one part of a coast and its sediment budget and the whole system is disrupted, invariably causing other problems further along the coast.

I know it’s easy for me to say, but I believe that legislation against coastal development, against development on flood plains, against disrupting natural drainage (by tarmac and concrete, for example), and against massive changes to natural river and sedimentation systems (look at the Mississippi Delta problems and the consequences for hurricane damage) is the only option. It would save immense amounts of money and human misery if we were simply to recognise that there are some natural processes that can’t – and shouldn’t – be screwed around with.

5. A technical question. Maybe I missed this in the book, but when I lived in southern Utah, I found it odd that in the land of red rocks, the sand on the beaches of the Colorado River is white, or at least not red. Why?

A couple of thoughts (although I’m no expert on the sandstones of the western US). Quite often, the red colour of a sandstone is only on the outside as a result of weathering and oxidation of its iron content – knock off a piece and the broken face may well be white or some other very different colour. Many of these sandstones are highly porous and permeable, and their internal colour reflects the chemical activity of groundwater seeping through and other aspects of diagenesis, the chemical changes that happen in a rock after it’s formed; the results can be highly variable.

The other point is that, while many sand grains are originally red (particularly desert sands and therefore sandstones such as the Navajo), that colour is only a rusty coating on the grains – bash them around for a while in a river and that coating will be worn off.

6. Of course, I have to ask this question. You mention several building stones made from sandstone. Do you have a favorite sandy building stone?

Definitely the New Red (Triassic) Sandstones on either side of the Atlantic (as in the Smithsonian). The colours are brilliant and their variations subtle, and the variety of sedimentary structures – ripple cross-bedding and so on – provide an instantaneous urban geological field trip. Here’s an example from a modern building near me in London (one of the blocks has been placed geologically upside-down).

But of course, on your side of the Atlantic it’s not just the Smithsonian – it’s the brownstones of New York made from “the most hideous stone ever quarried,” described so affectionately and eloquently in your book. And your Wingate red sandstone from Utah. [DBW here, As far as I know, the Wingate has not been used for buildings, at least in southern Utah, which seems a darned shame.] I need say no more other than simply urge readers to enjoy David’s chapter on this stone – if they haven’t already done so.

7. And finally, could you show a few images from your collection of the Ogden’s sand education cards?

With pleasure – when I first wrote a blog post about these last spring, I said that I would do more, so here’s a further sampling (ach with its accompanying description from the back).

One of my favourites

This next one seems to be a poor woman who has lost her golf ball in the sand!

A couple of commerce samples.

And, since we started with footsteps in the sands of time, so shall we end.

Sand: A Review of Michael Welland's Book

2010-02-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

Today, I have the pleasure of participating in Michael Welland's blog book tour for the paperback edition of his book, Sand. Without further ado, here's the review of one fine book. And, very exciting news. Just learned that Sand has been awarded the 2010 John Burroughs Medal, the highest literary award for natural history writing. Way to go Michael. (Unfortunately, there web site is not as up to date as their choices of award winners.)

Sand. It’s everywhere. At the beach. In rivers. On mountains. In your shoes. In your ears. In your computer. Of course, sand benefits by its formation: sand is an ultimate outcome of that eternal battle between the physical world and the omnipresent agents of erosion. Someone with way too much time on his or her hands has even estimated that a billion grains of sand form every second on our little planet.

Recognizing the all-pervasiveness of sand, Archimedes postulated that the number of grains of sand in the universe was 10⁶³ or ten to the sixty-third power. Who knows if he was right but consider that if you dumped out a cup of sand, and counted one grain per second, your task would require a little under 35 days. So, yes, sand could be everywhere, with some grains left over.

All the more reason to pen an ode to a material beloved not only by geologists, gravestone carvers, and computer chip developers but also Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jimi Hendrix, each of whom utilized sand as a metaphor in their writing. Add to this list Michael Welland, who ferreted out the above facts in his treasure of a book, Sand: The Never Ending Story. The book is now available in paperback, published by University of California Press.

Unlike many single topic books, Sand follows a trajectory, moving from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the individual grain to going beyond our planet and our present. Welland mixes in science, art, architecture, and literature. He traces a grain of sand on a quintessential adventure, from mountain to sea down via a river. He shows how sand affects every day objects from cement to glass to computer chips. It is heady stuff, but Welland writes with such passion and erudition that he makes his subjects accessible and fun to learn about.

