Faux Fireplace, Day 3

 

  

  

 

 

Faux Fireplace, Day 2

 

  

  

  

  

  

Faux Fireplace, Day 1

I will explain later.

 

 

  

 

Heaven Waits the Rubble Mason

In sleep he dreams mosaic visions
cut stone upon stone, the cackle of hens
sounds with sledge blast
striking an invisible grain.
Body in full motion
sweats sun heat to reach an apex --
their cold touch speaks to him of color
hidden within split shells.

At bancum, cobble wedged on thigh,
mash hammer and carbide pitch in hand,
eyes blink away scars
of chips punched to heart, forty years
a blunt trowel skipping stiff mud.

Sons, daughters, brothers of stone,
a family emerges to ring a hard breast.
Black Velvet gallon, golden on fresh hearth
for the small fire, ritual
fertility of first flame.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

First published in the Building Stone Institute Newsletter.

Marshall Pruitt and GO

Where Do Stonemasons Come From?

Bull manure. Thirty plus years ago, at the age of 20, I was self-employed, selling bull manure. It was all 100% grade-A prime bull, from a cryosperm facility at Cornell University, not far from where I grew up. Mostly the lab was known as the place that had the cow with the glass stomach that school children would visit and giggle and watch as it ruminated. While dropping a load, one day I met a 62-year-old stonemason named Marshall Pruitt, and he offered me a job. It was a step up. I had a respect for and wanted to learn traditional stonework. He needed a donkey.

When I started, Marshall said that if I lasted three months I would be a stonemason forever. It would be in my blood. A few weeks later, I suppose he figured I was not wholly wore out, he offered me a choice of his educational curriculum, either to be the best cocksman in the county, a different sort of stonework... or the best stonemason. Though I might have had an interest in the former, I told him I was not sure I would survive, and chose the latter. Marshall had a reputation as a bitter, overbearing, cantankerous, irascible white racist, the most opinionated, drunken and unfriendly craftsperson in all of upper New York State. I loved the guy.

He had a ten-year waiting list for new fireplaces. It was years when streakin' was popular and set up one night at the Rogue's Harbor Inn in Lansing, NY we got somewhere after the sixth round when he challenged me to go streak with him in the parking lot. I countered him that he was an old man and should show me how to lay stone before he dropped dead and the old art was forgotten (I think there is a missed “f” in this sentence). We never did streak, leastways not that way, but he wanted his glory. For the first year Marshall would only let me cut and carry stone. It was hard for him to give up his secrets. This was not from some honorable plan of apprenticeship, whereby I had to learn the simple skills before the true craft. Instead, it was his worry that I would steal work from him. In the end, I did. I did not exactly want to, but I did. When he gave in to teach me he vowed that even in death he would sit in Heaven and tell me to get to work. We did not streak that night, or any other. He taught me to lay stone.

His fireplaces were traditional brick, not metal boxes with electric fans. In the good summer months the two of us averaged one fireplace per week, included with the chimney. It worked for me. I lasted three years at twelve-hour days, six days a week. There were a lot of days when we said nothing to each other; each of us communed solely with the stone, sand, brick, and block. It was a meditation in motion.

Occasionally the mortar mixer did the talk, it spoke in a muddled language that resembled chicken-speak. It could have been hawg speak or creole voodoo or simply the yap of a mechanical beagle, but we thought it sounded like chickens. However, if our customers heard us cluck, it was us talkin' to each other. It was our shorthand work code; we would be taken too long to say longer words. We had little idea then that we were politicians. Water was “aga.”

Damned stubborn glacial till is what we mostly worked, boulders many of them harder than granite. Split them with a 20 lb. sledge, a sledge blast. It is like with an axe you let the hammer do the work. Smack! Just as the head reaches out to the stone you turn it so the corner strikes. There is perfection to be achieved in the accuracy and the motion of the swing. The boulder is split like a Faberge egg. All of a day spent clambered around on a farmer's pile in a hedgerow; stepped from boulder to boulder, grazing they call it now. We called it nothing. No words for this work. Hot sun. Old age and mud hid the secret interiors of the boulders that would be full of color and crystals and odd shapes to keep us in wonder what would be found next with the sledge. Hammered.

