How New York’s Last Stone Carvers are Quietly Keeping Their Forgotten Craft Alive

Pellettieri Stone Carvers’ Academy on West 38th Street. (Credit: Jonathan de Bock)

A fine powder covers everything in Chris Pellettieri’s cramped Midtown workshop — the floor, the half-finished ornaments, the robust stone blocks waiting to be carved. The craft, stone carving is still here in New York City, he insists, and it could and should be revitalized.

Before New York’s iconic skyline was defined by glass and steel, it was carved from stone. From courthouses and libraries to brownstones and apartments, the city once bore the mark of craftsmanship.

But a century later, the craft has all but vanished. Today, the skills that once built New York are now held by just a few dedicated carvers. One of them, Manhattan-born sculptor Pellettieri, is fighting to keep the art alive through his nonprofit Stone Carvers’ Academy, one of the last places in America where the craft is still taught by hand.

Pellettieri, a lifelong New Yorker, artist and master carver, founded his academy in 2015, modeled on the kind of collaborative workshops where he first learned the craft.

“I was trained in a group workshop, and it was great,” he said. “There was priority to sharing and training, and I really liked that. When I left that, I missed it.”

Eventually, after working alone in stonework for more than two decades, Pellettieri realized he wanted to recreate the training he received.

“I felt the need to teach more and share my knowledge and try to bring about this workshop environment,” said Pellettieri. “I want to build community and have bonding between the students.”

Today, the academy offers drop-in classes in his Midtown studio on Tuesday and Friday, and multi-day and multi-week programs for teenagers during the summer and spring break. He plans to launch an after-school internship program in February, and more advanced students can come in to use the workspace semi-independently as they refine their skills. But Pellettieri hopes to grow the academy into a full-time apprenticeship program.

“My vision is full-time trainees, not students once a week, not students every day for two to six weeks, but full-time employment,” he said.

Small classes, he said, tend to focus on making small pieces that are often discarded, while full-time trainees could move beyond introductory work to contribute to larger, shared projects — recreating the collaborative workshop environment in which he himself was trained.

The community Pellettieri hopes to rebuild once flourished in the Bronx, particularly in Mott Haven, where large workshops operated at the turn of the 20th century, though it’s hard to imagine now, given how much the area has changed. Before moving to Midtown, his academy was located in the Bronx—in what was once the center of the stone carving industry and home to the famed Piccirilli Brothers Studio. Six Italian immigrant brothers founded the studio in 1890 and produced some of America’s most iconic sculptures, including the New York Public Library lions and the Lincoln Memorial statue in Washington, D.C. The studio eventually declined in the 1930s and effectively closed in the mid-1940s after the deaths of its founding brothers and declining demand for ornamental stone carving.

“Their Bronx workshop really was the best in the nation and rivaled the quality from Europe,” said figurative sculptor and instructor John Belardo.

From the late 19th century through to the early 20th century, thousands of skilled and mostly Italian immigrant stone carvers shaped the city’s landmarks, defining the City Beautiful era — a time when architecture was meant to inspire civic pride and shared purpose.

“People think of New York as a very modern city, and of course it is, but it’s also very much a 19th and early 20th century city,” said Andrew Dolkart, an architectural historian and Columbia University professor.

In that era, stone carving required decorative features like carved cornices, arched windows, intricate column tops, and ornamental reliefs carved into facades, as seen on the Washington Square Arch, one of many iconic sites the Piccirilli Brothers helped create.

“Those architectural styles depended on the expressive use of ornamental detail, and that meant that skilled stone carvers were essential,” said Dolkart.

But styles changed and the stone carving industry rapidly declined. New building practices and materials replaced traditional carving. Labor costs rose. Restrictive immigration laws, most notably the Immigration Act of 1924, slowed the steady flow of skilled Italian craftsmen who had once filled the city’s workshops. In 1921 alone, more than 200,000 Italians immigrated to the United States; by 1925, that number had fallen to roughly 6,000. The following years offered little relief, and by the 1930s it was clear that the demand for stonework had declined significantly. After World War II, modernism favored glass and concrete over stone ornaments, further sidelining the craft.

By the early 2000s, preservation experts such as John Fidler, then the conservation director at English Heritage, were already warning of a looming “expertise crisis” as skilled artisans retired with no one to replace them. Two decades later, those fears have come true. A 2022 national study estimated that roughly 100,000 preservation-specific jobs remain unfilled each year, even as millions of historic buildings age into disrepair.

A 2023 regional workforce study led by the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension found that the vast majority of preservation trades in the Northeast face “moderate to severe workforce shortages,” with masonry at the top of the list. The report noted a widespread lack of tradespeople with the specialized skills needed to work on older buildings, with preservation professionals reporting long project backlogs and difficulty hiring as older tradespeople retire with too few replacements. At the same time, the study notes that training pathways are often underfunded, and apprenticeships are frequently low-paid, meaning that despite strong demand, employment opportunities remain financially difficult to access.

Preservation groups like the National Trust for Historic Preservation say the shortage threatens the future of historic architecture itself — not because of neglect, but because there aren’t enough skilled hands to restore it.

Milan Jordan, senior director of preservation programs at the National Trust, said skilled preservationists are aging out faster than new workers are entering the field. When this expertise disappears, the consequences are real.

“The less people understand about the way things were done… the more we end up doing a little bit more damage trying to work on those buildings,” said Jordan.

The shortage is palpable on construction sites too.

“It is difficult to get people who really are craftsmen, even in a union,” said Sophia Haynes, an assistant project manager at Nicholson & Galloway, the oldest restoration firm in the city. Many of the skilled stone masons have been working for decades, but younger people rarely choose the trade. Yet the demand isn’t going anywhere.

“The masonry work, the stone buildings, that are the definition of what New York was and is,” said Haynes. “It’s extremely important to keep those buildings alive.”

In New York City, a handful of programs are trying to close the gap. Alongside Pellettieri’s Academy — one of the few programs in the city, if not the only one, dedicated exclusively to hand stone carving– experts at the Green-Wood Cemetery and Woodlawn Cemetery train young New Yorkers in masonry restoration. The Art Students League teaches sculptural carving locally, while the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston does the same nationally.

Even with new training programs taking root, the future of stone carving remains uncertain. “For centuries, architecture and sculpture went together,” said John Belardo, a sculptor and instructor. “When we lost the idea that beauty was important to city living, we got a tremendous amount of ugliness and temporariness in architecture, and the first thing that goes is ornamentation.”

But people like Pellettieri are proving the city has a place for craftsmanship and the beauty it brings. If they succeed, stone carving may endure.

For Pellettieri, the greatest loss wouldn’t be to the skyline. It would be to people who no longer recognize what surrounds them. Built to endure for generations, stone makes the craftsmanship and history of the city visible in everyday life, he said, offering a link to the past that newer and more temporary materials struggle to do.

“Stone carving is a fantastic tradition,” he said. “People don’t even realize that because it’s everywhere and it’s taken for granted.”