Curiously, although many have written about the sand, no one definition exists. Size is a critical criteria, but by this definition alone salt and sugar are sand. Moreover, even defining sand by size raises questions as it can be as big as 2mm and as wee as .0625mm, plus how exactly does one measure an object where “one might see … a ruined Temple…[or] two images of human shape, kneeling and extending their arms to an Altar.” (Welland didn’t write the more flowery depiction; it comes from 18^th century Dutch, arenophile’s Antony van Leeuwenhoek description of sand grains.) Or as Blake put it in his immortal phrase, “To see a world in a grain of sand.”

Welland follows his reference to Blake with a poem from another well-known bard, Robert W. Service. Apparently when not rhyming about the Yukon and cremation, Service carefully observed sand.

For look, Within the hollow hand,
While round the earth careens,
I hold a single grain of sand
And wonder what it means.
Ah! If I had the eyes to see,
And brain to understand,
I think Life’s mystery might be
Solved in this grain of sand.

In Sand, Michael Welland has done a wonderful job of fleshing out some of life’s mysteries, at least in relation to sand. We are also fortunate that he has taken Blake’s ode to heart and shared his experiences with us.

Portland Building Stones Talks

2010-02-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

I know this is last minute, but I thought if there are readers of this blog in Portland, Oregon, they might be interested in two talks I am giving in town this week. Each talk will be PowerPoint shows focusing on work from my book Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology.

The first will be on Wednesday, February 3 at 3:30 P.M. at Portland State University. This talk is part of the geology department's Winter Term 2010 seminar series. I will be speaking at Cramer Hall, Room 17.

The second talk will be on Thursday, February 4 at 7:00 P.M. at the Architectural Heritage Center, 701 SE Grand Ave. This talk is $13 for non-members but if you consider how much fun you will have, I like to think it's worth it. If not, at least the money benefits a good organization.

Niagara Rocks and Building Stone

2010-02-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

One of the pleasures of having a blog is corresponding with other people. Recently, Gerard Middleton, a retired sedimentologist who taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, sent me a note about his work with building stone. Five years ago or so, a group of conservationists working on the Thompson family mansion at Ontario’s Ruthven Park National Historic Site contacted Gerard about tracking down the source of the stone used in the mansion. Like myself, he was sucked into the stories in stone.

Imperial Bank in Niagara Falls Gasport Formation, aka Queenston Stone (from Niagara Falls Public Library)

“This [his research] proved so interesting that I began to study all of the stone in buildings within a day's drive from Hamilton, where I live,” he wrote to me. He now has an immense set of notes and photographs, part of which made it into a guidebook, he co-authored for a “Joint Assembly” of the Geological Association of Canada and the American Geophysical Union. Titled “Niagara Rocks, Building Stone, History and Wine,” the guide covers the region west of the Niagara River between lakes Ontario and Erie. Other authors are Nick Eyles, Nina Chapple, and Robert Watson.

Maplehurst mansion, red Grimsby Formation and Gasport Fm

As the title implies, the guide delves into many facets ranging from settlement of Empire Loyalists in the 1790s up the development of a flourishing wine industry beginning in the 1970s. It includes sections on masons, quarry owners, the Erie and Welland canals, and geology of Niagara Falls.

Post Office and Customs House, Queenston Stone, hard to tell but sadly the building is in very bad shape

Quarries began to be developed before 1820 with apparently some stone going into Toronto’s historic Gibraltar Point Lighthouse in 1806. Most of the quarries are in Upper Ordovician to Middle Silurian sedimentary rocks. These include the Eramosa Formation, a dolomite; the Whirlpool Formation, a white quartz sandstone; the Grimsby Sandstone; and the Gasport Formation, a crinoidal dolomitic limestone.

Although written for the joint meeting, the guidebook includes descriptions of many buildings that the field trip did not have time to visit. The stops take in a wide variety of structures, which unfortunately are not illustrated. (Logically, they figure that you can see the building right in front of you.) Fortunately, one can find a few photos on line illustrating the beautiful stone.

Like many guidebooks, it is clearly a labor of love as the authors point out their favorite sites, both geological and cultural along the way. I hope that Gerard continues to share his information with a larger audience.