WESTOVER — Tom Luckini, proprietor of Luckini & Company, said work on the stone wall along Holland Avenue will likely continue for the next 10 days, depending on the weather.
Anyone making their way into Westover from Morgantown, or vice versa, in the last couple days has likely encountered traffic backups as the work is being done alongside a curve, midway up a hill.
“It’s a bit scary,” Luckini said of the traffic. “I feel sorry for the flag men. They’ve got to stay on their toes constantly. You can’t be out there half-asleep. I’ll tell you that.”
The City of Westover initially set aside $50,000 for the work, but ended up paying a total of $31,170 to Luckini and Shinkovich Masonry.
Luckini said work began Monday, but the search for usable stones has been under way for a week or so.
“There was another wall that came down in Westover somewhere and the city gave us that. Sonny Shinkovich had a few stones and I had a few stones. Any time you find one of those cut stones you hold onto it. They’re hard to come by, and everybody wants them.”
He went on to say the trick is not only getting a proper fit of the stones, but making sure the wall is sound structurally and built in such a way to prevent water from building up behind the stones.
Luckini, a third-generation stone mason, estimated the structure at more than 100 years old. He said the craftsmen who originally built it were supremely skilled.
“Those guys were artists. They weren’t stone masons. They were artists,” he said. “Even in behind the wall, they have stones turned and tied into that wall so the water can leech out and to give it strength, holding it back into the hillside.”
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