Worse Than Termites

From a construction site, some steel that’s been nibbled on. The building has the typical NYC structure for the 1920s: a steel frame encased in concrete fireproofing that was place integrally with the floor slabs.

In case it’s not clear, that photo was shot looking up, so you’re seeing the underside of the slab above on the left and right, the encased beam that I want to talk about in the center (for the upper two-thirds of the frame) and a bare-steel column (the masonry fireproofing has been removed) in the center lower third of the frame.

Getting down to business, the rectangle in the slab next to the pipe (left of the beam) is an old and no-longer-used flue. The duct that went to it needed to cross the beam and so someone cut a chunk out of the beam’s bottom flange. Most likely they used a torch and burned off the piece of steel they didn’t want. In case you’re having a hard time seeing it:

Speaking as a structural designer, we can do a lot of things. We can make structure figuratively jump through all sorts of hoops. That said, pushing structure around mechanical systems is usually a bad idea, because the structure is going to be around a long time (usually the same period of time that the building is around) while large portions of mechanical systems change in much shorter time-frames. The fact that the flue is gone but the cut in the beam remains illustrates this rather nicely. But convincing the people who install mechanical systems of this is sometimes difficult.

While I’m on the topic, I must have seen the Popeye animated short “Insect to Injury” a few dozen times when I was a child. In it, Popeye has just completed building himself a house when it is attached by an army of termites. After the house is destroyed, Popeye strengthens himself with spinach and builds a replacement house entirely of steel. Two sociological notes: First, in the original Popeye cartoons from the 1930s, he solves every problem by punching people, animals, and inanimate objects. By 1956, this was perhaps seen as a problem, so here he faces a foe that cannot be punched and solves his problem with a feat of non-violent strength. Secondly, most of the 1930s cartoons take place in poor urban neighborhoods of tenements, with a few outliers on farms or at sea. Popeye’s 1956 house is quite suburban in design, and set in a non-farm bucolic area that might be idealized exurbia.