Pre-WWI buildings in the city were framed with old growth timber from the country’s seemingly endless virgin forests. The fact can come as a surprise to modern urban dwellers, with wooden joists hidden behind floors and ceilings. These old bones of New York City were once trees of course, with roots upstate, or in New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Louisiana, Virginia, Nova Scotia – just about any place that forests were logged, and water or rail transport was available.
There would be no New York without lumber. So at least in part, the city begins in these backwoods, and with the people that logged them. Their methods, tools and culture can seem as remote as that of imported goods today. But where things come from and how they’re made is now knowledge of critical value, but the same awareness of the past speaks to qualities that don’t meet the eye.

The following links to selection of selection of photos, providing a glimpse of the forgotten forest and it’s logging heritage.

Logging Snapshots

Reclaimed or antique lumber has been turned inside out from it’s early years from the more degraded category of ‘used or Second-hand lumber’, merely a cheaper building material option, as much passed over by ‘high end’ projects as it’s sought after today. Not unlike the progression of the junk yard to modern recycling facility, second hand clothes to vintage thrift, these material are on the upswing for their timeworn uniqueness – and for being green. Measured by reclamation rates, 19th c. New York was likely a far more sustainable city. Secondary markets were, if not literally in-house, closely integrated into new material business’. That’s especially true with lumber and other second-hand building items. The same can be said for developing countries across the globe today. But in New York and the industrialized world, mechanized production leading to general abundance of lower priced dry goods, along with a range of other factors, produced common dumps of solid waste. Used lumber became increasingly marginalized as an item for short-term re-use in heavy construction applications. Used lumber, for instance, lined the sewers and excavated foundation sites of late 19th and early 20th c. New York. But prior to that, nearly every lumber yard featured used and second-hand lumber among the offerings. This continued well into the 20th c., but as an increasingly small percentage of all lumber on the market. By the mid-20th c.,  just a handful of companies held onto the trade. Today, only one city location handles used lumber in large volume. Similar to the old days, the business is combined and to some extent, subsidized with new lumber. But once shunned qualities of old wood are now beloved. Orphaned scrap, like a character from a Dickens novel, has been plucked from the old buildings and refined as a gentleman or ladies, though it’s former self still apparent on close look. The collision of these two worlds – rough and refined – is at the heart of it’s hard-knock charm.

Many things hold NYC together – education, diversity, sustainability, architecture, preservation, sports teams, economy, transportation, terrorism (temporarily) – and nails.  Old joists and timbers in city buildings may contain a few generations of this essential building item. Nails are one of the clues to the age of a city building, especially ones that date from the nineteenth century, when nail-making was developing quickly.
Like the wheel, there’s no record of the first person that had the idea to join two pieces of wood with a nail. But nails have been around since Roman times 2000 years ago. By the 1800‘s, England was the largest nail-making country in the world, with 60,000 people employed in Birmingham nail manufacturing alone. But the evolution of nail making was essentially the product of American Yankee ingenuity. The following briefly marks the nails time line within the built environment.
1700 to 1800 – Hand-wrought nails made by a blacksmith from square iron rods were used. Iron was drawn into rods, the end heated and formed by hammer on an anvil with four quick blows, forming a type of rose head. The rod was re-heated and the process was repeated. It was much lighter work than other types of metalsmithing, and often done by women and children. For this reason, it was among the dark spots from the industrial era, motivating machine advances in the process.
1790s to early 1800s – Machines were invented in the United States for making nails from bars of iron, shearing nails off like a guillotine, with a taper formed by wiggling the bar from side to side with every stroke. The heads were made as before, struck into a rose head by hammer blows on an anvil. These became known as type A cut nails. Eventually,  machines were developed that pounded a head on the end of each nail mechanically. This type of nail was made until the 1820s.
Early 1800’s – late 1800’s – In the USA, towards the late 1700′s and early 1800′s, a nail machine was invented. It had three parts. Flat metal strips about two feet long fed into the machine. One lever cut a triangular strip of metal, a second lever held the nail in place, while the third lever formed the head. The strip of metal was then turned around 180° to cut the next equal and opposite nail shape off the strip. The nails were known as “cut nails”. But still, the process was labour intensive with a man (or woman) at each machine. Nails made by this method are known as type B nails. And these are the nails most commonly found in many 19th c. New York City buildings today. Type A nails and the later type B nails can be distinguished by a small burr along the edge or the Type A. Both of these types are inexact, with each nail looking just slightly different. With exposure to time and the elements, the iron nails can begin to corrode, and slightly ‘bleed’ into the surrounding wood, leaving the ingrained mark of it’s history, without compromising the woods structural re-use.
Late 1800‘s – With the rapid development of steel making through the Bessemer process during the 1880s, iron nail making dropped off. By the 1880’s, 10 percent of the nails produced in the United States were made of steel wire. Within six years, more steel-wire nails were being produced than Class B cut nails. By 1913, 90 percent were wire nails. 
In the early 1900′s, the first coils of steel round wire were produced and quickly machines were designed to use this new raw material. And the first automatically produced wire nails with no human intervention other than to set up the machine immediately showed that this was the future.

Additional sources:

Whorf, Amy. A Thumbnail History of Nails, Country Living, June 1993, p. 72.
Sloane, Eric A Reverence for Wood, Dover Publications, 2004.
Bolles, Albert Sidney Industrial history of the United States, from the earliest settlements to the present time: being a complete survey of American industries.
Henry Billing Publishing, 1889.

http://www.glasgowsteelnail.com/nailmaking.htm

http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Nail.html
http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/203/nails.html

Old woods rough-sawn surfaces, stress cracks and nail holes, it’s visible growth rings back to year one are – it’s silent history. But over the centuries, other surviving documentary evidence may surface – a found photo, postcard or related artifact. It’s most recent past is so current and unceremonious as to barely seem like history. But the pace of modern life seems to compress time, so that the experience of the historical dates closer and closer to the present, with popular terms like ‘vintage, retro, and mid-century‘ taking on more of the allure attached to an old object. The expanded historical imagination comes to include the current moment – or at least the one just before – like the vital outer sap rings of a living tree.

And why not – demolition contractors function like the original logging crews; flatbed truckers drive the ox carts, river rafts and ships of the past; the sawmill still rips logs with steel tooth blades, and lumber yards buy and sell wood. The following are encounters with more recent points along the timeline between American old growth tree and the contemporary design of the exhibition.

Link to audio interview

Storied Boards documents the history of lumber that is salvaged from dismantled structures in the New York City area. The research follows the journey of a log, from it’s evolution as a tree species to a building and design project in the 21st century. The scope of the research involves the natural history and anatomy of the original trees, early American logging and lumber industry, construction, the individual buildings and structures where woods are reclaimed and related areas. Tracking re-uses of the lumber to new building and design projects maintains a living history of the this form of material culture. Research for each of the structures is a work in progress conducted by the Sawkill research.

The structures primarily span from the Erie Canal era (1832, 211 Pearl St.) to modern times (NY Public School scaffolding planks c. 2005).  Some are rare architectural treasures, others are rarely given a second look – but there wouldn’t be another building like it again. Every stick of lumber has a story to tell – whether about a building (862 Washington Ave., NY), a city neighborhood (1099 Leggett Ave., South Bronx), a structural icon (a Park Ave. rooftop water tank), a person associated with the site (P.S. 17, Henry David Thoreau School), or the timbers and trees themselves – prior to becoming the structural heart woods of a world class city.