What’s the oldest stone in Seattle? What's the best place in town to see fossils outside of the Burke Museum? Why do the rustic sandstone ledges, pediments and bases on so many old buildings seem to be peeling away? What do Seattle’s Rainier Tower, New York’s late Twin Towers, Rome’s Coliseum and Venice’s Piazza San Marco all have in common?
Most of us don’t think to ask such questions, though we walk past the answers every day. We look at buildings and we see buildings. We look at stones, we see stones. David B. Williams looks at buildings and sees stones. He looks at stones and sees stories.
Williams, a local geologist-turned-writer, has carved out a niche as a chronicler of the stones that cities are built of, a sort of mineralogical Arthur Lee Jacobson. Like a good specialist, he displays a boundless zest for such matters as prehistoric calcite deposition, ancient travertine transport and 20th Century slate-roof economics, and he has a bottomless well of stories about them, which fills his books Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology and Cairns: Messengers in Stone. At book length that may be more rocks than a casual reader wants to break, but such tales are the stuff of a great walking tour, which is what Williams offers now and then through downtown Seattle.
Growing up a rock hound in Seattle, as Williams did, means going against the local grain. Our glacially tilled ridges and valleys have fewer big rocks than just about any other terrain outside of alluvial muck. And the most distinctive materials on our older buildings are their extravagant terra cotta (“baked earth,” ceramic cladding and ornamentation) and, in such buildings as the Seattle Tower and old Public Health hospital, their subtly modulated, colored bricks.
But even those human-made materials reflect the city’s geology and geography. The fine-grained local clay was especially good for terra cotta, and the city’s ready shipping access helped it become a major manufacturer and exporter of building bricks. Doubtless there are many brick stories to be gleaned here, but Williams is still looking for the brick nerd who can impart them — the brickyard equivalent of the local geologist David Knoblauch, “a real scholar of local stone” and valuable source for Williams.
Still, there’s no shortage of terra cotta lore: The eight “Indian chief” heads on the 1910 Cobb Building (at Fourth Avenue and University Street) may look generic, but they were supposedly modeled after a photo portrait by Edward S. Curtis. The tusks on the walrus heads adorning the 1916 Arctic Building (Third and Cherry) are actually replicas, installed nearly 50 years after the 1949 earthquake dislodged several of the originals and the rest were removed; perhaps they’re still sitting in some civic warehouse, next to the Lost Ark. A legend widely reported as fact has it that they were actual walrus tusks, but Williams has found no evidence of that. Even then ivory was too valuable to stick on buildings.
