Return of the trades

When Billy Cleland drives in and around Washington, D.C., he sees more than monuments and grand buildings: He sees the fruits of his own labor.

Mr. Cleland has been a stone mason since 1940, and his work has included building the columns of the National Gallery of Art; setting the stones at John F. Kennedy's grave site; and serving as master mason of the National Cathedral in its final years of construction, setting the last stone finial in place in 1990.

"I've been very fortunate," says Mr. Cleland, now retired. "I've had the privilege to help build this city and many of its monuments.... Any craftsman who's worth his salt is able to stand back at the end of a hard day and look at his work and say, I did that."

Scott Holloway has never met the master mason, but he wants to be able to say the same things about his own work one day. Cleland's junior by more than 40 years, he is just embarking on what he hopes will be a lifelong career as a skilled tradesman. Mr. Holloway recently tired of office work and decided to find something more meaningful. He's now enrolled in a trades program where he is learning to make terrazzo - a specialized tile floor that involves mixing crushed tile with concrete and pouring it into place.

"It's exciting, I feel more of a sense of worth," he says of the 12-week course he's taking at the International Masonry Institute in Cascade, Md.

The terrorist attacks tore up New York City, he adds, "and that's where I'm from - and I could be part of rebuilding it."

Holloway isn't alone in his enthusiasm for the skilled trades. During a decade in which the media's career-and-workplace coverage has been dominated by Wall Street and the dotcom generation, the skilled trades have quietly been enjoying a renaissance in this country - attracting renewed public appreciation for their craftsmanship and quality, as well as a new generation of workers eager for the hands-on satisfaction of creating work that is meant to last generations.

"It's possible today to recreate just about anything that was ever created," says Clem Labine, editor of Traditional Building and Period Homes, magazines focused on restoration and traditionally styled new construction. "The crafts are there."

After being sidelined for most of the 20th century by the modernist movement - with its no-frills, less-is-more aesthetic - the skilled trades began to make a comeback in the 1970s with the growth of the historic preservation movement.

The trend has only accelerated in recent years, as consumer and commercial tastes have continued to swing back toward more historical and traditional building styles.

Today, craftsmen (and women) can be found making everything from dry stone walls, to architectural ironwork, to ornate terra-cotta figurines and cornices (used to decorate buildings).

They're also bringing new vigor to skills that had nearly died out in this country. For example, they're working with scagliola, a synthetic marble made from colored plaster, which originated in Italy and dates back to the Renaissance.

"It's work that connects you to tradition, to your past, to your history, or to someone else's history," says Misia Leonard, a preservation architect who works closely with skilled tradesmen as chief of the preservation office of New York City's Department of Design and Construction.

"It's grounding to see that people 100 years ago were doing something beautiful, and you're trying to bring it back," she says. "Most of the tradesmen that I know take tremendous pride in what they do. And they all say they're not in it for the money. They're in it for the satisfaction of doing a good job and having something to show for it."

Master stone mason Kevin Gardner, who has been building dry stone walls in New England for 30 years, agrees that there's a "particular personal satisfaction" in his work that's hard to describe.

After learning the skill from his uncle, he says, he found he had a "temperament" for the work.

"It's a temperament that likes order and balance," says Mr. Gardner, whose recent book about his work, "The Granite Kiss," has been receiving positive attention from the mainstream press. "It's a temperament that likes to make something out of nothing, that finds a lot of interest in arranging many, many things in the smallest possible area."

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