You can read about the building in the awards program: here. The short version: this was a very ornate police precinct house constructed in 1892, when Brooklyn was still an inexpedient city, and abandoned for quite some time. Here’s what the interior looked like the first time we saw it:
The structure was pretty much what you’d expect for a low-rise public building of that era: exterior masonry bearing walls, mostly brick, interior steel beams and cast-iron columns, and wood-joist floors supported on the beams and walls. As you can see in the picture above. the interior finishes, wood-stud partitions, and the wood-joist floors were just about gone, leaving only the structural metal and the walls. Our original main concern was to stabilize the walls so that no more loss of the original material took place.
There’s a funny thing about old bearing-wall buildings like this. The easiest way to stabilize the walls is to build back the missing floors. In other words, any temporary stabilization you might do – rakers bracing the walls to the ground, for example – is more work than building joust floors similar to the originals. This is one of the relatively rare times that preservation goals and structural engineering goals are completely aligned. Here’s an overall view of the second floor with the new joists in place:
And here’s a closer view where you can more clearly see the original columns and beams still in use:
We do a lot of this kind of work, and by “this kind” I mean “invisible.” The building is now complete and in use, and none of our work can in any way be directly seen. It’s indirectly seen by the presence of the building rather than a vacant lot or a replacement building, but it’s hard to point at a finished building, particularly one where the ornate exterior draws people’s attention, and say “We did a bunch of stuff inside that no one can see”.
Shaquana Lovell deserves all the credit on our end for the stabilization that made everything else possible.
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