by Vince Beiser
And the more concrete America used, the more sand it needed. Grains were hauled up in quantities never remotely seen before. In 1902, according to the US Geological Survey, the United States produced 452,000 metric tons of construction sand and gravel. Just seven years later, that amount had grown more than a hundredfold, to nearly 50 million tons.48
That sounds like a lot, until you learn that New York City’s highways and skyscrapers, including the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, ate up more than 200 million tons of sand. Most of it was hauled in from Long Island, which still supplies a great deal of the city’s needs. The abundant high-quality construction sands of the island is one reason Nassau County, just east of the borough of Queens, became such a popular suburb and vacation home site for New Yorkers. “The great hills of the north side of the county abound in sand that is excellent for building proposes,” declared a 1912 New York Times article explaining the reasons behind the area’s burgeoning growth. In addition, on the county’s southern side, an “inexhaustible supply of beach sand” was being put to use to make concrete blocks “in nearly every community in the county.”49
Sand has always been cheap, but when you’re talking about quantities that large, there’s a lot of money to be made. In 1919, a twenty-three-year-old eighth-grade dropout named Henry Crown and his brother Sol started a company with a borrowed $10,000 to supply sand and gravel to the contractors building Chicago. Sons of a Lithuanian immigrant sweatshop worker (née Krinsky), the Crown brothers would buy railcar loads of sand and deliver it by horse and wagon. Sol soon died of tuberculosis, leaving Henry in charge.
At the time, Chicago’s population was exploding. It added half a million inhabitants between 1910 and 1920.50 Supplying the building boom was a great business to be in. Crown’s company, the Material Service Corporation, grew fast, buying its own sand and gravel pits, quarries, and processing plants. Within five years of founding the company, Crown was a millionaire. Later, Crown built custom-made barges equipped with pumps to suck sand from the bottom of Lake Michigan. His company’s aggregate helped build Chicago’s Loop railway and the Civic Opera House.
Crown expanded into real estate in a similarly big way: for several years he owned the Empire State Building. Material Service Corporation later became part of General Dynamics, America’s biggest defense contractor. Still, Crown maintained a low-key attitude. “He would portray himself as a ‘sand and gravel man’ of limited education, veiling his moves and quietly consolidating his power,” wrote The New York Times in his obituary. Crown died in 1990, the billionaire patriarch of one of America’s wealthiest families.51 The company that got him started is still a major aggregate outfit.
Concrete was well suited to the grandiose ambitions of the earliest twentieth century, when the Western world was at the peak of its power and hubris. Concrete made possible the Panama Canal, begun in 1903, which reshaped an entire nation’s landscape and the world’s shipping routes. It was used to make bunkers for millions of troops in World War I—a matter of such importance that the German military brought high-quality sand and gravel by barge from the Rhineland to the front lines, rather than relying on local supplies.52 Concrete was used to build the titanic new factories cranking out automobiles and other industrial products all over the world. One million tons of it were deployed to anchor San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The then-British colony of Hong Kong53 produced so much concrete in the 1920s that sand supplies ran drastically short; thieves began stripping beaches and even digging up riverside graveyards, sparking violent clashes with villagers.
The capstone project of the era was the construction of the mighty Hoover Dam, at the time the biggest ever built. Enough sand and gravel to fill a train stretching 1,300 miles was mobilized to build this concrete monolith across the Colorado River. The process of harvesting, sorting, and hauling all that aggregate was a major engineering challenge all its own.
The job went to a California-based road building company owned by Henry J. Kaiser. Kaiser was at this point on his way to becoming one of America’s wealthiest and most important industrialists; his deft handling of the sand and gravel supply for the dam was a key reputation builder. Kaiser and his aggregate expert Tom Price found a treasure trove of gravel and sand about six miles from the dam site, and there built one of the biggest aggregate plants the world had ever seen. In the facility’s labyrinth of silos, conveyor belts, and storage containers, millions of tons of sand and gravel gouged from the earth with heavy equipment were sorted and sifted around the clock.
