THE CITY ROCKS! Explore the Hidden World of Building Stone

THE ARCADE'S PILLARS: A LOST SIERRA

Introduction > Prologue > Building Stone

	Early in the 19th century in America, builders experimented with grand shopping arcades. The arcades didn't catch on, but they can be considered ancestors of the modern shopping mall. They provided a place where many businesses could be grouped together.  The Arcade, Weybossett Street entrance   The Providence Arcade is the oldest and grandest shopping arcade to survive. It was also the first monumental business building in Providence, built at a time when trade and whaling had made Providence one of the most prosperous seaports in New England. The architects Russell Warren and James C. Bucklin designed it, and the Arcade Realty Company and builder Cyrus Butler erected it in 1828. Warren was the earliest exponent of the Greek revival style in Rhode Island, and the Arcade looks like a Greek temple to commerce. Inside, three floors of shops look onto a wide central walkway, and a glass roof lets in natural light. At each end is a portico, supported by six Ionic columns. The column shafts are three feet in diameter and more than twenty feet high. Many teams of oxen dragged each column five miles from the Bare Ledge Quarry in Johnston, Rhode Island, to Providence, on a huge cart constructed especially for the purpose. At the time, the Arcade's columns were the largest monoliths in the country. The Arcade fell on hard times in this century and was nearly demolished in 1944. The Rhode Island Association for the Blind saved it and bought it as an investment. Still, for many years, it was in poor repair, with few shops, especially while Providence's downtown suffered from a poor economy in the 1970s. In 1980, it was extensively refurbished, and is now crowded every day with shoppers, tourists, and the lunchtime crowd from the surrounding bank and insurance towers. Johnston was once part of Providence, but became a separate town in 1759. Like most large towns in Rhode Island, it contains smaller villages that retain their names and individual identities. The Bare (or Bear) Ledge Quarry is just outside Graniteville, a small village on the eastern border of Johnston, near the North Providence line. Several small granite quarries once made up an important local business in Johnston. They began by supplying stone for textile mills. Some were still quarrying, cutting, and selling granite into this century. The Bare Ledge Quarry is deep in the woods near the interchange of I-295 and State Route44. The quarry pit, a pile of unfinished blocks, and part of an old dirt road survive. Joseph Olney supervised the quarrying and carving of the granite pillars for the Arcade. His son, Joseph Jr., left his mark on the Arcade as well. On one of the pillars is a small defect in the stone, filled with a soapstone plug, which he carved, initialed, and dated. The soapstone came from another, much older quarry in Johnston, where Native Americans used to get soapstone for pipes, utensils, and bowls.  Unused rock at the Bare Ledge Quarry   The Bare Ledge Quarry granite is part of the Esmond Igneous Suite--a group of igneous rocks that formed in the late Proterozoic era. Their exact age is uncertain, but they are at least 570 million years old. These granites underlie about a quarter of Rhode Island. They mostly lie just to the west of the Narragansett Basin, which makes up the eastern part of the state and holds Narragansett Bay. The Esmond granite, as it is popularly known, crops out in the roadcuts at the interchange of Rtes. 295 and 44. It is a hard, greyish, medium-grained rock that consists of quartz, two kinds of feldspar (microperthite and albite), some black mica, and a greenish mineral, epidote. The term "Proterozoic" means "First Life". One-celled organisms dominated life throughout most of the Proterozoic, which lasted from at least 2.5 billion years ago--when the first known life appeared--to the beginning of the Cambrian period, 570 million years ago. For much of this time, vast mats of algae consumed the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and released oxygen, slowly creating the conditions suitable for oxygen-breathing life. Granites form when sedimentary rocks or granites melt and then crystallize under the earth's surface. This often happens when two tectonic plates collide. The heat of the collision can melt vast amounts of continental rocks and deeply buried sediments and create masses of granite called batholiths. The Sierra Nevada in California is a good example of a batholith. It formed as the North American plate overrode the Farallon plate, which has now mostly been driven down into the mantle. The Cocos and Rivera plates, which underlie the ocean south of Baja California, and the Juan de Fuca plate, off the northwest coast of the U.S., are small remnants of the Farallon plate. The Esmond granites in Rhode Island probably formed during a similar plate collision, hundreds of millions of years before the Sierra Nevada. A second, later collision slightly deformed and chemically altered the granite, introducing the epidote. Erosion exposed the granites of the Sierra Nevada as fault movements forced them upward. The gentle, rolling hills of western Rhode Island are all that is left of what may have been a similar mountain range, which rose at a time before anything had evolved to live on land.

Introduction > Prologue > Building Stone > Providence Arcade	Copyright © E.B. and P.C. Keck