Sing Sing Marble

Sing Sing Marble. . These soaring 30-foot entrance columns are a grand welcome to Dale Cemetery. They were designed by the cemetery's architect, Howard Daniels. At one time, elaborate. wrought iron gates on large marble piers secured the entrance. , Like many of the headstones, monuments, steps, walls and other structures at Dale Cemetery, the pillars were made of a stone nicknamed “Sing Sing marble.” It was quarried at nearby Sing Sing Prison by the inmates. It was not a fine marble but a coarse dolomitic limestone. , Beginning in the 1830s, this material was used in the construction of buildings and structures throughout the Village of Sing Sing (Ossining), the Lower Hudson Valley Region and New York City. Lyndhurst in Tarrytown and the first New York University building both incorporated Sing Sing marble. , The wide use of convict-quarried stone led to the Stone Cutters Riot of 1834, when members of the New York Stone Cutter's Guild violently protested the use of cheap prison labor that drove down their wages. Hammers in hand, they took to the streets of lower Manhattan in a four-day riot which was only put down when the National Guard was called in to quell the unrest. , Twenty years later, the stone caused trouble for the cemetery's founding treasurer, Munson Lockwood. As the warden of Sing Sing Prison during the cemetery's construction, he was accused of misappropriating prison labor and prison stone. The scandal, fueled by crusading reporting from The New York Times, drove him from office. , By the 1870s, the stone had fallen out of favor for construction projects. Builders preferred using bricks.