Feb.
14, 2007: Keeping Or Curtailing Cobblestones
Photo and Story by Joe
Zlomek
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California landscape contractor Jeff Brown
surveyed the cracked
concrete driveway that serves as the entrance to a 1942
Cape Cod-style home and pronounced it ugly. His replacement remedy for greater curb appeal, in an upcoming edition of
Home and Garden
Television’s “Landscaper’s Challenge”
program, is cobblestone.
Meanwhile, almost 3,000 miles away in Fall River
MA, that city’s traffic department surveyed hundreds-years-old cobblestone streets and pronounced them ugly. Its replacement remedy is
asphalt; the city has been
routinely paving over the stones to create a smoother
roadbed.
Maybe there’s a trade or deal to be worked in this, the real estate version of “what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” At its heart is a natural product of both historic and decorating significance.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, stones were taken from riverbeds and placed in the hulls of wooden cargo ships as ballast before they began an ocean voyage. The distributed weight helped keep the ships floating upright. Once a ship reached its destination, its stones were removed and cargo loaded for the return trip.
As stones piled up around their harbors, practical port owners hired teams to “cobble” or assemble them flat-side up in sand or mortar to form a permeable but long-lasting road surface. Cobblestone roads didn’t produce dust, didn’t get muddy, couldn’t develop ruts, and easily flexed with ground movements like
frost |
| A car drives down a
cobblestone street in the Philadelphia PA neighborhood of Manayunk
during sunny February 2007 afternoon. |
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heaves. They seemed to be the perfect pavers for a
coastal
environment.
Today, “cobblestones” refers generically to almost any stones with dimensions of between 2-1/2 and 10 inches. With soft eye-pleasing tones, and edges that have been smoothed and rounded by the continual flow of water, they are a designer’s and architect’s dream. They can be expensive too, costing as much as $3 each for authentic material.
Cobblestones answered the prayers of homeowners Jonathan Endicott and Creston Baker in the
HGTV show to be broadcast March 4 (2007) at 7 p.m. They told Brown their driveway “looks like a loading dock,” and said they wanted “a more premier finish.” Brown gave it to them using large stones that he said results in an “older, more settled-in look.”
But it’s the settled-in feel, not the look, that creates cobblestone headaches for Kenneth Pacheco, head of
Fall River’s Department of Public
Works. A local newspaper, The Herald
News, interviewed Pacheco last month and reported that “cobblestone streets are slick in the winter,” “are hard to plow,” and make a “finely-tuned, foreign-made car bounce and sway in a disturbing manner.”
So Pacheco’s crews regularly rip out cobblestones and install new streets, or pave them under. Usually their work follows upgrades to a water, sewer or electrical system, or occasionally the creation of a new residential or commercial development.
As of Jan. 28 (2007), according to The Herald News, only portions of three cobbled streets remain in the
Southern Massachusetts port city that once was filled with them. Low mounds of abandoned cobble now litter the staging yard of the
city’s Water
Department, Pacheco said, much as they once did beside Fall River’s docks.
In New Bedford
MA, only 14 miles east of Fall River, cobblestone is treasured for the historic flavor it offers to the city’s shopping district. The same is true in
Manayunk PA, a Philadelphia neighborhood that’s come alive during the past 20 years with boutiques, restaurants and gentrification that appeals to well-heeled baby boomers.
Such progress elsewhere hasn’t been lost on Fall River Mayor Edward M. Lambert Jr. Rather than sell unused cobblestones, Lambert told the paper he and city council members are actively talking about using them to pave a plaza at the city’s Government Center. |
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