The east side of Madison Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets:
The building that has been removed was a mid-rise office building from the 1950s, and there’s a new high-rise in the works for the site. So far, nothing out of the ordinary for Manhattan. I’m quite interested in the ghost on the side wall of the modern tower on the left. That’s 56 East 58th Street, constructed in 1982, some twenty-five years after the demolished building.
This doesn’t appear to be the usual ghost, where an old party wall condition forces modern buildings to wrap around a wall that can’t be readily demolished even after it no longer serves a purpose. In this case, we seem to have a few artifacts of the 1980s causing the trouble.
First, in the pre-seismic-design era in New York (i.e., before 1996) building were often built with nominally zero clearance at side lot lines. There might a small gap or there might be zero, but there was no requirement to leave any space, the way that there is now with a seismic gap. On the other hand, not everything can be built tight up against an existing neighbor. In this case, most of the exposed ghost side wall of 56 East 58th is non-structural concrete block, which can be built blind against a neighbor. But the building frame could not be, and so we see that the structure at each floor level (either concrete slabs, concrete slabs and spandrel beams, or concrete slabs and steel beams) is set back slightly from the lot line.
Second, a non-structural block wall designed in 1982 would (a) likely not have any vertical reinforcing other than dowels at each floor to the slab below, (b) would have been designed for a lower wind load than current requirements, and (c) would not have been designed for seismic forces at all. So exposing this portion of wall, which had been hidden since it was built, meant potentially overloading it with wind pressure.
Finally, because we’re looking at a ghost from a mid-1900s office building rather than one from a rowhouse, it’s much taller and wider than most.
In other words, a modern ghost for a modern era.
As it happens, between the day that I took the photo above and the day I wrote this blog post, I saw a nearly identical photo on line. We’ve worked with Ancora on a number of projects, so it was interesting to see that this is one of their projects.
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