| On a beautiful, hot and sunny Monday morning in August, more than a dozen volunteers gathered under the majestic limbs of an ancient mulberry tree in the rear garden of the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum for a briefing by the project’s leader and technical expert, Andy deGruchy, a masonry conservation specialist from Quakertown, Pennsylvania, for whom this was his third HCN project.  With its imposing, three-story granite mansion, constructed in the Greek Revival style between 1836 and 1842, this is the last remaining great country estate in Pelham Bay Park, overlooking Long Island Sound, and the combination of elegant formal gardens, wooded perimeter, refinement and serenity makes the estate a veritable refuge from the hustle and bustle of city life. The volunteers, representing Heritage Conservation Network, the New York-based organization Preservation Volunteers, which provides young recruits from France an opportunity to participate in preservation projects in New York annually, and the Historic House Trust, of which the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum is a member, were all united with a common purpose: to restore the garden masonry to what is believed to be its original dry-laid, or mortarless, design.
The gardens, with their granite steps, flagstone terraces and walkways, and central lily pond and fountain, were the work of the famed New York architectural firm of Delano and Aldrich (headed by partners William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich) back in 1915. The firm was also responsible for the restoration of the mansion itself, following twenty-five years of abandonment and neglect. Although no documentation regarding the original garden design has been found, both Andy deGruchy’s  advance research and the garden itself provide evidence that Delano and Aldrich intended for no mortar to be used to hold stones together; rather, a most elegant, visually appealing, but now obsolete alternative was employed: galleting. As Andy explained in his briefing, expounding on the derivation of his workshop title, galleting is the term for filling a mortar joint with gallets, small pebbles or slivers of stone (from the French word for pebble or chip of stone); and the French word abreuvoir refers to both the central water source or fountain in a traditional French village and, in masonry nomenclature, the gap or interstice to be filled with mortar. Given that the focal point of the mansion’s terraced garden is a lily pond featuring a winged cherub fountain (essentially, an abreuvoir) and that the youthful participants from Preservation Volunteers hailed from France, the workshop’s title was particularly fitting.
 As the participants learned, for over half a century, inappropriate, but probably well-meaning, efforts to repair and maintain the granite steps and flagstone terraces had relied on the liberal use of Portland cement between stones and the pouring of a concrete bed underneath some steps and portions of the walkway enclosing the central pond. This method of repair is not only inconsistent with the original design and unsightly, but it is also damaging to the stonework. Given that Portland cement and concrete are impermeable to water, rainwater and moisture that collect beneath and between the stones can only escape through the face of the stone itself, frequently resulting in cracking and flaking. Hence, this project entailed removing the many layers of cement and concrete from the dry-laid stones and filling the spaces between the stones with newly made gallets.
Following his briefing, Andy introduced the volunteers to the tools that would be employed for this project, including hammers and chisels, a “star drill” used to make a series of holes along which to split a stone into gallets, and Andy’s own small guillotine for actually slicing the stone. Gallets would also be made by sawing a shallow line across a piece of flagstone and then tapping the stone with a mallet to break it.
 Using hand tools and more modern pneumatic tools, the volunteers worked diligently and meticulously to remove the layers of cement and concrete. With the joints, or abreuvoir, newly exposed, work began on replacing the missing gallets. This was an exacting process, akin to putting together a complicated but creative puzzle, for, without mortar, the gallets depend on gravity and friction to hold fast. Gallets were made, individually sorted and selected by size and shape, and then painstakingly placed by hand between the garden steps and terrace flagstones.
In addition to their four days of masonry work, workshop participants were treated to daily breakfast and lunch served up by the Executive Director of the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, Clarissa Cylich, in the mansion’s sun-drenched orangerie overlooking the garden, a rather highbrow space to be used as a masons’ “break room”! A “behind-the-scenes” tour of the mansion was also provided, which included not only the opulent entertaining and family rooms open to the public, but also a walk up the magnificent elliptical “floating,” or freestanding, staircase to the attic, where, in the mansion’s heyday, an ingeniously placed horizontal band of transom windows would draw the hot summer air from the lower floors up the spiraling stairwell and out of the residence, in the same way that a fireplace chimney functions. The tour also included a glimpse of the mansion’s basement, where, having fled northward to this pastoral sanctuary in the stifling hot summer of 1936, New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia directed the affairs of the city from a phone bank, whose staff cubicles are still intact today.
 After four full days of hard work and delicate touches, the volunteers’ efforts were most apparent and rewarding to see: no more obtrusive and damaging Portland cement, but an elegant, old-world and lost-art restoration. The participants were certainly proud of their work, and the many visitors who stopped by during the course of the project, including representatives of the various collaborating organizations, seemed equally impressed. One would hope that Delano and Aldrich would be similarly contented and impressed if they were to return, taking pleasure in knowing that there are still organizations and volunteers who care about historic preservation and sensitively restoring the past to its former glory.
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