The Tree

Hemlock’s are most people’s idea of what a pine tree looks like – tall, dark and thick needled. But in the city, it can seem a mystery. It’s rarely spotted among salvaged lumber, yet it was logged commercially in the East for many decades (In the 1860’s, 770 million bd. ft. were sent to sawmills). Chances are that it was milled into smaller dimensional lumber; not sizes common in New York (with the average tenement joist 20’+). When it does surface, it’s warm reddish-brown hues and dense figure make it an attractive wood for a range of applications.

It can be a challenge to mill Hemlock with tear outs in the wood or knots easily blowing out when worked with modern tools, but each wood has it’s peculiar qualities. Otherwise, it’s moderately light, moderately hard, and moderately textured. It’s traditionally used in construction for light framing, but also boxes, pallets, and often, as low quality paper pulp for newsprint. So it remains an important urban wood, but as the medium for “all the news that’s fit to print”.
The species extended from Nova Scotia through Maine and New England, and west to Wisconsin. It grows best in a cool humid climates, and through all seasons. 150-year-old trees can be three feet thick and 100 feet high. It’s one of the few softwoods that tolerate shade, which causes the lower branches to hold out longer, producing a knottier wood.

 

Spruce was used on early airplanes, for finely made musical instruments and for early walkway over the Brooklyn Bridge (but only after some debate and the intervention of the engineer, John Roebling). But in modern times, the species, with it’s relatively soft, pale and knotty figure, has often been degraded. Early Spruce loggers were ridiculed by ax men taking down the towering Eastern White Pines, and it wasn’t until those forests were depleted that Spruce became a significant commercial wood, primarily for everyday framing lumber. White Pine built early New York through the mid 19th cv. From there, the multi-family’s that sheltered our immigrant grandparents were served by Spruce.

Spruce is actually a broad family of trees with a number of sub-species (Norway, Sitka, Colorado, White, etc), and it can be impossible to identify one from the other as wood, without actually seeing the tree itself when it was logged – observing it’s cones, needles and bark. But in the Northeast, three types of Spruce were logged in the 19th century, and of those, just one – Red Spruce – was used for framing wood. The others (Black and Blue Spruce) were logged for pulp mills that produced paper.

The framing lumber for essentially any building in the city – pre-WWI residential of every size to commercial structures of all types (warehouses, factories, , is framed with softwood lumber, sourced from coniferous trees and distinguished from hardwood broad leaf trees (Oak, Beech, Chestnut, etc.) most readily, by needles and cones. The difference is reflected in it’s smallest component cell structures. A microscopic look at the cities lumber reveals a simpler and more archaic pattern of cell arrangement than any hardwood, resulting from the earlier evolution of conifers on the planet – by roughly five million years. Each of these broadest of soft and hardwood categories within Treedom have been critical to civilization.

In New York City, Softwoods have framed it’s built structures; hardwoods have outfitted it’s interiors. But the rule is sometimes broken, and in recent years, it’s practically being reversed – with aesthetics, economics and ecology all being reconsidered (or by post-modern estimators, deconstructed) for today’s built environments. Cypress is one of these anomalies, technically a softwood (though rated by lumber yards as a hardwood) that is rare on the city scene, though an occasional choice for rooftop water tanks. The exhibition utilizes material harvested from an old urban distillery tank.

 

 

Doug Fir arrived in New York City from the West in the early 20th c., framing low-rise light industrial structures across the city, especially in the developing outer boroughs – the auto parts suppliers and repair shops, candy and confection distributors, machinery and carpentry shops, the juke box and pool table distributors, all operating under woods from the massive Douglas Fir trees – the mid-Century modern of American structural woods. It took intercontinental freight networks and the depletion of Southern forests to make Doug Fir more economically viable in the East. And during WWII, larger volumes were being shipped east to conserve steel. 

Douglas-fir is one of the fastest growing conifers in North America and grows to remarkable sizes in older forests. It’s been available in large supply and it’s excellent wood characteristics make it the most utilized lumber species in the United States (close to 70% of NW lumber). The trees grow through varying climates in the Northwest and up into British Columbia. It can reach heights of 250’ or more with 3-6’ diameter trunks. It’s seeds are dispersed by the wind and lodge readily in most soils. The tree is named for the Scottish botanist David Douglas, who was sent to N. America to study this species in 1825.

It’s principal use is structural lumber and timber because of its strength and availability in large sizes. It also is used heavily for construction-grade plywood, veneer, paper products and various types of millwork, flooring, pallets, boxes, crates, ladders, and furniture. And sometimes, it’s just ornamental, planted throughout the world.

A) Early wood usually lighter than late wood. B) abrupt transition. C) Resin canals indistinct to visible eye. D) Frequently tangential groups in the latewood. E) Rays of two widths, those with traverse resin canals barely visible to naked eye.

