The Toads of Mount St. Helens

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

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

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

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:

1. The higher the temperature variations, the higher degree of bowing.
2. Higher humidity can lead to problems when water penetrates pore spaces.
3. There is no correlation between panel size and thickness and tendency to bow.
4. Bowing tends to be more pronounced on the southeast and southwest facades.
5. More pronounced bowing occurs on the upper parts of buildings.
6. No link has been found between anchoring system and bowing.
7. Marble color doesn’t impact bowing.
8. Pollution doesn’t impact bowing.
9. 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

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

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?

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.