One day it was hot and we must have been succumbed to heat stroke. I looked at this one flat rock; it was gray with white stuff on it. I asked Marshall what he thought it was and he said it had to be pheasant shit. From then on whenever we got to advertise ourselves with a new customer while we set up in the yard I'd tell them how Marshall had such a good eye he could tell the difference between pheasant and chicken shit at fifty yards. A stonemason needs a good eye.

One day I was cutting a corner out of a stone and a chip hit my stainless steel thermos and put a dent in it. He told me then about the time he put out the eye of a kid at the school where he had been employed. The union had kicked him out because he taught boys in a reform school how to work with stone. Marshall was pissed at the union. Pissed at the school too because they had fired him after a girl accused him of rape. Marshall never had too much luck with schools.

Our long days often ended in arguments, and then in a drunken stupor. Jobs were paid for in cash and booze. Whenever we finished a fireplace, we would call the family around and start the tiny, sacramental first fire. The first flame always the sweetest, most memorable. This flicker was usually doused with a generous libation of Canadian Mist or Rheingold beer. A fireplace built in a bedroom, with its implications of fertility, would be an occasion for an extra-rowdy bash. Sometimes we did not make it out of the yard until the next day. I'll not forget the evening I came home and sat on the floor inside the door to take my boot off then woke up next day in the same spot to put it on again. Or walked two miles in the night in an ice storm where I slid in and out of the blind ditch, just so's I'd be on site on time. The time we were snowed in overnight in hills near Enfield and the fat girl of the house that was takin' after her grannie with three chins, made me cookies while Marshall coached her that I was quiet and shy but sweet on her. I wanted so much to stay outside that the mortar froze on my trowel. When I asked Marshall said it was settin' up real fast is all and to hurry it up. I got a cold in my back that year that ached me fiercely for another decade. This one job the owner had recently moved up from Brooklyn to the country and had cut down the dead elm tree right next to the house. He did not like the majestic looks of a dead tree. The roots rotted out, a year later Marshall and I was there in good weather to wonder at how the chimney leaned out about a half foot from the top of the house. We built fireplaces in rainstorms, ice storms, and blizzards. I slid off a roof in the middle of a snowstorm when I had gone up to cap out a chimney. I never did get frostbite.

Marshall became a stonemason at the age of 12. He said it was because a homely, one-eyed girl out back of a school playground seduced him on a Saturday night. He felt sorry for her. This would have been in the early1920s. The matronly principal of the school was only too happy to expel a boy who was overly energetic, and overly empathic towards the needs of one-eyed girls, and who was also Jewish. He always told me he was a Hebrew. He had to have been lost somewheres. Marshall began work as a bull. He carried double bags of Portland cement in the Sierra Nevada, the Devil’s Backbone, for two stonemasons who built wilderness cabins. He survived and began to learn this trade. I don't think he ever learned to read.

During World War II Marshall worked in the San Francisco shipyards where he chipped welds. He stood on a suspended two-by-twelve off the side of a ship, without safety harness, and held an 80-lb. air hammer. One day, hung 75 feet in the air, Marshall hit a particularly solid weld. If his partner hadn’t of grabbed him, Marshall would have gone down. When I worked with him, thirty years later, he still could not climb up a chimney scaffold more than four feet off the ground without he would shake the bolts out of it. I served as his upwardly mobile squirrel. It was me did the climbing for the two of us.