Sand was given special attention. When it came to making concrete, Price told an interviewer, “the secret of the important qualities of workability and uniformity are found to lie largely in the sand.”54 Once separated from the gravel, sand grains were further sorted by size in flotation tanks, in which, as a National Parks Service report later put it,55 mechanical rakes would pull “a ribbon of wet sand out of the frothy water like some sort of prehistoric slime monster crawling out of the primordial ooze.” The plant produced some 700 tons of aggregate per hour, its output loaded onto a specially built train to be hauled down to the dam.
Concrete has a way of leading to more concrete. The Hoover Dam created an enormous water supply called Lake Mead and also generated hydroelectricity. Together, those resources made it possible to build cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix in the middle of the desert—cities of concrete and glass and asphalt.
The spread of concrete also spawned whole new types of architecture. One of its earliest apostles was the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright,56 who understood that concrete made possible entirely new forms. Take the inverted ziggurat of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that Wright designed in New York. Wright created its fanciful geometry with “gun-placed concrete,” aka gunite, a form of the compound made with more sand and less gravel than ordinary concrete, which allows it to be sprayed from a nozzle57 directly onto a vertical surface. Try doing that with brick.
Wright’s work paved, so to speak, the way for Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus School, Le Corbusier’s International school, and Richard Neutra’s modernist creations. From Modernism grew Brutalism, the stark, angular, proudly concrete-heavy style that became popular after World War II. Today that term is often applied more broadly to the generic mode that has come to define so much of the visual landscape of our cities—the bluntly utilitarian look of near-identical factories and warehouses, the quadrangular shapes of institutional buildings and cheap apartment blocks, the coldly functional sweep of highway overpasses.
By the first decades of the twentieth century, sand and gravel in the form of concrete had become the ubiquitous building blocks of cities. Meanwhile, additional battalions of those little rock particles were being mobilized to create the roads that would knit cities together.
CHAPTER 3
Paved with Good Intentions
In the summer of 1919, a young US Army lieutenant colonel found himself stuck behind a desk at Maryland’s Camp Meade, frustrated, depressed, and resentful. He had missed out on all the action in World War I, assigned instead of combat to overseeing a stateside training camp. He was bored with shuffling papers,1 and he missed his wife and infant son, who were halfway across the country in Colorado. He was itching for something more exciting to do, especially if it might further his stalled career. So when word came around that the military was looking for volunteers to join a truck convoy that would cross the country from coast to coast, the twenty-eight-year-old officer—an ambitious West Point graduate by the name of Dwight Eisenhower—signed right up.2
“To those who have known only concrete and macadam highways of gentle grades and engineered curves, such a trip might seem humdrum,” wrote the future president in his memoir At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends. “In those days, we were not sure it could be accomplished at all. Nothing of the sort had ever been attempted.”3
In today’s America, so thoroughly defined, shaped, and organized around paved hig
hways, it’s hard to imagine just how few intercity roads there were, and how primitive they were, only a century ago. In 1904, the United States had a grand total of 141 miles of paved roads,4 not counting city streets. Most of the rest were dirt tracks that devolved into mud in the winter and potholed, rutted obstacle courses in summer. Enormous stretches of land, especially in the West, didn’t have any roads leading from one city to the next.
Crossing the continent in a motor vehicle was an exploit only a handful of hardy pioneers had attempted. A doctor from Vermont with the appropriately stirring name of Horatio Nelson Jackson was the first to succeed, slogging from San Francisco to New York in a two-cylinder, twenty-horsepower automobile. The trip took sixty-three days. A quartet of women led by New Jersey housewife Alice Huyler Ramsey made the same trek in the opposite direction a few years later, shaving four days off Jackson’s time.5
By the time Eisenhower started packing for his cross-country road trip, the nation’s highways were starting slowly to improve, thanks largely to the surging popularity of the automobile. Americans had bought over one million of these exhaust-spewing mechanical wonders by then, and were clamoring for better roads to drive their machines on. What was then called the War Department was also increasingly excited about the automobile’s possibilities as a tool for combat. “The new vehicle, whose capacities had been well tested in training and combat support, offered a speed of movement and a mobility not restricted by rail schedules or routes,” wrote Eisenhower. For the government, a cross-country convoy offered a chance to explore the military capabilities of cars and trucks, a solid publicity stunt, and a favor to the burgeoning auto industry.
