New York City's hidden old-growth forests
Scientists are salvaging centuries of climate and historical data from demolished structures

Date:
August 2, 2021
Source:
Earth Institute at Columbia University
Summary:
Tree-ring scientists have mined rare old-growth timbers from
demolition at an iconic Manhattan building to produce historical
and climate data.

Ongoing salvage efforts at other buildings promise to expand on
these findings.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
In the popular imagination, New York City is a mass of soaring steel-frame skyscrapers. But many of the city's 1 million buildings are not that
modern.

Behind their brick-and-mortar facades, its numerous 19th- and early 20th- century warehouses, commercial buildings and row homes are framed with
massive wooden joists and beams. These structures probably harbor at
least 14 million cubic meters of timber, the volume equivalent of about
74,000 subway cars.

Their main sources: old-growth forests that long predated New York,
and were erased to create it.


========================================================================== Historic preservation has never been New York's strong point; about 1,000
old buildings are demolished or gut-renovated every year, the remains
mostly going to landfills. Now, a team from the Tree Ring Laboratory
at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is harnessing
the destruction to systematically mine torn-out timbers for data. Annual
growth rings from trees that were young in the 1500s may offer records
of past climate no longer available from living trees. Studies of
timber species, ages and provenances can shed light on the history of
U.S. logging, commerce and transport.

"New York City is a huge repository of old timbers, probably the
biggest in the country. It's an amazing resource for science," said dendrochronologist (tree- ring scientist) Mukund Palat Rao, one of
the leaders of the effort (his position at Lamont is sponsored by the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). "These forests don't
exist anymore -- they're inside the buildings. They're being demolished
at a rapid pace, and getting thrown away.

We're trying to collect whatever we can." After its settlement by the
Dutch in the 1620s, New York grew steadily but slowly. Then, about 1840,
great waves of immigrants began arriving. A resulting major growth spurt
lasted some 80 years before tapering off. During this time, much of the
now existing city was built. Before steel came in during the early 20th century, the framing material of choice was wood. Starting in the 1700s, loggers to the north cut vast swaths of white pine, spruce, hemlock and
balsam fir, often floating it down the Hudson River. By the latter 1800s, three- quarters of the Northeast's virgin forests were stripped. Many
builders then looked to the vast old-growth longleaf pine ecosystems of
the U.S. Southeast.

When the eastern seaboard was exhausted, loggers moved on to Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Today, only about 3 percent of the South's old
longleaf forests remain.

In a study just published in the Journal of Archaeological Science:
Reports,the researchers shed unprecedented light on this period. The study looks at joists taken from Manhattan's gigantic 1891 Terminal Warehouse,
an iconic structure that still occupies an entire block in Manhattan's
Chelsea neighborhood. Early on, it stored everything from carpets, furs
and liquor to Broadway stage sets and stone sarcophagi. In the 1980s,
it was converted into the country's largest mini-storage facility. A
run of railroad tracks bisecting its cavernous interior became for more
than a decade the site of the infamously decadent Tunnel nightclub. The warehouse has also served as a spooky set for movies including the "Ghostbusters" series.

In 2019, new owners wanted to open up space for new shops, offices and restaurants. This involved pulling out enormous wooden joists holding
up some interior sections of the building. Hoping to reuse the joists,
they called Edward Cook, head of the Tree Ring Lab, to see what could
be learned about them.



==========================================================================
Cook is a hero of archaeodendrochronology, the study of wood from old buildings. Early in his career, his examinations of Philadelphia's
Independence Hall and other historic structures showed that their
ages could be pinned down by studying tree rings in their framing. He
has since dated about 150 old houses and other buildings across the
Northeast. In 2014, he and colleagues analyzed the remains of a wooden
sloop accidentally turned up during excavations at the destroyed World
Trade Center site. They determined it had been built from old-growth
white oak cut somewhere near Philadelphia around 1773, and served for 20
or 30 years before being dumped on the mucky shoreline of New York harbor.

The tree-ring lab crew went down to the Terminal Warehouse's massive
basement.

Here, they found piles of removed joists, 22 feet long, a foot wide and
3 inches deep. Looking at the ends in cross section, they could see that
many displayed 150 or more annual growth rings -- a dendrochronologist's delight.

(Caroline Leland, the study's lead author with Rao, also noted several humongous bird-cage-like things -- tools of the trade once used by go-go dancers at the Tunnel, she guessed.) Amid combustion fumes and deafening racket, a building worker chainsawed off the ends of a couple of dozen
of the best-looking joists, and the scientists took them back to the lab.

Based on resin content and certain patterns and colors in the timbers'
rings, the team determined that the joists were perfect specimens of
old-growth longleaf pine, prized by 19th-century builders for their
density, strength and resistance to rot.

Trees' growth rings vary each year according to weather; in the
simplest translation, wider rings mean wetter years with good growing conditions. After that, it gets more complicated; by measuring and
comparing rings in excruciating detail, dendrochronologists can create
a year-by-year fingerprint that most or all of the trees from the same
place have in common. The joists came from different parts of different
trees, so no two represented the exact same time span. But many overlapped
in time. This allowed the scientists to assemble a master chronology,
from the date the oldest trees started growing to the date they were cut.

Based on the characteristics of some of the joists' outer rings, the
scientists determined that most of the trees had been felled in 1891or
a bit earlier. And, all the trees were ancient; most started out as
saplings anywhere from the early 1600s to the mid-1700s. The oldest had sprouted around 1512.