If he saw a jogger, Marshall would say that anyone with a real job did not have to run around to no place. He constantly complained, with creative curse words, that the youth of America were lazy, pea-brained, and indolent. I wanted to prove him wrong, and worked harder. One time this one house there was a black man with his son with a tractor. They worked all that day to plow the field across the road. It was their business and not his. Marshall was a bundle of perplexed agitation all day going from his bancum set up before the breast to the window to look out. There was no rest for this man with the worry of what terror a black farmer could possibly be conspired after. He would go on about how the blacks had taken over basketball and what next the world was going to fall to. Hell was a toughened lump of bile on his narrow racial horizon. My girlfriend at the time wanted to work with us but he would have none of it. I tried to explain to her that if she was around on the job that he would never go to the bathroom. She did not understand, besides, he said that she walked like a cowboy. He was always ready to give me advice on love. When I was fagged out from days and hours of pointing mortar and bored senseless from work on a stone house he told me the best way to get on with the hardship of work is to think about woo woo. We worked all winter on that house with the kerosene heaters burning to make us nauseous with headaches. In the spring I looked out past the canvas and saw the sun bright. I got up and walked out. It took him three days to find me.

Even though Marshall preached to me that universities only function as hotbeds of sex, drink, drugs and depravity, I spent what few free days I had in the Cornell architectural library where I read old books on stonemasonry. I convinced him to build Count Rumford style fireboxes. This was not accomplished by rational argument, or from me to show him the book with pictures, but by incremental misunderstandings and deliberate errors in my layout. Slowly making the masonry boxes shallower. Then showing him an improved draft. Marshall was always intrigued by the mystique of a strong draft in a well-built chimney.

Eventually we built what we imagined were close approximations of a Rumford design. The chimneys worked better. It sounded exotic when Marshall got into his sales pitch to the farmers in the rural counties. We built their decorative-masonry heat-machines based on colonial American thermodynamic science -- what he actually told them was an old American design he had learned in Ethiopia. Everywhere for Marshall seemed to be America, even when he spent a year in Saudi Arabia where he was dry. He told me about how they lay one concrete block per day like some people would speak of streets with gold pavers. It was his eye witness account.

We worked for this one farmer, a prosperous guy with a pallet mill, out north of Moravia. We had built a 6' wide firebox, a split cobble breast, and a raised hearth of bluestone. Marshall had spent a lot of time fussed up over this one fireplace. It had to be his best monument. We worked through all of the stones to pick the best and most interested of them. I spent an entire day to put a hole through the keystone so that we could fit the handle to the damper opener-spiral. Then we did a random flag floor, and then built a dry sink all in the same room. This was above their dairy room and had a hand-crank wood elevator to it. The farmer made real good apple cider that he kept cool in the dairy room below. Each day at the end of day he would give us each a cold tall glass. Pretty heady stuff it was. So when we got finished there we had to have a party and all the farm hands and neighbors around were invited. I met a guy that hunted rabbits. There were pitchers of the hard cider filled from the barrel brought up on the elevator.

It was not long before Marshall was fully animated, what with the first fire and the good draw on a tall chimney. He danced. Times like this I had learned it was smart to stand directly behind him because he had a tendency to fall over backwards like an ironing board let go all of a sudden. He jumped up on the hearth and danced like it was a jig, even without music, everyone watched. With their attention in hand he lit to tell the story of the stones that he had put into their fireplace. He pointed at the mother stone, it was yellow sandstone. Then he pointed out the father, a hell of a fat red igneous stone. Then onto the children in a row all the way down to the littlest baby. A family to ring the hearth of the breast. I was behind him; he kept going and did not fall. Then there was the moon stone, a heavy mother, a large chunk of natural iron that he had cursed because it would not cut. I had a crush on the farmer's daughter but would not tell her so.

