An Architectural Field Trip to Green-Wood Cemetery National Historic Site
Once a month, I make my regular visit to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn to lead a Design Professionals Hands-on Product Demo Day. This is my favorite event because it gives me a chance to dig into our complete product lineup. Our Jahn Mortars are our flagships, for sure, but our cleaners, strippers, coatings, water repellents, and tools… I love making these products the star of the show sometimes.
Kamen Tall Architects scheduled a private demonstration with CSP
Green-Wood is a National Historic Site that is also still in operation as a cemetery. Our interest at CSP is that Green-Wood has of the largest collections of 19th- and 20th-century outdoor stonework—and it’s in constant need of preservation. It’s a truly beautiful site. Imagine a 478-acre park, dotted with stone statuary, mausoleums, grave markers, walls, and gateposts.
CSP supports the effort by training cemetery preservation interns and staff at no charge. In exchange, Green-Wood allows us to use its maintenance garage for our demonstrations, which we offer to engineers, architects, preservationists, and others.
Hands-on experience with Cathedral Stone Products was part of the session
Of course, these are more than just demonstrations—I like to say: doing is believing when it comes to our products, so attendees receive their own stones to work on during the session. They learn about the tools, how to properly demo a broken stone, how to prep it for the mortar. We talk about how you can stain masonry to get the marble lines in marble repair mortar or the color variations of highly weathered glazed terra-cotta.
Recently, the firm of Kamen Tall Architects scheduled a private session. They wanted every one of their employees to have time away from the office to get hands-on with masonry restoration and preservation. They learned about methods for repairing both natural and synthetic stones. They also saw some restoration demonstrations using our cleaners, paint strippers, water repellants, potassium silicate coating, molds and casting mortars, and specialty tools.
The purpose is always to open the attendees’ eyes and let them play with things themselves. Everyone knows about Jahn Masonry Repair Mortars and Grouts, but they may not have had the chance to work with our cleaners, paint removers, coatings and repellents, or the specialty tools we’ve developed.
Playing with CSP products
There is nothing like an event like this to really communicate the breadth of CSP’s product lines with the restoration and preservation professionals who may not have spent a lot of time in the field. In person, they can touch it, smell it, feel it, and see it. You don’t get the same degree of believability unless you’re right in front of it. As I said, seeing is believing.
