Ladder Company 8 of the Fire Department of New York has been in this handsome little building since 1903, but that’s not why anyone knows the building. They know it because of Ghostbusters. Putting aside the fictional use of the building for paranormal investigations, it has an interesting claim to fame: it is literally half …
The first part of my discussion of the Singer Building is here: Construction History: Singer. I stumbled across the HABS photos of Singer, taken in 1967 just as its demolition was beginning, and there were a few interesting items there. First, the picture above is the building’s formal portrait, a rendering prepared by the architects …
The Champlain Building in Chicago, built in 1894, was demolished in 1915. The picture above, which could pass for a construction photo, shows the beginning of the structural demo: the windows and interior build-out are gone, and the frame and exterior-wall removal has just started. Holabird & Roche, the architects for Champlain, took the opportunity …
Another good piece on recycling at the scale of buildings: Pass the Leftovers! by Matt Burgermaster looks at the issue of reuse of building materials during demolition, using the ongoing demolition of the Union Carbide Building as an example. The statistic that jumps out at you: NYC produces 6 million tons of construction and demolition …
I’ve written a bit about the new West Thames Street Bridge – a pedestrian crossing over the near-highway that is West Street – and thought that its immediate predecessor, the Rector Street Bridge, was worth a few words. The origins of both bridges are interesting in that they lie in other demolition. When the elevated …