One time we met a kid who had gone to a school in Holland to learn to be a stonemason. From the way this guy talked, I became convinced that to go to school would not produce a stonemason, only a talking imitation. I never saw him lift a stone (he probably would have herniated himself), but he sure could talk a good line. In my career I've met plenty of people with a desire to play with stones for a livelihood that would be better applied their meager talents to retail sales or as hair cutters. It was not often we worked projects where there were other trades and for the most part we avoided a whole lot of people. When you work like forever there is little left over for social life. This one project the block mason's brother was a carpenter who had cut off all the fingers to his hammer hand with a dado saw. It was a Saturday and his 10-year old son was there to watch. The lesson was don't drink beer and saw wood at the same time, leastways, not before noon. He had all his fingers wired back on but he had no insurance so he had to work with one arm hauling blocks for his brother. That should have been the interesting part of this story. Marshall was convinced that one of the family members on the crew had stolen his wristwatch. In the morning he cursed the block mason under his breath and I heard all of it. Towards noon he cursed the block mason's son who was mixing the mortar. Then after lunch it was their wives who brought their meals and had left an hour before. Then the almost fingerless carpenter with the real sore arm was blamed. They were by all estimations a shifty and devious clan of thieves. I was agitated to hear of such despicable actions on the part of tradesmen to do such an underhanded thing as steal a working man's watch. It was a terrible thing. I vowed to Marshall that I would observe them and that if there was any opportunity to make amends and retrieve his watch I would not hesitate to beat them all silly with the 4' level. I worried the entire night.

Next morning Marshall revealed that his wife had found his watch tucked down between his mattress and the headboard. There is always a thing to be said for a bit of patience. Some years later, moved on out of the area and no longer any threat of competition for my mentor, I had an opportunity to do a small amount of work on the facade at Carnegie Hall. I contacted the local hometown newspaper and talked them into doing a short article with a picture. I later learned that Marshall happened to be lain in hospital when the article appeared. A tree that he had been cutting down for firewood had hit him. His wife showed him the article. Marshall had been through a lot and could not remember which of his many helpers I was, but his wife reminded him that I was the one who wore funny hats. He remembered. I was told that he cried. I was glad the article mentioned him, because Marshall died in that bed. And sure enough, not many days go by that I do not hear him tell me to get to work.

First published in Stonexus.

R.I.P Seamus Malarkey

My Irish concrete-mason friend Seamus Malarkey died of cancer the end of last week.

With recent years I had lost touch with him. But over time I had recommended him in with a few clients in our business network. Word would get back to me on occasion that Seamus was still beating around to drum up business. A recent discussion with another friend in common had my hopes up that I would get to see Seamus in the near future. I had said, “Tell Seamus I said hello.”

Instead I got the call this morning that his cancer had spread to his brain and he could go no farther.

Seamus was always a wiry guy, all bone and muscle. Another friend that I called after I got the bad news this morning said that he had seen Seamus about a month ago. That he looked like the wind could blow him over. The church where I had recommended him in for work loved him and they were all excited that he would replace their sidewalk this year. Odd how folks can get emotional about their sidewalks, but I think it depends a whole lot on the human relationships.

Seamus always brought with him good stories that would make everyone laugh. He also brought back for us on a trip home to Ireland a very nice bottle of his father’s poteen. That was good stuff that took a few years of delicate sips to empty out the bottle. And there was the Christmas he went to the Irish butcher in Queens and we had more meat, pig knuckles and tripe and such that my wife, Irish-German, certainly appreciated. More meat than we quite knew what to do with.

One time I sent Seamus a business letter and it freaked him out so much that he hurried up his concrete pour that was scheduled for that day and rushed right into my office to find out what was wrong. It was a simple letter. There was nothing at all wrong other than Seamus thought to get a letter must mean there was an emergency. He may not have been able to read, though I never checked him on that. When you know an impish genius you think twice to fault them for what they never got to an opportunity to learn.

His office was his briefcase; I always admired him for it despite that with such a meager outfit he always seemed to be in a rush to keep up. When he would set that ratty case down on the table and open it up there would be a cloud of concrete dust whisked up into the room.

