The picture above shows a concrete industrial building in Hell’s Kitchen, from the pages of the Engineering Record in 1907. We know that building because we’ve been working on various pieces of it for about five years. When we work on a famous building, it’s no surprise to see it in the press, but we don’t expect to see a building like this in a 115-year-old article.
The first sentence of the article explains why it was worth writing about:
The 10-story and basement reinforced concrete McNulty Building, which occupies a 50X95-ft 9-in. site on the north side of 52d St., between 10th and 11h Aves., New York City, is one of the first small-column reinforced concrete buildings erected in the Borough of Manhattan.
That may not sound like an explanation, but it is. Reinforced concrete was, in structural engineering terms, the first completely-new material introduced by modern technology. Cast iron and wrought iron began in construction (in the US) in the mid-1800s, and were used at first in an experimental and rule-of-thumb manner, leavened with a little basic engineering, like beam formulas. By the time their design was systematized, they had already been in use for some time. Steel followed as similar to and an improvement over wrought iron. The use of these metals was a huge technological innovation, but their first appearances were not complete breaks with practice as it then existed.
Reinforced concrete was different. New methods of beam and column analysis were required, a means of correlating the material mix with the concrete strength was required, and even figuring out what materials belonged in the mix took some time. In circumstances like that, regulatory bodies tend to lag a bit behind, and the New York Department of Buildings was a laggard. The 1901 building code – the one in force in 1907 when McNulty was constructed – treated concrete as a form of masonry and did not address the strength of reinforced columns in any meaningful way. New York wasn’t particularly bad on the national level, as the first real concrete code (the Joint Committee report) didn’t even reach draft form until 1909, but other cities were less restrictive.
The phrase “small-column reinforced concrete building” is a reference, as described later in the article, to the columns being designed analytically using a formula that the DoB was experimenting with. In other words, this was not one of the first concrete-frame buildings in the city, but it was one of the first designed as a concrete frame rather as elaborate masonry.
