The Quincy Quarries Rock!

The Quincy Quarries Rock!

So are you not a fan of the natural world, which includes of course not just the birds of the air or the lilies of the field or the squid in the ocean, but also the dirt and rocks that were here first, long before living things evolved?  How about all those great rocky and stony places we hear so much about, which you yourself may have visited, or long to visit someday?  You know them:  we’re talking places like Bryce and Zion and that canyon so special it is known as the Grand.  People ride mules down its steep trails and cavort through the rapids at the bottom in giant rubber boats, or they will until the river down there has become a trickle, which just might happen pretty soon the way things are going.

Ain’t it Grand!
MId-Atlantic Rift

Maybe your passion for these things has already sent you farther afield, like all the way to Uluru in Australia, deep in the outback by Alice Springs, or Giant’s Causeway near the quaint village of Portballintrae in Northern Ireland (they say it’s much safer to visit there since since the Troubles ended, and let’s hope those never come back), or to that MId-Atlantic Rift in Iceland, which happens to be the very spot where the North Atlantic tectonic plate and the Eurasian, two entire continents, are drifting apart as we speak, if you can believe that.  Go see for yourself! 

Uluru, the rock formerly known as Ayer; will we get an SUV named after it someday? We’ve already got a Denali/Mt McKinley
Giant’s Causeway

Or maybe your rocky ambitions have been a bit less grandiose or a bit more historically or artistically and frankly humanistically inclined.  Your interests run more towards cave paintings in France, or those oddly placed stones at that henge place in England, or maybe you even visit the local cemetery sometimes to admire the carvings on the tombstones. One could expand this category considerably if one started taking into account all the buildings and monuments, statuary and other human constructions of granite and marble and limestone and whatever other rock or stone lends itself to fabrication.  Go back to the beginnings, way earlier than the Pyramids, and you’re in Göbekli Tepe and Tower of Jericho territory and do we really want to go there?  Maybe not today.

Göbekli Tepe in the Anatolia part of Turkey, where we’re not going today

On a somewhat different note, do you also not ponder sometimes deep deep questions such as What is Art?  What is Beauty? and related concerns like What is Ugly? or What is Garbage and/or Desecration or even Outright Vandalism?  For the moment we’ll leave out What is Truth? and What is Justice? If you’re not overly invested in getting a simple or straight or even comprehensible answer, but are a lover of process and just pondering for its own sake, let us take our walk then, you and I, where the big stones lie ‘neath the empty sky, to the very northeast corner of the Blue Hills Reservation.  I speak, of course, of the Quincy Quarries.  Fasten your seat belts and put on your sunglasses as this may be a bit of a wild and intensely colorful ride.

But of course given the way things work around here, we need to start with a bit of history, because everything around here has lots of it, though  in this case we’ll be brief.  In this case the story more or less began with the Battle of Bunker Hill on June17th 1775, over in the Charlestown section of the Cradle of Liberty known as Boston.  It was actually a loss for the home town team, but no matter, since it was also inspiring for the heroism shown by an army of amateurs against the serious professionals working for the British.  It should also be stated here that the battle itself actually took place on the adjacent Breed’s Hill, though in the fog of war does it matter?  Philadelphia also makes claims to being the Cradle of Liberty, so be aware that much with this story is not clear cut except for the quarry stones themselves.

Route of visionary chimerical RR, south of Boston
Quincy Quarries Historical Site is there above Gumby’s head; there are rattlesnakes in the Blue Hills!

What is more straightforward is that 25 years later a decision was made to make a monument honoring that battle and its many heroes, that was to be known as the Bunker Hill Monument.  There was this brief opening in that moment to correct the whole Breed’s Hill error, but sometimes honoring history means sticking with popular knowledge rather than the facts, hence the forming of the Bunker Hill Association in 1925.  At the time there were already any number of sources for stone, and  with the BHM in mind, a BHA member named Gridley Bryant purchased a granite quarry in Quincy, not all that far away but then moving quantities of giant stone blocks any distance is always a mighty undertaking.  How to pull this off in the best way? was the question.  Gridley, clearly one of those outside-the-box thinkers (this is long before that phrase had been coined but he was one nonetheless) hit upon the idea of a railroad as part of the solution, which was so outside the box that few liked it, one calling it “visionary and chimerical” which were evidently bad qualities to have in a railroad.

Do those horses look happy? Powerful? Did they have names? What names would you give them?

