Dual Purpose

These old construction photos I’ve been picking apart come from the New York Public Library’s collection. They’re from a series of photo albums and the collection is labelled “PHOTOGRAPHS OF BUILDINGS UNDER CONSTRUCTION, 1901-1935” but it seems that the connection is that they are all buildings designed by the architects Trowbridge & Livingston. The photo above shows the first half of the next album, titled “Bankers Trust Company Building, Wall & Nassau Streets.” Eagle-eyed observers will note that this is the third corner at that intersection to be discussed, following the Morgan Building and 15 Broad Street at the southeast corner (Wall and Broad Streets) and the New York Stock Exchange extension at the southwest corner of Wall and Broad. The Bankers Trust site is north, across wall from the NYSE. The fourth corner will not be in this series, since it’s been occupied by Federal Hall since 1842.

The pictures in today’s post do not show the construction of the Bankers Trust building. Rather, they shows the demolition of another interesting early skyscraper, the Gillender Building. I find Gillender so interesting that I presented a paper on it three weeks ago at the Structural Analysis of Historic Constructions conference in Kyoto. My paper concerned my efforts to analyze Gillender, the most slender steel-frame skyscraper constructed prior to the end of the twentieth century, using modern methods. One of the reasons I chose Gillender for that exercise was that a great deal of structural information was available from articles in engineering journals. I used the demolition photos I found online to check that certain assumptions I had made looked correct.

The top photo above shows the beginning of demolition, with the copula stripped of its cladding and scaffold set up to demolish the two-story penthouse. The timber sidewalk bridge is still in construction, but there are already wood chutes available to dump interior demolition debris onto the bridge. Note the seven-story building that wraps around Gillender from Wall Street on the left to Nassau Street on the right. That was the Stevens Building which made up about 80 percent of the Bankers Trust site, with Gillender making up the 20 percent at the corner. Three days later the cupola framing is gone:

Note that the sidewalk bridge extends the full width of Wall and Nassau Streets. True, they’re narrow streets, but that was still a lot of protection. Eleven days later, half of Stevens is gone along with everything but the steel of the top three main floors of Gillender. Most of the penthouse steel was still there as well.

Three days after that, the penthouse steel is gone, another two floors of facade is gone, and the main block steel is starting to comedown. In short, they were moving fast.