When I left off last week, with a photo from November 15, 1926, the caissons were in place, and the cellar hole was mostly excavated with support-of-excavation shoring in place.
Pictures for the next two months or so showed little visible progress because the work was mostly taking place under that huge grid of timbers. There were two items of work down there, neither of them particularly photogenic: the final excavation of the cellar floor, and setting the bases of the steel columns on top of the caissons. Here are views from under the shoring (the wide one at the main portion of the lot; the narrow one at the Wall Street wing):
Unfortunately, the construction photo album created by the Thompson-Starrett company does not have a close up on the detail where the steel columns meet the caissons. The detail I’ve seen from other similar buildings of that era is that the lower end of each column is riveted to a small concrete-encased steel-beam grillage, with the grillage sitting on the caisson top. Obviously, leveling the grillages and making sure their heights were correct was a critical step for the frame geometry. If a base was off, it could be fixed, but that would have meant refabricating the cellar-to-first-floor column shafts.
Eventually, the erection of the columns started, so that they came up through the mass of timber bracing.
A photo taken from the roof of 43 Exchange Place makes it clear that the timber shoring was carefully laid out so that the columns and the rest of the steel framing could be erected without interference.
In this picture, Exchange Place is on the left and Broad Street is on top. The steel has been erected for three bays from Broad Street heading to the east. The dark members are steel, the light ones are wood; the new wood stacked in the area where the steel has been erected is formwork for concrete floor slabs for the first and second floors.
Finally, it appears that there was a minor snowstorm shortly before this photo was taken on December 6, 2026:
In the interests of maintaining sanity on both ends of the writing/reading relationship, I’m going to limit this posts in this series to twice per week.
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