No Expiration Date

This is the third and last post on what I called a “rather boring” building. That very geometric picture is a roll-down door on the left, a pier in the middle, and a window on the right. Here’s the thing that caught my eye:

That’s a cast-iron column, rectangular in cross-section, with openings on the back (inside) face. It supports the steel-beam lintel over the roll-down door, and the center pier of the masonry facade above.

The public records say the building was constructed in 1931. That sounds right based on the way it’s put together, although it wouldn’t amaze me to hear that it actually constructed in 1920 or 1940. The odd thing is that cast iron as structure was over before 1910. It hung around a while longer as part of architectural enclosures (as a curtain-wall material on high-rise oriel windows, for example). This column is the only piece of cast iron I saw in this building and it’s serving a purely structural function.

Since I’ll never know how that column got there, I’m free to hypothesize. A few possibilities:

• The large opening for the roll-down door might have been an alteration, and the contractor who built it had a cast-iron column lying around (maybe from demolition of another building?) and used it.
• This door is the only place that something stronger than a masonry pier was needed at the exterior wall and the designer or builder preferred using cast iron to steel here because of iron’s superior weathering characteristics.
• Someone (the general contractor? the mason?) had a cast-iron column sitting around in his yard and found a way to get rid of it.
• The opening was an alteration and the lintel for it was reused and came with the column attached.
• The column was left over after demolition of whatever was previously on the site, just waiting to be reused.

The second possibility is the least likely. After all, there are exposed steel lintels in the exterior wall. The first feels right to me, but honestly it could be any of these or something else entirely. It’s just odd. No one was making new cast-iron columns in 1931, but ones that already existed could be reused.