(Photo: Michael Appleton/New York Times)
In the decades following the American Civil War, the South found demand for a new cash crop: virgin longleaf pine. In the era before steel girders became useful for construction, virgin longleaf pine was regarded as the finest lumber available. So the ancient forests of the South were cut down to build late Nineteenth Century New York City.
In 1938, the Great Southern Lumber Company sold its last log of longleaf pine. The US Forest Service estimates that only 3% of the original remains. That makes the wood left inside old buildings very valuable. So recovering it has become a thriving industry in New York City. Vivan Yee writes for the New York Times:
Some of the trees were three centuries old. Dense, durable and saturated with resin that made it unusually resistant to rot and insects, the timber proved rough work for builders to mill. But in the decades before steel began to dominate, longleaf pine was the strongest material around.
“Everybody in the wood business says the longleaf pine tree was the best wood the Lord ever made,” said Pat Fontenot, the owner of Olde Wood Accents in Washington, La., an antique pine dealer. “If it wouldn’t have been for the longleaf pine tree, we wouldn’t have been able to do the Industrial Revolution.” […]
The only way to find original-strength longleaf pine these days: Mine it from buildings like the Domino Sugar Factory or 443 Greenwich Street in TriBeCa, the brick and mortar vertebrae of northern cities’ industrial might.
“It’s a Southern tree that has been a part of New York City for 150 years,” Alan Solomon, the owner of Sawkill Lumber, who hunts down old lumber, from the Coney Island boardwalk to a Western Beef supermarket in the Bronx, said during a recent expedition to the TriBeCa building. “The city’s always reinventing itself. Stuff’s always getting knocked down.”
-via American Digest