Photo: Hoadley, Bruce R. Understanding Wood: A Craftsman’s Guide to Wood technology The Taunton Press, Newtown, CT. 2000.

 

Moving 19th century lumber from the deep South to New York doesn’t appear to have been substantially different than the run from Maine to the city. The ship routes from the South were longer, but the economics may not have been decisive. And the Southern woods had qualities that were hard to match for certain building applications – primarily the large structural timbers of industrial buildings.
It was a Southern lumber mill that won the bid (to the chagrin of local mills) for supplying the Pine that was used to construct the Brooklyn Bridge, which used a volume of timber that must have dwarfed any other project on the scene. Just the underwater Caissons, which encased the concrete base of the towers, were eight feet thick and the size of a city block.

Southern Pine framed America’s industrial revolution – it’s mills, warehouses and factories. The woods heavy resinous fibers were ideally suited to this purpose, with great resistance to fire and insects, hardness ratings comparable with Red Oak, plentiful and economical – until those old growth forests, extending from the Carolina’s to Texas and South to the Gulf, were depleted by the 1920’s.
Longleaf pine is native to the southeastern United States, in the Coastal Plain from southeastern Virginia to central Florida and west to eastern Texas. It can grow to 100 feet, and 3 foot diameters. The species has a range of alias’ – no fewer than sixty: Fat Pine, Georgia Pine, tea Pine, sydstaternas gul-tall, longstraw pine sumpf kiefer, and hard pine – to name a few.

Southern Pine is very heavy and strong and stiff, with a straight grain. But it’s thick resin make it difficult to machine. It ranks high in nail holding capacity, so that salvaged Pine can be a dog to de-nail. The heartwood is rated as moderate to low in resistance to decay, and milled properly with a sealant, it performs well for exterior applications. The furniture of Brooklyn Bridge Park is made from salvaged antique Pine that came full circle from decommissioned cold storage buildings on the site.

 

The Eastern White Pine towered over the forests of the East Coast, an impressive sight for both the Native Americans, who praised it as the “Tree of Peace” and the early European settlers, who prized it for yielding the finest ship masts. The King of England ordered the largest to be marked for the British Navy – a significant factor in the events leading to the American Revolution.
Old growth pine was a favorite wood of early 19th century America with huge, knot-free boards. Freshly cut white pine is creamy white, but antique Pine deepens to an almost translucent golden brown, possibly due to the rich soil conditions of a Virgin forest. It was common and easy to cut, and was used for paneling, floors and furniture. The pre-1850 commercial Classics of lower Manhattan, forming the city’s first world trade district, were built of White Pine. Attesting to the woods commercial value, Wall Street is one block from Pine Street.

It’s the tallest tree in eastern North America, with early reports of the trees rising up to 230 ft.  with diameters of up to 8 feet! The tree grows in a range of Eastern conditions from cool, humid climates to boggy areas and rocky highlands. It provides food and shelter for a collection of animal and insect species that would fill a floor of the Museum of Natural History. Certain types of Caterpillars have been found to feed only on Eastern White Pines. It originally covered much of northeastern America, though only one percent of the original trees remain untouched today.

 

Nothing if father off from the concrete jungle than the natural one, like the largest of them all, the Brazilian Rainforest. One place where ecological and human made diversity collides is in the city parks and boardwalks, where woods harvested from the deep forests of South America are used extensively. NYC, as it turns out, is the largest consumer of tropical hardwoods in the country. The issue has drew the sharp criticism of environmental groups and the city responded. The fabled Coney Island Boardwalk will be replaced with concrete, except for the one block in front of the amusement area. Global warming is afar scarier ride than the Cyclone, so the question of nature verses nostalgia was an easy one.

It’s not so easy to pass on the irreplaceable qualities that Rainforest woods offer – remarkable resistance to water, rot and insects; incredibly hard (3x stronger than Oak), and a distinct weathered grey patina. But the harvesting of these woods creates wholesale destruction. Ipe trees for instance grow over a hundred feet apart, so there’s a lot of collateral damage – to untold species of plants, insects, animals and ultimately humans.But the experience of these woods still has one sustainable, but very limited form – as reclaimed lumber. FSC Ipe, for instance, has now been available since 2007, but certificates have been known to be occasionally forged. All of the tropical hardwoods that are used on the boardwalk are remarkably durable and insect resistant, naturally – they don’t need to be coated or impregnated with harsh chemicals. And there are a range of hardwoods that are harvested, with some difficult to distinguish from the next, not unlike the ‘white woods’ of Spruce, Hemlock and White Pine in the Northeast.

These woods are valuable as timber trees, especially for furniture, decking, and other outdoor uses. In the Amazon, tribes use it for hunting bows. It’s also a beautiful ornamental tree for landscaping gardens and public areas, with colorful flowers. It’s also a useful  honey plants for bees, and popular with the hummingbirds. Certain products extracted from the tree have had a range of folk medicine uses.