Attention to Art
By K. Schipper
ROYAL OAK, Mich. – Tom Mahany likes to think he’s a little bit unique in the landscape-stone trade; not everyone spent three years studying engineering and military tactics at the U.S. Military Academy and another three years of fine art at the University of California-Berkeley.
His specialty – dry-stacked walls of New York bluestone – is also a little out of the ordinary. But, Mahany retains one thing in common with many contractors from Maine to California: He’s hit a dry spell in the current economy.
pursuit of an entirely different business), he’s spent the greater part of his time from April to Christmas working to enhance the outdoors.
That is, until the fall of 2008. Now the owner of Eldon Precision Stone LLC is spending his days on a mix of activities including marketing his skills, picking up what he describes as “handyman” jobs, and supporting veterans’ activities.
A Sense of Balance
Asked about his educational background, which includes those years at West Point and Berkeley, Mahany admits that, “There aren’t a whole lot of us.”
A native of Maine, he adds, “I went from the extreme right to the extreme left, East Coast to West Coast, with Vietnam in the middle.”
There’s a lot of Mahany that suggests balance and a willingness to integrate both side of his personality into a whole. For instance, he’s self-deprecating enough to laugh about the fact that as a graduate of Berkeley in the mid-1970s, he found himself working as a carpenter – along with many of his fellow art grads.
However, he opted for a somewhat different career path.
“Stone was something I could do, and the competition wasn’t as great as it was being a carpenter,” he says. “There were a lot of carpenters out there, but only a few stone masons, and even fewer who actually took the effort of building enduring structures.”
Mahany suspects that some of his interest in building with stone is in his genes. He notes his Maine roots and that New England is the country’s original home of hand-built stone structures, especially walls. And, of course, there’s that background in engineering.
“It’s all balance,” he says. “Engineering is about solving problems of balancing and maneuvering mass. It’s also an important aspect of footings; there’s logic in the mathematics format of it all. And, there’s always something new to learn. The older I get, the more I learn about leverage.”
For 25 years, his Eldon Precision Stone was a fixture in the Bay Area – although, as his experience grew, he found himself focusing more on dry techniques.
“There is something very satisfying about fitting the stones,” he says. “I found a niche with it and started getting calls on doing dry-stack, and I began to focusing on it more and more.”
Then, in 1995, what he calls his “other life” in the art world prompted him to relocate to Michigan.
“I have a couple patents in my name in luminescent coloring, and when somebody bought one of them, I came here to work on it,” he explains. “That (the coloring business) went south, so I went back to my stonework, and for the last 16 years, dry techniques are all I’ve been doing.”
Breathing Stones
Given his location, it’s not surprising that one of Mahany’s specialties is seawalls.
“Obviously, for the last few years, that had been a pretty lucrative source of income,” he says. “Because the lakes freeze in the winter and ice can destroy the docks and shares in front of someone’s home, stone is a good answer for that.”
The other popular options are wood and steel; however, Mahany says, after 20 years the result is something worse than if the site had simply been left alone. Not only does natural stone fit better in these natural settings, but dry-stacking is an ideal solution.
“In any setting involving freeze-thaw, the stone will almost breathe,” he says. “If you put mortar in there, the mortar will expand and contract according to the temperature, but once it expands it doesn’t go back to where it was.
“The stone wall will expand and contract with the elements, but if you put mortar in there, it’s planned obsolescence.”
Mahany explains that the secret to a good dry-stacked wall is making sure that every stone sits by itself before you put the next one on top.
“Every stone must attain self-balance,” he says. “This is done most often with shims. Those are the broken pieces that most people just discard, but I’ve got buckets of them around in different thicknesses. That’s very important.”
With that in mind, it’s understandable why Mahany is so particular, and why he hand-selects all the stone for projects himself. Although he prefers the New York bluestone for smaller projects, for seawalls he utilizes Canadian limestone.
“Obviously, there’s stack stone everywhere, but New York bluestone doesn’t get any finer,” Mahany contends. “What appeals to me is the density: it’s just a very hard stone.”
He’s especially drawn to the layer just below the overburden, which is striated and comes out in sheets. It’s the aesthetics of millions of years of groundwater constantly weather it that provides its appeal to Mahany.
“It takes more understanding to deal with that layer,” he says. “Utilizing the full color with a natural-bed face and nice texture is like putting together a painting. What you get at the end is a visual piece of work, rather than just a structural piece of work.”
Often irritated by cladding or walls installed by brick – as opposed to stone masons – he adds, “I can’t stand the sight of running bonds in stonework.”
Facilitating Success
That’s not the only concern Mahany has about the hardscape market.
“I would really like people to understand the difference between a real stone mason and a landscaper who’s doing stonework,” he says. “Even with some of the television shows, I have to laugh at some of the stone masons they have on. They’d never show woodwork being done like that.”
Still, Mahany notes that having spent years getting jobs strictly by word-of-mouth and having more offers than he could comfortably handle, he’s stumped by the current economy.
“Before June of 2008, I had to turn work away,” he says. “Then, the bottom dropped out, they drained the swamp, and the work’s just not there.”
Mahany has tried a mix of approaches since then: contacting landscape architects via the Internet, taking smaller, less-demanding jobs to fill his time and bring in some money, and – not surprising, given his background – directing more of his efforts towards veterans’ issues
He’s also ready and willing to travel. One year he spent part of the Michigan off-season in Alabama, and he says his tools for walls are fairly minimal.
As for his possible roles, Mahany says there are many.
“I’m at the stage where I can facilitate other parts of an architect’s stone needs,” he says. “I can specify, I can select and procure stone, I can help with the design and even consult with the engineering part of it.”
Mahany is also keeping his hand in his other career, or as he puts it, “Painting is something that I still work on continuously, although not constantly,” and one of his 2009 highlights was a show at a local gallery.
However, that’s small consolation when the work schedule remains mostly empty. While he’d like to get a higher-end, higher-profile commensurate with his skills, for now Mahany share the same fears as many other contractors out there.
“The smaller jobs are okay, but they only just keep the repo man away,” he says.
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