But the fierce opposition from some members of government failed when the vote came up at the State House, and democracy here in this particular Cradle of Liberty prevailed, otherwise why had a revolution been fought?  The Quincy Railway was to be one of the first operations of its kind in these new United States, almost three miles long from the quarry on a Quincy hillside to the Neponset River, where the stones could be loaded on boats to take them up to Charlestown.  The thing took all of six months to build at a cost of $50K and yes that was a lot of money in those days. The loaded cars would weigh six tons apiece and would you believe they sometimes strung several together and pulled them with horses?  Of course the low rolling resistance of metal wheels on a metal track is the physics of why it was possible, but did the horses understand this?

Inclined plane made of granite, set at 15º which is pretty steep

The coolest and cleverest thing was how they pulled the cut stones down the 84 feet from the hillside where they were cut down to sea level, on an inclined plane of 15º made of granite, with the train cars moving on a chain in some way.  Yes it’s kind of hard to picture but the fact is all 221 feet of the monument got built by 1843, a total of 17 years, which works out to 13 feet per year.  Pay attention, as some of these numbers are on the test! 

Wonderful, informative plaque
Wonderful expressive stone illustration; now THOSE horses look powerful!

Fast forward to 1963, the year the final quarry was closed.  That’s a long run, and it’s possible some bank or government building near you was cut in that western corner of Quincy, though no longer dragged along by a team of horses anymore.  This closure, as was the case with quarries all over the country if not the entire world, filled with water from the sky and seepage from the ground below, such is the way with many of them.  And the story around here, that might also be universal, is that such sites become the playground of rowdies and wayward teens and probably the homeless, as well as any number of death-defying or -wishing types, most of them men and most probably in their teens and often as not under the influence of one chemical or another, who would dive from the tallest pile of stone down into the inky depths.  This not being Acapulco and these wild and crazy divers being rank amateurs at their chosen practice meant many simply disappeared in those inky depths, or floated up lifeless.  

One helluva grand cliff/diving platform; I dare you to jump! Double dare!! Are you chicken? Are you a MAN?
The rocks sprout various hooks & bolts & this bright little “table”; how does one “quarry” rock, anyway?

So many in the case of Quincy, in fact, that the town tried any number of ways to stop them.  Fencing turned out to be useless, as was filling the pools with old telephone poles and trees.  These would get waterlogged, sink down to a depth where they were invisible, and rudely surprise many a diver launching into a formerly deep body of water that was deep no more.  Which for many was their final thought, ever.  The solution of course was to fill the place in with dirt, which meant sourcing millions of cubic yards from someplace, but where?

A memorial stone in the nearby woods; there may be others scattered about. Alas! Poor Gootch! Gone at seventeen!
A few years back these folks would’ve been swimming in this spot, or floating (hopefully not lifelessly)

Oh, the strange fortuitous turns of history!  At least now and then.  The solution arrived with the onset of the Big Dig in downtown Boston, maybe the largest federal construction project in American history that resulted in any number of immense tunnels for Interstates 90 and 93, as well as lots of well-paying jobs and a good bit of poor planning and corruption (projected duration: seven years which turned into fifteen;  projected cost: $2.8 billion which became $8 billion which is not even the total, which is projected to be $22 billion when all the bonds and loans and whatever get paid off in 2038). Another result was the production of staggering amounts of dirt and where to put it?  How about creating this giant hill on one of the harbor islands (Spectacle) and trucking the rest down to the Quincy Quarries?  Talk about fortuitous!

It’s a big area!
A former pool has become a meadow

The result is what you see here, a “historic” section of the Blue Hills Reservation that has welcomed “legal” visitors for many years now. This includes eager rock- and mountain-climbing aficionados and people who come for the views of downtown from high atop the blocks of granite (there’s nowhere to dive anymore, folks, so don’t even think about it!), and as the pictures suggest maybe hundreds if not thousands of lovers of visual expression armed with paint, mostly of the aerosol variety but not always.  Which gets us to the aesthetic and philosophical and socially analytical and probably even moral part of the discussion, and good luck to us.

What say you, Hobbes, to all of this? “Legalize Ranch” (upper left) is a specific reference

Graffiti, or the public expression by people on any available surface in their environment, in a manner that tends to violate social norms and public and private notions of property, has been part of human civilization since its inception. Those looking for easy answers might conclude that the practice must have begun with the Vandals, who sacked Rome back in 455, but chances are vandalism at its inception was mostly about wanton destruction more than carefully considered self-expression.   Phrases and pictures can be found scratched onto rocks and boulders at the most ancient sites of human habitation, and the catacombs of Rome and Pompeii as well as Egyptian tombs bear all manner of what appear to be unauthorized inscriptions on the walls.  At its crudest graffiti may be vandalism but it’s often something quite different.  Of course wreaking havoc is a form of self-expression, too, but that message tends to be pretty vague and uncreative.

