Nearly Permanent

This photo is listed in the NYPL collection on the construction of the IRT subway as “Subway Station Construction”, to which I respond “What am I looking at?” and “What is wrong with you people?”

We’re looking at City Hall Park (more about that in a moment) so presumably this is supposed to be about the City Hall Station, which was the architectural highlight of the original IRT. But I’m having a hard time seeing station construction in this photo. There’s some wood fencing and what looks like train tracks in the lower right corner, but mostly we’re seeing demolition? A folly? Something with Ionic columns.

The building on the left is the Tweed (City) Courthouse, with its octagonal skylight visible. The small, darker building in the center of the photo is an older courthouse, nearing the end of its life, and the little building on the far right is an old building that had been repurposed as a firehouse, also near the end. Even if we didn’t know this is from a group of photos taken of subway construction shortly after 1900, we could date it by the big building under construction in the background right: that’s the Surrogate’s Court at Chambers and Centre Streets, which was constructed between 1899 and 1907.

Based on the angle, the photographer was on or near Park Row, on the east side of the park, looking north and west, so the thing in the foreground is east of City Hall. And here it is, the Hall of Records, in 1857:

That building had a long and slightly weird lifespan: built in 1759 as the New Gaol, it was used for relatively low-level felons and debtors, used to hold prisoners of war during the British occupation during most of the Revolutionary War, and then went back to being a low-level prison. It was remodeled in 1830 to be the Hall of Records and then later in the century converted to be the Register’s Office, which is a different version of a hall of records. It was demolished in 1903 because the City Hall loop at the (then) south end of the new subway ran right through its foundations. (I also have to believe that, with all the new civic construction going on in the area around 1900, the more-than-140-year-old building seemed a bit creaky by comparison.)

So, what we’re seeing is the demolition of an old building on the future site of a station. The people between the two fences (bottom left) are moving between Centre Street and either Broadway or City Hall; their path wraps around the demo site under the sidewalk shed to the left of the staircase. The stair is not a temporary structure – look at its ornate handrail – and so must be the stair leading to the park from the elevated station at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge:

So the tracks on the right are at grade (as are the people) and probably streetcar tracks in Park Row. No excavation has taken place here yet because the old Hall of Records was in the way. The station construction of the title is clearing the site.