Tag: brownstone

The Comstock King and Brownstone

“San Francisco’s crown in the matter of private architecture has rested on the brow of the city’s famous Nob Hill for the past 10 years but the brightest jewel in the setting is receiving its finishing polish,” appeared on page 4 of the May 9, 1886 New York Times.  The short article was referring to the mansion of James C. Flood, best known as one of the Nevada Comstock Kings.  His home was reportedly the most expensive private residence in America.  The reason was understandable—Flood’s 42-room estate was made of sandstone shipped around Cape Horn from Connecticut.  Total cost was $1.5 million and included a $30,000 bronze fence, which was rumored to be polished by a man whose sole job was to do so. 

Flood chose the red sandstone, better known as brownstone, because it was the stone of the wealthy.  William Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, and George Pullman all lived in brownstone homes, and brownstone was called an “almost proverbial synonym for all that is elegant and desirable.”  Tons and tons of brownstone was shipped as ballast around Cape Horn.  The 107 foot by 127 foot edifice featured 14 solid stone columns, 13 feet tall by 22 inches square, and 23-foot-long sandstone steps.  The biggest blocks each weighed 18 tons.

I have long wanted to see Mr. Flood’s brownstone.  Skipping out on a few sessions at AGU allowed me to reach this goal. The mansion is rather handsome and very out of place on its block surrounded by gargantuan and mostly granite buildings.  And it is clear that no one has polished the bronze fence in decades. 

The main brownstone quarries were in Portland, Connecticut.  First used for building in the 1650s, brownstone started to spread widely in the late 1700s and reached a peak by the last decade of the 19th century.  Following devastating floods, the quarries shut down around 1936, but not before the removal of 10 million cubic yards of rock. 

From a geologic point of view, brownstone has long attracted attention.  The red sands were part of an extensive series of sediments deposited in rift basins formed 200 million years ago by the separation of North America and Africa and the incipient opening of the Atlantic Ocean.  These sediments record more than 35 million years of time and stretch from South Carolina to Newfoundland.  The sediments also preserved the tracks of thousands of dinosaurs that roamed the wet sands near streams and lakes in the basins.  More than 20,000 of these tracks, including the legendary Noah’s Raven, are now displayed at the Amherst Museum of Natural History. 

James Flood’s residence was the lone mansion on Nob Hill to survive the 1906 earthquake.  It was, however, only a shell as fire had burned out the interior.  Flood had died in 1889 and his daughter sold the gutted building to the Pacific Union Club.  They hired the architectural firm run by Daniel Burnham to redesign the mansion.  Ironically, Burnham was the architect of the World’s Columbian Exposition and its White City, which contributed to white stone replacing brownstone as a favored building material.  The Flood residence is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Only members and their guests are allowed in the building now.

 

Gary Cooper and the Stones of San Francisco

With the upcoming AGU annual fall meeting, I want to look at some of the building stone used in San Francisco.  Despite the area’s abundant stone, the earliest fireproof granite building used stone quarried, cut, and fitted together in China.  Known as the Parrott Block, it was built in 1852.  The blocks had been labeled with Chinese characters and shipped to San Francisco, to be assembled by Chinese workers.  The three-story building survived the 1906 earthquake and fire but was razed in 1926 for the Financial Center Building, now remodeled as the Omni Hotel. 

Various rock trickled into San Francisco in the following decades. By the end of the century two of the most prominent were a sandstone quarried near Sites and a granite from Raymond.  Sites is about 100 miles north of the bay area, in the Sacramento Valley, whereas Raymond is 150 southeast in the foothills of the Sierras.  Both rocks reached the city by train. 

Colusa sandstone quarry – From: http://quarriesandbeyond.org/states/ca/quarry_photo/ca-colusa_photos.html

Two quarries in Sites provided stone.  A. D. Knowles opened his quarry in 1886, followed in 1890 by the John McGilvray Stone Company.  Known in the trade as Colusa Sandstone (the town of Colusa is about 25 miles away), the rock comes from the Upper Cretaceous Venado Formation, a several-hundred meter thick layer of submarine fan deposits.  They are part of the Great Valley Group, tens of thousands of feet of muds, silts, and sands that accumulated in a forearc basin found between the Sierra Nevada magmatic arc and the Franciscan subduction complex. 

The Ferry Building was the first great structure made of Colusa rock.  Other well-known buildings are the St. Francis Hotel, Music Temple in Golden Gate, and the Flood Building.  The stone was also shipped to Hawaii.  It is generally bluish gray or buff, though a recently opened quarry about one mile north of the original quarries markets the sandstone as a brownstone.  Like other sandstones during fires, the Sites rock spalled heavily during the post-1906 earthquake infernos. 

Raymond Granite Quarry – 1905 — From: http://www.sjvls.org/photoheritage

The Raymond granite quarry opened in 1888 on property locally known at the time as Dusy’s Rock Pile.  Light gray in color, the Raymond rock is classic, Sierra Nevada subduction zone granite, and is now sold as Sierra White by the quarry’s present owner Cold Spring Granite.  Raymond granite was used in the San Francisco Civic Center, City Hall, Palace Hotel, and numerous buildings on the UC Berkeley campus.  The new main San Francisco library, built in 1996, also has a granite façade from the Raymond quarry. 

The stone, or at least the quarries, achieved a bit of notoreity in 1949 in the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.  At a low point in his career, architect Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper, retreats to a job in a quarry.  The quarry in the book is in Connecticut, but since the film was shot in California the Raymond quarries had to stand in for Connecticut.  Although limited, the scenes in the quarry with Cooper and Patricia Neal are some of the movie’s most famous and controversial because of their sexual imagery.  And for those inclined to stone, the shots do a fine job of depicting quarry technology.