Old School

I’ve talked around the edges of Federal Hall, but it’s worth spending a moment to discuss its most distinctive feature. And that’s not the big colonnade facing Wall Street. Despite the name, this is not the building that served briefly to house Congress when New York was the capital, it’s the 1840s building on the same site constructed as the Customs House and that has served as a sub-treasury.

The building was constructed from 1834 to 1842. While it was always supposed to be fire resistant, the 1835 Great Fire affected the way that its architects, Ithiel Town and A.J. Davis saw the issue of fire protection. This building is, along with 55 Wall Street and City Hall, a rare example of a pre-1870 New York building without wood floor structure. Here’s what the masonry vaulting looks like, covered with plaster:

Here’s a building section showing the vaulting:

And here’s a floor plan, showing some of the groin vaults shown as dashed Xs:

The question that needs to be asked in evaluating an old design is what tools were available to its designers. If Town & Davis had access to steel beams and concrete slabs, we’d judge their use of masonry vaulting as a quirk, a deliberate anachronism, or a lack of common sense. In the context of the 1830s, this was their only realistic option to get a fireproof building and so was a perfectly logical choice.