The New York Times Workers were using stone from a Portland, Conn., quarry yesterday to repair a brownstone house on South Portland Avenue in Brooklyn. Mike Meehan, a geologist who once explored for coal in the Appalachian Mountains, is supervising a crew of four men and a canary yellow backhoe, clawing away at the cliffs of the country's only operating brownstone quarry, trying to fill the orders that pour in every day. They're for the Cooper Union in New York City. And those over there are going to the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul in Providence, and that's a stoop going to Yale. Those pieces there are for the cornice trim on a new house going up in the Farmington Valley.
Brownstone is back.
Already moribund by the start of the Great Depression, they filled with water after the flood of 1936 and the hurricane of 1938, were discovered by teenagers as a make-out spot and were adopted by fishermen who stealthily hunt big bass near the towering brownstone cliffs. But preservationists and planners are beginning to see a new future for the formidable stone. Architects have started using it to give a touch of historical sobriety to new suburban palazzos, and conservators have begun restoring the elegant facades of grand monuments like the Cooper Union on Astor Place in Manhattan. On May 16, the Department of the Interior gave three quarries in Portland status as a national historic landmark. The same quality that gives brownstone its charm, making it easy to quarry and easy to carve, also makes it exquisitely vulnerable to harsh weather and the passage of time, especially if the stone is installed improperly, and even worse, is maintained poorly.