The eighty-one-vehicle “motor truck train”—including trucks, motorcycles, ambulances, and field kitchens, accompanied by carloads of reporters and auto company officials—set off from Washington, DC, at 11:15 A.M. on July 7, 1919. Less than four hours later, a coupling broke on a kitchen trailer. That was only the first of many mechanical troubles that bedeviled the convoy. It advanced a grand total of forty-six miles that first day.
The worst problems, however, weren’t with the vehicles, but what they had to travel on. Even the concrete roads that had been installed in parts of the more easterly states were often too narrow for the trucks, sending their tires off the pavement. Many had not been maintained since they were installed, leaving them in such ragged shape they could barely be driven on. The heavy trucks sometimes broke through the pavement and destroyed scores of too-flimsy bridges, forcing the vehicles to ford the occasional stream.6
That was the good news. In Illinois, the roads turned to dirt. “Practically no more pavement was encountered until reaching California,” Eisenhower reported in his official notes. Motorcycle-riding scouts sped ahead of the convoy to find routes forward. For a long stretch between Utah and Nevada, Eisenhower noted with dismay, “the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes.”7 Trucks got stuck in salt flats and stalled by sand drifts. At one point dozens of soldiers had to be harnessed to tow stranded trucks by hand.8 Some days the convoy progressed only three miles. “There were moments when I thought neither the automobile, the bus, nor the truck had any future whatsoever,” Eisenhower recalled.9 When they finally reached San Francisco, they were greeted with speeches, a parade, and medals.
Along with pretty much every other officer on the journey, Eisenhower recommended to his superiors that somebody do something to improve America’s roads. Many years later, he himself got to be that someone. In fact, he would launch the construction of what was for decades the most advanced and encompassing network of paved roads ever built: the US interstate highway system.
To build that continent-spanning network, the old general would call into service stratospheric quantities of construction sand. Every mile of the US interstate highway is made with some 15,000 tons of concrete.10 Throw in the medians, overpasses, ramps, and road base, and all told, an estimated 1.5 billion tons11 of gravel and sand went into making the national highway system. That’s more than enough concrete to build a sidewalk reaching to the moon and back—twice.12
Laying down all that sand and gravel in the form of roads radically transformed the nation. Paved roads have profoundly shaped where and how hundreds of millions of people live and work, what they value, even what they eat—in America, and increasingly, everywhere.
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The need for a flat, durable track beneath your wheels is an ancient one. People have been manufacturing hard roads since as far back as 4000 BCE; the streets of the Mesopotamian cities of Ur and Babylon were paved with mud bricks glued together with naturally occurring bitumens—sticky, gooey, tar-like materials also known as asphalt.13
The word pavement comes from the Romans, who developed the first major road network to connect their empire. Their roads were surfaced with a top layer of stones they called pavimentum.14 Modern paved roads have their origins in eighteenth-century England. An Englishman named John Metcalf developed a system of well-drained roads built with large stones covered by a layer of gravel, which he used to cover 180 miles of Yorkshire byways.