==========================================================================
They then compared their data to previous studies of rings in rare
living longleaf stands, ranging from Louisiana to North Carolina. Because yearly conditions vary from site to site, each site exhibits localized
ring patterns.

By comparing these, they were then able to deduce where the timbers
had come from: The rings from the joists lined up nicely with those of
living trees from eastern Alabama's Choccolocco Mountain and Spreewell
Bluff, just across the border in western Georgia. Both areas had been
heavily logged in the late 1800s, when steam power and rail networks were expanding mightily, allowing lumber to be shipped to ravenous faraway
markets like New York.

Delving into regional historical archives, the team hypothesized
that the trees were sawed at the Sample Lumber Company, near Hollins,
Alabama. Then, in one of a couple of possible scenarios, they would
have been shipped by a series of connecting railroads to the port of
Savannah, Ga. There, the 250-pound joists would have been loaded into
openings in the hulls of schooners bound for the banks of the Hudson,
where the Terminal Warehouse was rising.

"To think of all those old trees, just clear cut -- that was really sad,"
said Leland. On the other hand: "There is a lot of history locked up
in those timbers. It's really difficult to find living old growth in
the eastern United States now. If we can get enough samples, it may
allow us to develop a better understanding of the long-term climate
in the regions these trees come from." The scientists now wanted
more old timbers. Luckily, they had a connection with Alan Solomon,
a New York entrepreneur and polymath. Solomon comes from a family
of scrap-metal dealers, so he knows salvage. He is also an intensely
driven historical researcher and preservationist. Among other pursuits,
he fought for seven years in the late 1990s and early 2000s to stop the demolition of 211 Pearl Street, a circa 1831 commercial building in lower Manhattan commissioned by soapmaker William Colgate. (Yes, that Colgate, progenitor of the Colgate- Palmolive mega-corporation.) Solomon had heard
that New York writer Herman Melville might have written his famous 1853
short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" at 211 Pearl. This may or may not
have been true. In the end, the building was destroyed and replaced by
a skyscraper. A salvager carted away some of the timbers and sold them
for reuse in other buildings, including a hotel in New Hampshire.

By 2019, Solomon was running his own Brooklyn-based timber-salvage
company, Sawkill Lumber. (Named after a creek that once ran from the present-day site of the American Museum of Natural History to the East
River. It powered an early 1600s Dutch sawmill that probably helped devour
the old-growth forest of Manhattan itself.) Solomon also authored a
book about reclaimed wood, for which he consulted Ed Cook. After that,
Solomon ended up helping with historical research for the Terminal
Warehouse project. With his finger on the pulse of New York demolitions,
he was more than happy to have the dendrochronologists tag along with
him to active sites and saw out samples as walls were being taken down
and workers piled up debris.

Among other places, they showed up with their own chainsaws and hardhats
to the remodeling of an 1898 firehouse on Manhattan's Lafayette Street;
a couple of doomed horse stables in Brooklyn; the 19th-century St. Mary's Church in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood, which was coming down
for a modern development; and various warehouses, homes and mixed-use
building scattered around the city. So far, they have material from 18 buildings, and plan to collect more.

The one other site they have analyzed so far is 211 Pearl; Solomon had
hung on to some of the remains. They identified the framing as white
pine. They then compared the timbers to studies of rare living white pines
from Pennsylvania, upstate New York and Quebec, and found the best match
in New York's Adirondack Mountains. Here, they learned, the pines had
once grown as much as four feet in diameter and 160 feet tall. Logging
had started in the 1750s and peaked in the 1870s, with much of the wood
being sawed in the upstate town of Glens Falls, and sent down to New York.

The living-tree studies to which the researchers compared the Pearl
Street timbers extended back to 1690 -- quite a respectable stretch. But
some of the Pearl Street timbers were even older: 1532. If more such
specimens can be found, said Rao, this should allow the scientists to
extend the climate record for this region considerably. Interestingly,
the trees appear to have been cut in 1789, four decades before 211
Pearl went up. Were they stockpiled? Or, perhaps recycled from an even
earlier building? The dendrochronologists have now joined with Solomon
to try founding a nonprofit aimed at promoting the preservation of
old timbers in New York. They are also talking with a small group of
engineers and architects who want to lobby the city for an ordinance
that would identify old timbers uncovered in demolitions, and require
companies to contact salvagers.

"I'd like to see information from a big network of buildings," said
Leland. "We could develop a sort of history of the urban forest."
The Terminal Warehouse study was also coauthored by Benjamin Cook and
Milagros Rodriguez-Caton of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; Bryan
Lapidus and Andrew Staniforth of L&L Holding Company; and Marguerite
Holloway of the Columbia University School of Journalism.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Earth_Institute_at_Columbia_University. Original written by Kevin
Krajick. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Caroline Leland, Mukund Palat Rao, Edward R. Cook, Benjamin I. Cook,
Bryan M. Lapidus, Andrew B. Staniforth, Alan Solomon, Marguerite Y.

Holloway, Milagros Rodriguez-Caton. Dendroarchaeological analysis
of the Terminal Warehouse in New York City reveals a history of
long-distance timber transport during the Gilded Age. Journal
of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2021; 39: 103114 DOI:
10.1016/j.jasrep.2021.103114 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210802103036.htm

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