If you have ever had to pour concrete, and I mean as in do it yourself, it is backbreaking work. Concrete is not forgiving, it is an insistent mistress that likes to get harder than a F$@%$!^@. Once the truck starts to let the mass out there is absolutely no turn back. Concrete does what concrete does and concrete-masons have to be on top of it –- in full game mode -- otherwise they end up with a real stiff mess of ugly gray rock crap that they need to clean up. When concrete goes down like a sweet love it is beauty in motion. There are mechanics that push concrete all day long day after day, year after year.

We had a client owned a building over on 54th Street near to the United Nations and Seamus as our subcontractor was there to replace a few squares of sidewalk. My job that day was to sit in our double-parked truck and watch it while my partner was inside at a meeting with the owner of the building.

Keep in mind that people in New York walk all over everything, and as much as Seamus might try they would walk right through where he worked. He had to take up existing sidewalk which meant that he busted it up with a sledge (and I mean a sledge, not a powered chipping hammer). For this grunt work he had with him a young strong fellow, Irish, shirtless as to be expected, to do the heavy work. Seamus never lacked for muscle, and the studs he brought with him you would never see twice. Obviously they knew a bit about standing on sidewalks, and day work, and sidewalk work.

Seamus had his small dump truck there, a well-used contraption and as they busted up the concrete they loaded the chunks into the back of the truck.

This went along fine until an ambulance showed up, sirens loud blaring and lights flashing. It was obvious to Seamus that his dump truck was in the way. So he left off the concrete busting and jumped into the truck. There was no other place to park it so he had to drive around the block until the ambulance was done.

So here we had Seamus driving around the block, and I mean driving around the block in a very congested and busy area of Manhattan, not an easy feat even in a small car. And the young buck kept at busting up the concrete that he now piled up in the street... because, it had to be taken out because, well... the concrete truck was on the way.

The EMT folks nonchalantly walked through the construction zone as if they were traversing river rap on a kayak holiday.

Eventually they brought someone out of the building entrance on a stretcher.

The usual pedestrians walked through the construction site... there was nobody available to stop them. I don’t think it ever occurred to Seamus that he would be doing the roundy-round as sort of an unwilling NASCAR dump truck urban-paddy routine.

I got out of our truck and did what I could to keep civilians out of the mess. Then the ambulance sped away with Seamus who came up the block, gunned his engine... and then the city bus pulled into the free space.

Seamus never once screamed, yelled, or acted as if anything was out-of-the-ordinary.

Eventually the bus moved and Seamus recaptured his needed street territory. He was just in time for the concrete truck to show up.

Now, these Irish, as skinny and wiry as they come when they fill up a wheelbarrow they fill it to the top... no sense to waste a good push I suppose. Beside that he was paying for the muscle by the cash hour. With this sort of ambition the concrete spills out a bit before the load up is complete. It is a manly act.

This was such a case in hand that the barrow got fully bloated and on the second time around the tire went flat. From there on Seamus and his helper worked with shovels to move the concrete. Fortunate for them they were only had to replace a few odd squares.

My partner finished his meeting and we left.

Seamus never complained about that day.

He did complain about the day that one of the younger project managers in the company thought it would hurry up the sidewalk for the fancy hotel customer and so he ordered hydraulic cement delivered to the job. Hydraulic cement sets very quick. Blink twice and it will set. It was a small job and when Seamus mixed the concrete up in his mixer it set up before he could get finished with the mix part, let alone the placement. He had to buy a new mixer for that.

The last time I talked with Seamus I joked with him how I was going to get him a large brick job and that it had to be done with fast setting brick. He always laughed and said, “As long as you warn me I’ll make sure to bring my fast setting trowel!”

Rest in peace, my friend.

Comment on The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism

Quotes that I found of particular interest from The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism and Other Writings, Max Weber, 1905, Penguin.