In 1816, a Scotsman, John Loudon McAdam, came up with the idea of putting down a layer of broken, sharp-edged stones, then running a horse-drawn roller over them to compact them together to form a strong surface. Other road builders improved on the process by adding hot asphalt to keep dust down and to glue the stones together. The method was dubbed tarmacadam, after its progenitor. From this evolved the technique of combining asphalt with sand and gravel to make asphalt pavement, aka blacktop, aka bituminous concrete—but usually just called asphalt. Modern asphalt pavement is often more than 90 percent sand and gravel.15
Relatively easy and cheap to make, and highly effective, asphalt caught on. France laid down one of the first asphalt roads as part of its Paris–Perpignan highway in 1852,16 and within a few decades the material was used to pave many of the roads of London and Paris. In the United States, asphalt pavement was introduced in front of the Newark, New Jersey, City Hall in 1870. Washington, DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue came soon after. It wasn’t long before New York City decided to ditch brick, granite, and wood in favor of asphalt paving on its streets. One advantage asphalt had over wood was that it didn’t soak up urine from the endless parade of horses that were the primary form of transport at the time. And unlike brick or stone, asphalt had no gaps between blocks for manure to get stuck in, a serious health hazard.
In those days, almost all asphalt used in the United States was naturally occurring, imported by ship from two giant lakes of it in Trinidad and Venezuela. (Los Angeles’s La Brea Tar Pits17 are another natural lake of bitumens.) As demand grew, the imported material was gradually replaced with man-made asphalt derived from another booming industry: oil. By lucky coincidence, bitumens are created as a by-product of refining gasoline from petroleum. So the more gas that was manufactured to fuel cars, the more asphalt there was available to make roads for them to run on.18
Meanwhile, other road builders were experimenting with that material that was getting so much buzz in the construction trades: concrete. An inventor named George Bartholomew installed the world’s first concrete street in 1891 in Bellefontaine, Ohio. It was such an untrusted novelty that city officials allowed the concrete to be laid only after Bartholomew agreed to donate all the sand and other materials, and to post a $5,000 bond19 guaranteeing it would last at least five years. The street is still in place today.
There’s been a spirited rivalry between the asphalt and the concrete industries in the road-building market ever since. (Asphalt roads are the black ones; concrete roads are gray.) In the 1950s the concrete industry’s main trade organization ran full-page magazine ads featuring movie star Bob Hope declaring, “I don’t know how they get new-type concrete so flat and smooth riding, but I like it. Makes driving easy, really relaxing.” The ad goes on to brag that “concrete is one of the best friends a taxpayer can have,”
noting it has 60 percent lower upkeep costs than asphalt.20 These days, asphalt producers like to boast that 93 percent of all 2.2 million miles of America’s paved roads are surfaced with their product.21 They don’t mention that it’s often just an overlay on top of concrete base.
Both asphalt and concrete are basically just gravel and sand stuck together. The difference is the binding agent. In concrete, it’s cement. In asphalt pavement, it’s bitumens.
The basic trade-off is that in general, asphalt is cheaper to lay down and to maintain, and provides a smoother, quieter ride.22 Concrete, on the other hand, lasts longer and doesn’t need as much repairing in the first place. The choice often comes down to how much money a given government agency has handy.
Both types of pavement began creeping over city streets in the late 1800s, but outside of urban areas at that time, there was almost nothing but dirt to travel on. Roads just weren’t that important. For most of American history, if you wanted to move lots of people or large quantities of goods any significant distance, you did it via water. Rivers, lakes, canals, and seacoasts carried trade and travelers between settlements. Then along came the railroads in the mid-1800s. Trains connected existing centers and made it easier for people to settle further inland. Sometimes the iron horses supplanted waterways altogether. Roads, such as they were, were for local travel and hauling small loads via horse, wagon, or foot.
That state of affairs, however, just couldn’t last in a country where everyone suddenly wanted a car. In 1900, only eight thousand motor vehicles were registered in the United States. But sales boomed as the product improved. Technical advances like replacing hand cranks with electric starters made horseless carriages ever more appealing, especially to women. In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, a relatively cheap car specifically aimed at getting the masses behind the wheel.23 That’s when the automobile really caught on. By 1912, there were nearly a million cars on American roads—10 percent of them Model T’s.24 They jostled for space with the new trucks that farmers were investing in to haul their produce, and which businesses were turning to as an alternative to railroads. At the time, there were still 21 million horses hauling people and cargo, but it was clear automobiles were becoming ever more important.
