Volume 35
Spring-Summer
2009 |
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Stonework must surely rank as one of
the oldest of folk arts, if only for the
longevity of the material used—hence its
presence in the historical record. While an
immense but finite supply of wood drew
Europeans to the shores of North America,
once they had exhausted local forest stands
through clearing, burning, ship building,
and construction, stone became the material
of choice. The ensuing works in stone
have been the longest lasting remnants of
vernacular architecture. In few places is
this story more apparent than in the southeastern
corner of New York State, where
the Dutch first settled some four centuries
ago and the English soon followed. Like
most of the coastal regions close to urban
and industrial development, the pace of
forest depletion was accelerated, leading
to increased use of stone.
New old-style dry stone wall in Salem, New York, built by Kevin Towle. All photos: Tom van Buren
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As any visitor to that part of New York
can tell you, Westchester is covered not
only with geological formations of excellent
building stone, but also with glacial
stones. Since the earliest Dutch settlements
in the region, generations of wall builders
and masons made immediate use of the
readily available resource and left their
mark on the landscape. A tour around the
county reveals a patchwork of projects,
from colonial-era buildings and farm
stone walls (often referred to as “stone
fences” in contemporary accounts), to the
nineteenth-century mansions of robber
barons, to the twentieth-century reservoirs
and Robert Moses’s parkways with their
famous bridges. This nearly four-century
orgy of stone building drew professional
as well as accidental masons from every
corner of the world, from the days of
slavery, to the waves of Irish and Italian
immigrants who built the dams and bridges
of the county, to the current Guatemalan
and Ecuadorian masons who now uphold
the trade.
The purposes to which stone is put,
the techniques masons have used, and the
builders themselves have all changed over
the years. This evolution reflects changes
in the availability of materials; technologies
of quarrying, stone splitting, chipping, and
carving; and the use of stone structures.
Just as significant have been the evolving
immigrant populations and ethnicities of
stone masons themselves and the cultures
of stonework that they have brought with
them.
Everett Cantamessa (left) with a student in the BOCES stone shop.
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In the winter of 2008, the Folk Arts
Program of ArtsWestchester (formerly
the Westchester Arts Council) presented
a mixed media exhibit on stonework as
an occupational folk art. Mounted in the
council’s gallery in downtown White Plains,
the exhibit—featuring images and examples
of stone carving and setting and stone
wall building—was titled “Set in Stone.”
The project began in 1996, when folklorist
Amanda Dargan began research for the
Westchester Arts Council. At that time,
second and third generations of Italian
stoneworkers were still active. Their fathers
and grandfathers had come to Westchester
from Italy to build New Croton Dam, the
Kensico Dam, and the many arched bridges
of the parkways. Hundreds of institutional
buildings, from churches to the county
courthouse, benefited from this pool of
skilled labor. The postwar period also saw
a massive housing boom in towns like
Eastchester, Yonkers, and Tuckahoe, with
many new homes built with veneer stone
and massive chimneys.
More recently, a fashionable revival of
the farm wall—which Katonah-based journalist
and author Susan Allport calls “walls
of affluence” in her 1990 book Sermons
in Stone—has drawn hundreds of Latin
American stoneworkers, who can often
trace their ancestry to epic wall builders
of the Andes. The housing boom of the
past decade has prompted a renewal of the
trade, with a major influx of masons from
Ecuador and Guatemala.
Old farm stone fence snaking into the Kensico Reservoir.
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Tools of the trade, including pitching tools, pin and feathers, and dressing chisels.
| The “Set in Stone” exhibit was divided
spatially according to three distinct themes.
Around the gallery’s perimeter, the historical
context of stone building—from the regional
geology, to the quarries, to the generations
of projects and styles—were presented in
text panels and documentary photographs.
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In the center, text and photographs recording
the lives and work of six masons were exhibited,
with actual stone structures erected
in the gallery. Finally, on another floor of
the gallery, members of the Westchester
Photographic Society presented stunning
photographs of stone structures great and
small from around the county.
Featured master mason Everett Cantamessa
is a living exemplar of this occupational
legacy. Born in Mount Vernon to a family of
quarrymen and masons from Bergamo, Italy,
he grew up in the trade, working through the
postwar housing boom and on major institutional
projects, such as the buildings of West
Point. He taught his son Eric, who is now the head teacher at the BOCES stone shop
in Yorktown Heights. The family’s history
and documentation about the shop formed
a central part of the exhibit.
Mason Manuel Inga Lazo standing in an archway he built in Mahopac, New York.
| Another key mason featured in the exhibit
is Manuel Inga Lazo, born outside the
colonial-era city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Part
of the original research, he has since expanded
his contracting company to include
four brothers and has built projects all over
Westchester County. Since immigrating to
the United States in the 1980s, he has returned
to Ecuador many times to document
archeological sites where the ancestors
of his culture built massive structures of
stone without any mortar. |
Other featured
masons included Brazilian Dulio Prado and
his mostly Guatemalan crew, who have the distinction of being some of the fastest
dry-wall builders in the region, and Kevin
Towle, who designs and builds spectacular
landscaping projects in the Salem area of
Westchester.
These are but a few of the masons
whose lives and works were featured in
the exhibit. The photographs that accompany
this essay are a small part of
the exhibit. More images and information
about the project are available online at
www.artswestchester.com.
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Tom van Buren directs ArtsWestchester’s
folk arts programs and serves as music
consultant to the New York Folklore
Society.
As any visitor to that part of New York
can tell you, Westchester is covered not
only with geological formations of excellent
building stone, but also with glacial
stones. Since the earliest Dutch settlements
in the region, generations of wall builders
and masons made immediate use of the
readily available resource and left their
mark on the landscape.
This article appeared in Voices Vol. 35, Spring-Summer 2009. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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