WESTCHESTER REMEMBERED
Quarried Histories by Suzanne Clary
ABOVE: A MONUMENT FIT FOR A KING: WASHINGTON SQUARE ARCH BUILT OF TUCKAHOE MARBLE (PHOTO CIRCA 1916) OPPOSITE: THE PEOPLE’S PALACE:THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BUILT WITH TUCKAHOE MARBLE (PHOTO CIRCA 1916)
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efore curtains of glass and shafts of steel defined our built environment, our castles in the air were realized in stone. We prided ourselves on knowing where that stone came from. My father is not a geologist or a genealogist but he can often identify the composition and origin of many preskyscraper era churches, courthouses and landmarks from Brooklyn to the Bronx. This is how I learned that Castle Clinton in the Battery was made out of sandstone and that Belvedere Castle in Central Park (the backdrop for Shakespeare in the Park) was anchored by Fordham gneiss. Similarly my mother – again with no masonry know-how but a great devotion to her alma mater, Manhattanville – first introduced me to “The Castle,” an 1892 Stanford White Beaux Arts masterpiece, by way of how it was built. One spring as I helped her cut out black castle-shaped pieces of felt to make banners for her college’s traditional reunion procession, I learned how Reid Hall was fashioned out of rock quarried directly on-site at the country estate of American politician and publisher Whitelaw Reid. My parents have always respected both the design and artisanship of their surroundings; they passed that reverence down to their children. As a result, the fairy tales we grew up with were populated by stories of the real magical bastions in our midst. Sure Frozen’s Princess Elsa can whip up a turreted palace and drawbridge out of ice and frigid air in the space of a three-minute song. But the castles our clan came to marvel at were carved out of Westchester and Connecticut quarries as well as the very bedrock of Manhattan. And they were birthed by dust-covered Irish and Italian immigrants in spans of time that lasted years, if not decades. The history of one quarry town whose stone can be found in structures throughout New England begins just outside New Amsterdam. Eastchester was settled in 1664 on the same site where the home of Puritan firebrand Anne Hutchinson had stood twenty years earlier. Dotted with farms and grist mills, the town became best known in the 19th century for its quarries of distinctive “Tuckahoe marble.” The brilliant white, “native” stone born under great pressure 500 million years ago in the prolific Cambrian Period was first discovered in 1815. After the Great Fire of 1835 wiped out 700 buildings in lower Manhattan made of wood, brick, sandstone and granite, Tuckahoe marble with its fireproof qualities found a very appreciative audience. Cut out of the earth in massive blocks, the material also found favor with proponents of the Greek Revival style. This included renowned architects like Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis (who we will return to later); they expertly and eagerly incorporated solid stone columns and the vocabulary of antiquity into the soaring facades of homes for affluent Americans and patriotic institutions.