"The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling -- we, on the other hand, must be. For when asceticism moved out of the monastic cells and into working life, and began to dominate innerworldly morality, it helped to build that mighty cosmos of the modern economic order (which is bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production). Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed" p 120

In consideration of our being told often enough (in the USA) what our personal portion is of the national debt, and in line w/ a theme oft repeated by by my timber framer friend as to our having lost connection w/ hands-on trades work with the rise of industrial factories. And to all those who try so valiantly to drop-out of the mechanism. Note to self: We do, so far, exist within a closed-system earth.

"German-American families, who have lived for more than a generation in Brooklyn, which, unlike "New York proper," is regarded as "pious," still have problems when it comes to forming more intimate relations with the old-established residents. Among these problems is how to give a satisfactory, as opposed to a merely "formal," answer to the inevitable question: To what church do you belong? Even today it is perfectly normal for a land speculator, wishing to see his sites occupied, to build a "church," that is, a wooden shed with a tower, looking for all the world like something out of a box of toys, and to employ a young graduate just out of a seminary run by some denomination or other for five hundred dollars as its pastor. He will come to an agreement, spoken or unspoken, that this position will be a life-long post provided only that he can soon succeed in "preaching the building sites full." And usually he does succeed." p 204

Interesting in respect of geographic community based on religious identity, Brooklyn being pious in comparison to Manhattan, wooden sheds with a tower, and what is it that we intend to preserve in these old churches -- the built shed or a celebratory memory of the social and economic forces behind how the sheds with towers came to be in the first place? Note: Quaker houses & such in Flushing, Queens.

"...when Methodist workers in the eighteenth century were the object of hatred and persecution from their fellow workers, this was not due at all, or at least not primarily, to their religious eccentricities -- England had seen plenty of these, some of which were more conspicuous. In fact, the frequent destruction of their tools, of which we read in reports of the time, suggests that they were targeted because they were excessively "keen to work," as we might put it today." p 18

So, if the spirit of capitalism is associated w/ the inward asceticism of Protestants then where does the union solidarity that "no worker will exceed the common output of the many" stem from? Just asking. I understand, though have not quite grasped, that Weber provided a sociological-based counter to theories of Marxian materialism.

My specific interest in the history of Methodism is that I was brought up one week in the Methodist Church and the next week in the Baptist Church. There was a two-room school building in between. They both preached a whole lot how the other sect was going to hell. The dichotomy will still give me nightmares. In the end I rejected both as being somewhat nutso, but as I grow older as a Theocratic Anarchist I more and more appreciate that a reaction to various religious perversions is conditioned by the background and root of our early education and the threads of family ancestry.

One grandfather, whom I spent a good deal of time following about, was a Congregational lay minister and an electrician, the other a Master finish carpenter (specialist in spiral staircases) who enjoyed the Bible reading sessions of the Witnesses who would knock on his door.

As I do not proscribe to any of the popular cults, leastways willing to attend nearly any service for the enlightenment and entertainment value, I am often assumed to not be a religious. In honesty to myself this is hardly exactly the bottom of that story.

A Row of New Tenement-houses Shoddy Built, Fall and Injure Many Workmen

frm our friend Ruth Barton in Vermont: Vermont Tribune, Ludlow, April 17, 1885

A Row of New Tenement-houses Shoddy Built, Fall and Injure Many Workmen

Eight five-story tenement-houses on West Sixty-second street in New York, built on criminally cheap principles, collapsed, Monday, and tumbled down, the wreck being complete.  Some 30 workmen were busy about the structures, and a part of them were buried in the ruins.  A large loss of life was rumored at firs, but now only six workmen are unaccounted for.  At least 18 were injured but none fatally.  Charles FRANCK, the master brick-layer, was arrested, but the builder, Charles  BUDDINSEIK, who has frequently been in bad odor with the authorities on account of the "skin" structures he has put up, drove rapidly from the scene to his house on East Seventy-seventh street, and disappeared; finally, however surrendered himself.

