One man spent 37 years fitting stones together in an abandoned New York quarry. The result covers 6.5 acres. No mortar. This was Opus 40. Harvey Fite bought the property in Saugerties in 1938 for its bluestone. That same year, he helped restore Maya ruins at Copán in Honduras. Back home, he began adapting the masonry he had observed there to the broken stone beneath his feet. He stacked flat stones and worked larger pieces across the walls to tie them together. Water could drain through the gaps, reducing damage from winter freezing. When a section failed, he pulled it apart and tried again. The ramps, terraces, passages and pools followed the quarry’s contours. He was building a place to display his carved figures, while also teaching at Bard College. This went on for decades. The centerpiece took another kind of patience. Fite had spotted a fourteen-foot, nine-ton stone in a nearby streambed. It took roughly ten years to secure it. In 1964, he and his neighbor Bert Wrolsen worked out how to raise it. They moved it on log rollers, pulled it upright with a truck-mounted winch, then hoisted it with a timber A-frame while its pedestal was built underneath. Fite intended to carve it. Once it was standing, he left it largely as it was. He moved the other statues into the surrounding grounds. The quarry had grown into the sculpture. He called it Opus 40 because he expected the work to take forty years. He died in 1976, after 37 years of building, in a tractor-mower accident at the site.