Traditional Building

Traditional Cut Stone workers with the new eagle crest for the Palm Beach courthouse.

The new 16,000-lb. eagle crest for the Palm Beach courthouse was carved by expert stone carvers from Traditional Cut Stone, using Indiana limestone, the same material used to build the Empire State Building.

The new eagle is now perched above the west entrance of the Palm Beach Courthouse.

Traditional Cut Stone Ltd. of Ontario, Canada, has won a Master Craftsmanship Award from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation for its work on the Palm Beach Courthouse restoration. The award was given for its carving of the eagle crest in the pediment of the building.

The new eagle is carved from five pieces of Indiana limestone and weights 16,000 lbs. The original carving was lost in 1970 when a wraparound façade (now removed) was added to the building. Traditional Cut Stone created detailed drawings based on an archival photo of the courthouse from the 1940s and on images of similar eagles from the same time period.

The carvers made a small clay maquette from the drawings and then a full-sized clay model. A rubber mold was fabricated to create a negative for the plaster mold. It then took three months for three expert stone carvers to create the new eagle crest, using 800-year-old techniques, the same techniques followed by Italian sculptors such as Michelangelo and Bernini.

The limestone used for the project, and for other carvings in the building, is the same limestone that was used to build the Empire State Building. It required 26 tractor-trailer loads of material to deliver the eagle to the site.

The new 16,000-lb. eagle now sits above the west entrance of the courthouse, welcoming visitors to the restored building. “Everyone at Traditional Cut Stone was thrilled to work on the restoration of this magnificent building,” says Richard Carbino, vp and founding partner. “Far too often, when historical buildings are as damaged as this one was, they are lost forever. This is a rare case of a community coming together with a collective vision to make something beautiful again.”

The Master Craftsmanship Award was one of several 2009 Preservation Awards presented by the group during its 31st annual conference. Other awards were given for restoration/rehabilitation, adaptive use, preservation education, infill design, and historic landscape/archaeology.

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