Adaptive Reuse, Maybe

Continuing the saga of Bankers Trust, yesterday I showed the end of demolition of the two buildings previously on the site, the 1880s Stevens Building, and the 1897 Gillender Building, a tall, extremely slender steel-framed skyscraper. The picture above shows the site basically cleared. With the buildings gone, the photographer was able to get the reverse angle view, looking southeast instead of northwest like all the other photos:

The stubs of the twelve columns of Gillender are still visible, a topic I’m going to return to. The low building straight ahead is Federal Hall, on the northeast corner of Nassau and Wall, the tall building on the right is the Wilks Building on the southwest corner of Broad and Wall, demolished for the New York Stock Exchange addition some fifteen years after these photos, and the building between with the plume of smoke near its stubby tower is the old Morgan Building, later demolished for the new Morgan Building. A couple of weeks later, foundation work was in full swing:

I count five separate derricks around the site, giving us a pretty good idea that caissons were being installed. And, since the top of the sidewalk bridge is no longer needed for demolition debris, it’s a good place to put some shacks. Here’s the reverse angle from that same day, with “compliments of Marc Eidlitz” – the general contractor – stamped on the print:

Two weeks later and foundation work is in full swing – and the name The Foundation Company is painted on a bunch of the equipment. And this is where things get interesting: the new caisson work appears to be on the former Stevens Building site, with the former Gillender site more or less enclosed in a box.

Now comes my pet theory. Maybe someone has foundation plans of Banker Trust and they can prove me right or wrong. The Gllender building put a lot of concrete and masonry into the ground for its foundations to transfer the column loads down to a layer of hardpan – what would probably be classified today as decayed rock. Here’s part of an Engineering Record illustration fomr 1897 showing how big the caissons and piers above were:

Something like 40 percent of the soil below Gillender’s footprint was removed and replaced by the concrete-filled caissons, the brick piers above, the concrete pier caps, and the steel grillages connecting the columns to the pier caps. Removing all that stuff would be a nightmare. The pet theory is that the caissons and piers were reused, with new grade beams (almost certainly steel) used to transfer the new column loads to the appropriate piers. I haven’t gone through all these photos yet to see if there’s evidence one way or another, and I have no inside knowledge of the building, but it seems like an obvious place to reuse some difficult and expensive existing construction.