That’s the side of Federal Hall, a building constructed largely of Tuckahoe marble. Marble is the metamorphic relative of limestone – put limestone under enough heat and pressure inside the earth’s crust and you get marble – and Tuckahoe marble is a dolomitic marble, which is the metamorphic relative of dolomite, which is basically limestone formed in the presence of magnesium. Tuckahoe marble is distinguished by its white color (despite the picture above) when freshly cut and by its coarse grains. Unfortunately, the intergrain strength and cohesion is significantly less than the grain crystal strength and cohesion, so the stone has a tendency to come apart along the grain seams from weathering and from relatively low levels of tension. It was popular in the early 1800s in New York because it was the best-looking local stone, and so was used for buildings with pretensions to grandeur, like Federal Hall and the A. T. Stewart department store.
I have a theory that is unprovable as it is based on an alternate history of New York. Our local stones are granite (which is difficult to work with because it is so hard), schist (which is difficult to work with because it is hard and has properties that vary wildly with direction), brownstone (soft, weak, with properties that vary wildly with direction, and subject to spalling in our climate), and Tuckahoe marble (soft, weak, and subject to spalling in our climate). Perhaps if we had a decent workable and durable local stone – something like Indiana limestone, for example – we wouldn’t have invested so much effort into faking finished stone in our building facades. From cast iron starting in the 1850s, to terra cotta starting in the 1880s, to architectural precast concrete starting in the 1860s and again in the 1920s, we have been faking masonry for facade veneer for a long time. Maybe if we had better stone, things would have developed differently.
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