Charles FRANCK and Charles SWAGER, bricklayers, say the houses were built during the cold weather of the winter "imitation" mortar being used and the walls filled in with timber, left by the carpenters, to save bricks.  When the recent warm weather began, the walls began to weaken, and steps were taken to brace them up from both ends so that they would stick together until the roofs could be put on and the end walls rebuilt.

Monday morning it was seen that three houses at the west end were in imminent danger of falling.  The foundation had bulged noticeably, and the walls were shaky.  Builder BUDDINSEIK's attention was called to this and he set men to work to fix up the walls and foundation.  Four stone masons and 18 carpenters were at work on this when the crash came.  There were roofers, painters, lathers and plumbers numbering perhaps 30 at work about the premises at the time.

About 3:15 p. m., a shout of warning went up and the end building toward Eleventh avenue was seen to totter and then fall, with a noise of thunder. Both foundation side walls had fallen out, and the body of the house, deprived of its support, collapsed.  The building adjoining fell next. Then the whole row followed like a line of card houses.  There was a continuous roar, that seemed to last many minutes, as one after the other the tall buildings went down.  In a very short time an excited crowd had gathered whose threats of vengeance on the reckless builder filled the air.

When the heavy cloud of dust had cleared away, the people looked upon a heap of broken bricks and timbers which was piled only a few feet above the level of the street.  Men with broken limbs and bruised faces were struggling out from under the wreck and dragged themselves painfully away. Shrieks and groans were heard from one or two places and to these spots the people rushed.  Firemen, and all the available ambulances in the city were summoned to the scene.

Transcribed by Ruth Barton, Dummerston, VT

Notes:

1. Our friend Christopher Gray, author of New York Streetscapes: Tales of Manhattan's Significant Buildings and Landmarks commented that, "Buddensiek ultimately went to the slammer, five or six years as I recall.  His name lived on as an epithet for two decades. "Skin" buildings was a widespread term at the time."

2. Shoddy construction has always been with us and continues to this day. The latest rage seems to be over sheetrock imported from China. This is what the public tends to see, it is in the news, but the situation of selection of materials, or substitution of one material for another, or outright waste of perfectly good materials in a market driven (induced consumer) building/construction environment is a whole lot more complicated than what gets into the news. Selection of appropriate materials that will perform as desired is an important element of the historic restoration process. As it is I spend a great deal of time paying attention to discussions regarding wood window restoration, the ills of vinyl siding, and the never-ending arguments over mortar mixes (lime vs. Portland cement).

3. Before there was a profession of "architect" there were only builders, some of whom were smarter, some of whom were more ethical than others. The history and rise of the American Institute of Architects was in part built up by a conscious campaign to educate the consumer that they needed mortar to be more than "imitation", more than sand.

4. When the construction/restoration/maintenance business is good, which it has not been, then a whole lot of people who would otherwise not have jobs are employed primarily because they have strong backsides and hopefully some experience, skill and training. To a large degree these are folks who not only did not go to college, they may not have graduated High School, in some cases they may not have even got to High School before they went to a life of physical work. I am not talking about places like Haiti, I am talking about our neighbors. Regardless, when it comes to work with their hands they prove out a tactile genius that is all too often undervalued. Then again, when hiring a usual practice is to ask questions, take a chance if they sound plausible, then send the mechanic out into the field to see what happens. It takes only a few seconds to tell if a person knows how to use a trowel or a hammer (it takes longer to figure out if they know how to use a pen). So this young fellow from Bed Sty Brooklyn answered a call for employement on a masonry restoration project at a church where we had a contract to repoint mortar joints. He came along all assurances forward that he had tons of masonry experience. You can imagine the instinct to chase after work. Unfortunate for him he did not know that when you mix mortar that it requires more than sand and water, that cement and lime needs to be added. The foreman after giving his instructions to mix a batch of mortar went about his rounds. By the time he got back to check on the young fellow the mason's were already complaning.