The New-York Historical Society moved into its current home, on Central Park West, in 1908. The building, grand as it was, wound up being much smaller than the Society had intended. The money ran out, as it will, and as it would again in the decades to come, when the N.Y.H.S. failed thrice more to realize its full scale. Now the New York Historical (a rebranding last year dropped both fussy hyphen and fusty noun) is achieving its deferred ambitions, with a hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar expansion. It broke ground nearly two years ago.
For a new edifice that will adjoin the old one on West Seventy-sixth Street, the Historical (if we must) and Robert A. M. Stern Architects (or RAMSA, if you insist) wanted to use the same kind of granite, to stay true to the building’s origins and to drive home the idea that, as Roy Moskowitz, the Historical’s project manager, put it, “We’ve always intended to do this, and it’s only fair that we be allowed to do this.”
The question arose: What granite is it, and where might one find it? The archives cited a stone called Sherwood pink. RAMSA hired a company called Swenson Stone Consultants to investigate. Malcolm Swenson, the president, had a hunch, and checked his much-thumbed copy of “The Commercial Granites of New England,” an encyclopedic guide published in 1923. Further sleuthing traced this particular pink to an abandoned quarry near Stonington, Maine, on a two-hundred-acre pile of igneous rock called Crotch Island.
“No one knew how to get it,” Edward Eglin, a Swenson executive, said the other day. He was speaking at the Deer Isle Granite Museum, in Stonington, to several dozen guests seated around a vast diorama depicting Crotch Island in its quarrying heyday, around a century ago. (Eglin had brought along his own volume of “The Commercial Granites of New England,” from which, later that night, over oysters, he read a favorite passage aloud: “Areally, granite is perhaps the most abundant rock in Maine.” He paused to savor “areally.” “Even where the exposures are of other rock varieties, the notable absence of granite dikes and quartz veins indicates the presence of granite at no great distance.”)
Crotch Island, named for the inlet that splits it, belongs to a Rhode Island company called New England Stone, now run by Ann Marie Ramos, whose husband, Tony, bought the island in the seventies. In 2021, Tony Ramos, who died last year, and Malcolm Swenson visited the site where Swenson thought the Sherwood pink might be. They had the topsoil excavated to expose the stone, extracted some samples to compare with the existing cladding on Central Park West, and, once they had a match, opened the old Sherwood quarry, for the first time since the thirties.
The corduroy-like finish on the original stone at the N.Y.H.S. had been hand-chiselled by quarrymen on site, but this was no longer feasible. “You can’t really find people who do that kind of work, at scale,” Eglin said. So this time the fabricators, in Quebec, developed a computer-controlled milling process, “with some random waggling of the milling head, to make it look handmade.” The blocks, about seventy-five in total, each weighing between eight thousand and forty-five thousand pounds, were trucked to Quebec. The first new stone was placed at the building site on August 4th.
The Crotch quarries used to have some fifteen hundred workers. Now there were four, three of whom attended the talk at the museum: two Quebecers and a local named Richard Stinson, in a Chevrolet ball cap. “It’s hard to find labor,” Stinson said. Asked how many generations back his family went on Deer Isle, he said, “Forever.” He operates the burner—a rod that blasts fire into the stone to cleave it. He’d never been to New York to see the fruit of his labors: “I don’t get off the island much.”
Early the next morning, out on Crotch Island, Ramos led Eglin and a few visitors down an old track littered with rusted machinery and piles of grout (the vulgate for waste rock) to an arena-size section of the quarry where the four men were already busy cutting stone. Stinson was working the burner. Two others operated a diamond saw, to make giant blocks.
“This is manly-man stuff, and we have such a hard time finding manly men,” Ramos said. She explained that the burning technique, along with wedge-and-hammer, is mostly obsolete: “This is the last quarry that does it. It’s noisy, wasteful, and less efficient. But the men love doing it. It’s more fun.”
Ramos said the industry in the U.S. was dying. She cited labor shortages, transport costs, regulation, and a preference for steel, glass, and concrete. She reckoned that the biggest customer for cut stone is the Church of Latter-day Saints. At the head of the quarry, ospreys had built a nest high atop an abandoned derrick bedangled like a maypole with rusty cables. It was one heck of a morning in Maine, a real sparkler. At no great distance from the base of the derrick, there were million-dollar views northeast toward Acadia and south toward the open ocean. Someday, there would almost certainly be summer houses here, probably of materials other than granite, and with the island underneath rebranded something other than Crotch. ♦
