The Long Journey of a Belgian Block

There is a driveway entrance on a current West Coast General Building Contractors project that has been over a century in the making. The granite blocks that pave it began their journey in Belgium, crossed the Atlantic in the hulls of Dutch cargo ships as ballast weight, were offloaded onto the docks of New York, repurposed to pave its streets and commercial corridors, and were eventually salvaged — irregular, weathered, and irreplaceable — and brought to California. That provenance alone would make them remarkable.