"Specifically, I take people around downtown Seattle to explore the stone that makes up our buildings. On the corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street is an elegant six-story structure built with two-foot-tall blocks of rough-hewn sandstone, about 44 million years old, quarried in Tenino, Washington. The building rose soon after much of downtown Seattle burned to the ground in 1889, and the jagged stone gives it a feeling of rugged permanence, certainly what the city needed after the great fire."
"Nearby on Fourth Avenue, 330 million-year-old oatmeal-colored limestone from Indiana adorns a social club listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Peering through a hand lens, I can tease out a diverse array of fossil invertebrates in the stone: conical horn corals, poker-chip-like crinoid stems and pieces of bryozoans, a colonial invertebrate that resembles Rice Chex. And up the street and one block over, 1.6 billion-year-old granite from Finland clads a 44-story skyscraper;"
Guided tours of downtown Seattle focus on the stone used in buildings, revealing geologic histories spanning tens of millions to over a billion years. A six-story structure at Second Avenue and Cherry Street uses two-foot sandstone blocks quarried in Tenino about 44 million years ago, installed after the 1889 fire to convey rugged permanence. A Fourth Avenue social club features 330-million-year-old Indiana limestone containing horn corals, crinoid stems and bryozoans visible under a hand lens. A nearby skyscraper is clad in 1.6-billion-year-old Finnish granite with multicolored interlocking crystals. The street-level view connects shallow seas, tectonic shifts and magma to planetary-scale change.
Read at High Country News
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