I’m going to spend a few days on a sequence of construction photos from 1926, because the sequence is more informative than any single photo. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a famous site with a lot of available information; it also doesn’t hurt that early in my career I worked on facade investigation and repair on two of the buildings in the photos to follow.
Let’s start at the end. This is the southeast corner of Broad and Wall Streets in 1927 or so, as photographed by Irving Underhill:
Not the first ziggurat in Manhattan, and not the last. The front door is on the right, with the address 15 Broad Street, but there is also an entrance in the very slender wing that extends to Wall Street. The low-rise that this building is wrapped around is the J. P. Morgan headquarters, built in 1913. The New York Stock Exchange is directly across Broad Street, Federal Hall is directly across Wall Street, and the Bankers Trust Building is diagonally across the intersection. The building immediately to the left of the narrow wing is 37 Wall Street, built in 1907 as a bank and offices, and converted to apartments about a hundred years later. Here’s the site in 1923, with Federal Hall unlabelled for some reason:
The Mills Building was demolished to create the site for the new building. 37 Wall Street had been built by the US Trust Company, which was absorbed by the Equitable Trust Company[1] in 1917, so 37 Wall is shown as Equitable on the map. Equitable was successful and growing, and was the developer of 15 Broad. When you see the construction photos, starting tomorrow, you’ll see that name on them. Mills is one of the early skyscrapers I’ve studied: completed in 1883, designed by George B. Post, and with exterior bearing walls and interior iron beams and columns.
Finally, the personal stuff: In the spring and summer of 1989, as part of the second cycle of Local Law 10 (the first incarnation of FISP) I looked at every single window on the Broad Street facade of 15 Broad to see if the loose lintels at the window heads were badly rusted or bowed. That was the summer that the first Batman movie came out, and at some point I switched from wearing plain black tee shirts on the scaffold to wearing black tee shirts with the Batman logo. That same year, I inspected the front facade of 37 Wall Street, which entailed kicking out the swing stage some 5 feet to get past the huge water-table near the 22nd floor, visible in the photo above near the third setback of the narrow wing of 15 Broad.
- As far as I know, there’s no relationship between the Equitable Trust and the Equitable Life Assurance Company a block away on Broadway.↩︎
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