Tweetie Pie looks perplexed, for good reason
This borders on vandalism or is even the real thing, wouldn’t you say? Just a quick purple blast at a rock on the ground

The subject matter of graffiti is wide-ranging and often has a timeless quality:  expressions of love, politics, curses, insults, seemingly random thoughts that could well be nonsense or at best inscrutable to anyone but the creator.  The first supposed “modern style” graffito, found in the ancient Greek city of Epheseus, was an advertisement for prostitution.  US soldiers in Europe during WWII made “Kilroy was here” into a trademark image of that war, and in modern times we have peace symbols and “Bird Lives” and “Free Huey” and you can no doubt name a few more. 

Abandoned building, downtown Lisbon Portugal; we were told rent control led to its demise
Graffiti plus mural; or is the mural also graffiti? Was it commissioned? Ain’t it grand?

One is hesitant to connect any of this with art and artists, but it is also a fact that what is presented is often carefully and artfully laid down. At best it can be intriguing or thought-provoking or even visually beautiful.  And of course anything goes nowadays so we get “legit” practitioners of this endeavor in the likes of Banksy and Shepard Fairey, who’ve become famous and who no doubt make a good living, but they are the exception and “legitimate graffiti” is kind of an oxymoron, would’t you say?  

MBTA Bartlett St Bus Barn, now long gone; Art? Garbage? Vandalism?
Pedestrian bridge over the Mass Turnpike, Allston section of Boston

So take a gander at what’s been happening at the Quincy Quarries!   Clearly the powers that be threw up their hands over any attempts to limit artistic or vandalistic expression in this place.  Maybe they’ve even let this happen intentionally.  One wonders if there were debates amongst Quincy City Council members about artistic freedom, or whether allowing what you see here was even kind of an asset, bringing in artists and vandals and lovers of the arts and even cultural anthropologists.  It’s entirely possible what you see here has been the topic of a PhD thesis or two, as this is Boston.  

Bright colors dominate the palette in this place
Great views of downtown, eight miles distant

Initially it bothered me that this is also a severely disturbed “natural” habitat, and a lovely one at that, but if one drives further up the hill this same habitat has been replaced by a number of gigantic new condo buildings and parking lots, “luxury” living no doubt, and even the site of a car auction with this giant warehouse and parking lot covered with wrecks and tow trucks.  The Quarry site is beautiful in comparison, and the beauty is both Nature’s work and the product of whoever the hell laid down all that paint.  Just be careful if you’re clambering around, as some of those painted surfaces are slippery, indeed. 

It’s not all spray paint
Is this actually Medellin Cartel territory? Or was it back in the day, before they were broken up?

And just like those who say a picture of the Grand Canyon cannot do justice to the experience of being there, such is also the case with the Quincy Quarries.  No, the quarries are nowhere near on the scale of most rocky natural wonders we all know about  –  this ain’t no Zion or Bryce –  but neither are those covered with such a flood of human expression.  That aspect of it, for me, lends it a special kind of immensity and grandeur.  I leave it to you to take a long careful look at what is there (I at least think it’s worth a long careful look) and make what sense you can of it.  If you throw up your hands in frustration and declare it all just so much hideous chaotic nonsense (even Hobbes and Tweetie Bird?) that’s okay too, but is it not at least a wild riot of color?  And if one keeps returning, it seems likely it will always be different in places, such is the nature of graffiti.  Call it a work in progress on a grand scale.  And admission to view it is always free, but watch your step as some of that paint is really slippery.

Warehouse wall by the docks in Vardø Norway
Graffiti? High art? Worth a fortune? On the wall of some fancypants museum somewhere, no doubt

EXAM:  No, teacher doesn’t really care that you can regurgitate any numbers about degrees of incline or heights of any monuments or the tonnage of a railroad car full of granite, but you could write a short essay about what meaning you find in any or all of the pictures shown.  Or instead of that describe a day in the life of one of those horses lugging blocks of rock from the quarry across the Neponset marshes to the river, all of which is still an undisturbed lovely landscape.  Or if you’ve strong opinions about art, compare this really famous and incredibly “valuable” painting by that fellow Pollock to any of the graffiti images.  Did you know our boy Jackson might’ve died in obscurity except that the zillionaire heiress Peggy Guggenheim took an interest in his work?  The rest was history, or rather art history.  It is not known if he started his career splashing paint on rocks.