The first order of business for constructing the new Equitable Building at 15 Broad Street was the demolition of the old Mills Building and its immediate neighbor to the east, 51 Exchange Place. The new building had a basically identical footprint at the first floor compared to the two old buildings combined, as both filled the combined two lots. The combined lot was basically a rectangle bounded by Broad Street on the west, Exchange Place on the south, 43 Exchange Place (the “Wall Street Exchange Building,” a generic name if I’ve ever heard one) and 23 Wall Street (the J. P. Morgan Company building) to the north. There was also a narrow arm extending north to Wall Street from the northeast corner of the rectangle. And the rectangle isn’t really a rectangle because none of the angles is 90 degrees and there’s a small southward jog in the south wall of 23 Wall Street.
Then, as now, demolition in Manhattan meant disassembly of the old building to avoid damaging the neighbors. This meant removing the heavy masonry floors and heavy masonry walls of the old buildings, with the occasionally piece of iron coming out as well. To be less glib, the volume of material that makes up modern structure is small relative to the volume of material in older forms of structure. The Mills Building had a small volume of iron performing a lot of structural work and a large volume of masonry performing some structural work. Had it been built ten years later, it would have had more iron (or steel) and less masonry; twenty years later, much less masonry. Replacing lightly-stressed masonry with highly-stressed metal was part of the change to new structural technology in buildings at the end of the nineteenth century.
Looking north up Broad Street toward Federal Hall, with the Mills Building on the right, on March 2, 1926. The light-court over the main entrance to Mills makes it look like two buildings.
Looking south, probably from Bankers Trust, a couple of months later. You can see the narrow Wall Street wing of Mills just to the left of the Morgan building, the bulk of Mills behind Morgan, and 37 Wall to the left of the Wall Street wing of Mills.
As the demolition proceeded, by May 25, the top of Mills was pretty uniformly gone. Note the debris chutes, one on Wall Street and three on Broad Street, taking material from second-floor windows to either the sidewalk sheds or waiting trucks.
By June 10, the main block of Mills was now shorter than Morgan.
Closer views of the Broad Street and Wall Street fronts, giving a better sense of the exterior of Mills, a substantial building by George Post, who was a leading architect of the 1880s and 90s.
Towards the end of demolition, July 9, 1926. Note the remnant of walls that have stayed behind, adjacent to 37 Wall and Morgan. Ghosts in the making…
Part 1: here.
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