Michael,

You seem to be the person to ask a question that has been nagging me for
several years. The olive-gray sandstone that was used on the Century Building
in NYC, do you have any idea where it was quarried? It is a very fine grained
stone, unlike bluestone or brownstone. I have seen it on a few other buildings
in NYC, often used as the base course... and often delaminated by years of
rising damp.

Though Apple is a happy member of the Building Stone Institute their primary
focus is on promoting sales of contemporarily quarried & imported stone.
Several years ago they asked me to speak at their annual convention on the
topic of stone restoration. The first message I had to get across was that I
was not going to talk about polishing floors... which is the mainstream stone
industry's concept of "restoration". I confused them, I think, when I
expressed that the stone restoration business is 100 years after market. I
find the interface over this gap of years to be an interesting process. At
Grand Central Terminal one of our tasks was to remove a piece of the Tennessee
Marble flooring, flip it over, and re-polish the underside. The question to be
answered was if restoration, replacement, or flipping of the floor would be
appropriate for the final project. This kind of investigation is not the sort
of task that the mainstream stone industry is generally prepared to consider.
You have to know who to ask, which reinforces the importance of networking.

Thanks,
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