A follow up to my previous post about the construction of the 1904 St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue. The picture for the first post showed a nearly-complete building; above is the hotel relatively early on, with the steel erected up to the 9thfloor and the masonry exterior just starting above the 2nd floor. (We’re looking east down 55th Street, with Fifth Avenue crossing between the hotel and the Robert Burns tobacco billboard.
I feel like I’ve discussed enough of these old construction photos that there’s not a lot new to say: we’ve got the steel crane up on top, and a bunch of smaller masonry and materials derricks mounted on the 4th-floor spandrel beams. The top four levels of framing are wide open, because the formwork for the tile-arch floors hasn’t yet been built. But two details struck me as showing something new.
First, the heavy-timber sidewalk bridge has a wood-framed construction-shack on the corner. Huts like this were regularly used until pre-fabs entered the market, giving every construction site a little prairie-farm flavor. In any case, the shack was kept warm in cold weather by a small stove, probably coal-burning. You can see the chimney at the center of the shack’s roof. Electric light and steam heat were old news by the fall of 1903, when this photo was taken, but they were not being used in a shack that had a less-than-year lifespan.
Second, look at the south side of the new building, where it abuts the rowhouses on Fifth. The steel frame is visibly back from the edge of the lot and the adjoining wall of the first house. That’s not a seismic gap. The brick south wall was constructed in that gap, tight to the rowhouse, around the steel columns. This is no surprise – we know that’s how the walls were built – but you don’t often see a photograph that illustrates it so well.
