I’ve written before about the caisson foundations at the Woolworth Building but here comes the New York Public Library with a fantastic Irving Underhill photo from May 1, 1911:
We’re looking south with Broadway on the left. The tallest building, partially lost in the haze, is Singer. I believe this photo was taken from a window or the roof at Underhill’s studio, which was at the corner of Park Place and Broadway.
There’s a lot going on here other than the topic at hand (for which, got to the next paragraph), including the ghost of the stair on the wall of Kalil’s Rathskeller on the right, to the wildly inaccurate rendering of Woolworth on the billboard facing the site, to the fact that the building at the corner of Barclay and Broadway, where the billboard is, had not yet been demolished even though construction had begun. The huge collection of chimneys just past the billboard is the Astor House hotel.
The foundations of Woolworth are deep caissons, and if you’re wondering what that looks like, the big cylinder sticking up in the middle of the site is one of them. The other, lower vertically-oriented cylinders are also caissons. The mess that is the rest of the site consists of cranes, a spoil container in the center foreground to take the earth being excavated from inside the caissons, steam engines running pumps, and a seemingly-endless supply of timber, pipe, and ladders. The Foundation Company was building those caissons – you can see a sign with their office listed as 115 Broadway, six blocks away – and they were as good as anyone at constructing this kind of foundation. So the mess wasn’t, it was just organized in a way that I can’t entirely see.
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