"Specifically, I take people around downtown Seattle to explore the stone that makes up our buildings. On the corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street is an elegant six-story structure built with two-foot-tall blocks of rough-hewn sandstone, about 44 million years old, quarried in Tenino, Washington. The building rose soon after much of downtown Seattle burned to the ground in 1889, and the jagged stone gives it a feeling of rugged permanence, certainly what the city needed after the great fire."
"Nearby on Fourth Avenue, 330 million-year-old oatmeal-colored limestone from Indiana adorns a social club listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Peering through a hand lens, I can tease out a diverse array of fossil invertebrates in the stone: conical horn corals, poker-chip-like crinoid stems and pieces of bryozoans, a colonial invertebrate that resembles Rice Chex. And up the street and one block over, 1.6 billion-year-old granite from Finland clads a 44-story skyscraper;"
Tours through downtown Seattle focus on the stones that form urban buildings, revealing deep geological time. A six-story structure at Second and Cherry uses two-foot, rough-hewn sandstone blocks quarried in Tenino about 44 million years ago, conveying rugged permanence after the 1889 fire. A social club on Fourth Avenue is clad in 330-million-year-old Indiana limestone that contains diverse fossil invertebrates, including horn corals, crinoid stems and bryozoans. A nearby skyscraper is faced with 1.6-billion-year-old Finnish granite whose multicolored crystalline texture shines on sunny days. Moving between regions highlighted personal connections to geological landscapes.
Read at High Country News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]