The photo above shows the George Blumenthal house under construction in 1912. This house – this mansion – had more in common physically with a small commercial building than it did with an ordinary house, which explains the team behind it: the architects were Trowbridge & Livingston, who generally designed large public buildings, and the builders were Marc Eidlitz & Son, who generally built large commercial buildings. If your mansion has fireproof floors supported on steel beams and an ornate stone facade, it makes sense to have a builder who knows that kind of building.
A few things about the site… We have the standard protective sidewalk bridge constructed of heavy timber because reusable pipe-frame sidewalk sheds hadn’t been developed yet. We’ve got big piles of material sitting in the street, possibly only during the day as they are being loaded into or unloaded from the building. Note the two ladders on the right, one from the street to the bridge and the other from the bridge to a second floor window. The cornice is obviously being worked on, and there’s a temptation to say that the three big derricks on top are there to lift stone, but I think the structure was still in progress. The building is described as being four stories high and, speaking as an engineer, I can count that far unaided and we’re only seeing three stories. Here’s a photo from Eidlitz of the completed building:
It sure looks like the fourth floor is an a low hip roof, not yet built in the top photo. Since the building was of fireproof construction, the hip roof would most likely have been steel beams supporting terra cotta book tile. So those derricks may have been used to lift the steel and piles of terra cotta as well as the facade stones.
The building was demolished and replaced by a large apartment house in 1949, a few years after Blumenthal’s death.
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