Works > Minerals of New York

Minerals of New York began with an encounter with the Subway Garnet, a huge historic blood red mineral found on 35th Street and Broadway, led deep into the stores of the American Museum of Natural History, to the basement of a small bungalow in Queens, to the personal mineral museum of a 96 year old man who began his collection as a boy as part of the Pick and Hammer Club with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and back again – to a piece of Garnetifous Gneiss which was found 150 feet below the street where I grew up in New York City.

The project has evolved into a mineral biography of the city and has grown into a significant new body of work, combining drawings, personal narrative and geological urban wonder.

In 2019, the full constellation of work, archival material and geological artifacts that form the project Minerals of New York were brought together for the very first time, featuring in solo exhibitions at The Hunterian in Glasgow; Leeds Arts University and at Governors Island in New York in 2023.

A mineral biography of the city.

For years, the skyscrapers in New York were firmly planted in Mid-town and down at the end of the island not by choice, but because there the dense Pegmatite-rich rock was exposed at the surface – Mica Schist strong enough to hold the weight of towers. This same type of rock inhabits the coast of Maine, vast areas of Scotland and Riverside Park along the Hudson. As a kid, I knew Mica from streets that glinted in the sun, playgrounds peopled by boulders that seemed made of silver and gold, rocks on the beach with layers you could peel open like pages in a book. A Mineralogy curator named Peter told me mineral samples of Mica are sometimes termed ‘books’.      

My mother remembers finding books of Mica in the alley next to the building where she grew up in Brooklyn. Edgar Allan Poe lived across from Riverside Park when he is rumored to have written The Raven. If you find a shimmering stone in the area and leave it on the granite plaque on West 83rd street, your book of Mica becomes part of a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I imagine all these volumes together. A library composed of only rocks and minerals, every layer another narrative.

There is a cabinet in the stores of the American Museum of Natural History filled with minerals from New York. In it, I saw: Garnetiferous Gneiss found 150 feet below the street where I grew up; Green Muscovite located a few blocks from where our teacher lost us while we were hunting for worms; Galena Crystals from near Mount Sinai, where my father died high above 100th Street. Personal mineral memories.

The idea of minerals formed below the streets of New York seems somehow unlikely. That anything of the natural world, of caves and volcanoes, could ever occur there. But, it does.  The Subway Garnet, found on 35th and Broadway in the garment district where my mother worked; Almandine cousins from Lincoln  Center; weathered gems from Grant’s Tomb; Black Tourmaline from Amsterdam Avenue; Bornite from the Bridal Path; Menaccanite from underneath El Museo Del Barrio; Microcline Crystal from White Plains; ice blue Chrysotile from Staten Island, listed as ‘location unknown’,  though most likely it came from from the Asbestos quarry at Ward’s Hill only just across the island from Snug Harbor, the first home for sailors too tired to return to sea.

A sparkling arterial system that connects one island to another.  Under bodies of water; rivers of Stilbite, tunnels of steam. Resplendent mineral residents. New growth in older rock. A daily core sample of the city.

The rocks in Central Park are not smooth from years of kids sliding down them, like the polished fingertips and toes of certain statues, but from the slow movement of glaciers heaving themselves along, leaving scratches and grooves across the surface 18,000 years ago. Manhattan Schist forever tilting to the south. Imagine the Flatiron Building as Half Dome. Our hands enact the geological process.

And I know, we are humans, we are bones and muscle and brains and blood, but the iron in the Subway Garnet is the same iron that is in my body, and the marble floor of the Metropolitan is as carbonate as my bones. We are also mineral residents.

There is a photograph taken in 1942 on 207th Street in Inwood towards the northern tip of the island on one of the only exposures of naturally occurring marble in Manhattan. It was taken during a field session with the Pick and Hammer Club, a mineral collecting club for teenagers run by the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in Crown Heights.  My parents grew up in the neighborhood down Eastern Parkway; drawing in Saturday morning classes with Ms. Randall and planting seeds in the Botanic Garden.  Around 1942, my father’s family received a postcard from somewhere in Eastern Europe. His relatives had recently moved to a place he had never heard of. My father had a stamp collection, so he threw out the postcard, but saved the stamp. What did the card say? Weather is fine. We are well. See you all soon. Postdated far after the date they were long gone.

At home, I have a Subway Garnet found in the jetties of Far Rockaway by an early member of the Pick and Hammer Club. My great grandmother worked in a house off the boardwalk. The Pick and Hammer Club wound down by the mid 1950s. My mother was just a teenager then. This was many years before the hurricane washed the garnets away. 

Ilana Halperin

With thanks to Peter Davidson, National Museums Scotland; Jamie Newman, American Museum of Natural History; John Betts – Fine Minerals and his wonderful article The Minerals of New York City; Royal Scottish Academy; Nicola White; Alison Stirling; the mineral collectors of New York and Gayle Portnow Halperin.

Hunterian installation images: Ruth Clark
Leeds Arts University installation images: Jules Lister