An Armory Drill Hall Roof

In writing about our family history, my great-great-grandfather Frederick Williams gave several details about his mother's cousin, Frank Harrison.  Frank was Atlas Iron's Secretary and Superintendent and a "genius as an engineer."  One noteworthy tale which Fred preserved was this:

"He also devised great roof construction for the drill hall of a N.Y. Armory spanning an entire city block.  The engineers said it could not be done, so it was quite an accomplishment for our company as the newspapers told the story."

This anecdote, more than anything else, is what prompted me to look into the history of Atlas Iron.  It conjures a notion of great achievements in building... and it omits the most important piece of information.  Which armory did they actually work on?

After a few months of doing research on the company, I found a single mention in a newspaper article which seemed to provide the answer.  It stated that they worked on the Ninth Regiment Armory, which was built between 1894 and 1896, on West 14th Street.

The Ninth Regiment (today the 244th Air Defense Artillery Regiment) can trace its history back to the War of 1812.  They served in the Civil War as the 83rd New York Volunteers.  Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, they rented quarters on West 26th Street above a stable and carriage house.  After the founding of New York City's Armory Board in 1884, the regiment (like many others) began petitioning for a new home.  They would be one of the last regiments of the time to actually receive a new armory.

After a long, slow process, a site was chosen on 14th Street.  It was in the middle of the block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and it ran through to 15th Street.  The Twenty-Second Regiment's armory which occupied most of this site was razed to make way for the new building.  The Twenty-Second had moved to their brand new armory at Broadway and 67th Street in 1892.

A design competition was held, and the plans entered by the architecture firm of William A. Cable and Edward A. Sargent were chosen.  This fact is what makes me fairly confident that Atlas Iron did work on the Ninth Regiment Armory.  William Cable had previously been the partner of William H. W. Youngs, father of one of the founders of Atlas, and Atlas Iron worked on several Youngs & Cable projects.

So, what about the impressive drill hall?  Sources vary on the exact dimensions, but it was roughly 220 feet long and 185 feet wide (around 41,000 square feet).  The center of the arches stood around 64 feet tall.  This was not unprecedented.  The famous Seventh Regiment Armory, completed over a decade before, has a 55,000 square foot drill hall.  Several other armories which were built in and around the city prior to 1894 had similarly large drill halls.  I find it hard to believe that engineers would have declared it an impossible feat at that time.  Perhaps Fred, who was writing about this in the 1940s, conflated his recollections of Atlas Iron's work and press coverage of the groundbreaking Seventh Regiment Armory.  This is not to say that the Ninth Regiment's armory and drill hall did not also deserve - and receive - plenty of praise.

The Ninth Regiment had one of the smallest building plots for an armory in the city at the time, just over an acre (one newspaper said it covered 46,000 square feet).  To maximize space for the drill hall on that site, two levels of rooms were suspended between the giant steel trusses, one stacked on top of the other.  A skylight was built into the roof.

The armory was completed at the end of the summer of 1896.  In addition to military drills, the space was used for civic events; concerts, exhibitions, bicycling, indoor baseball games and other sporting events were all held there.  The building stood until 1969, when it was torn down to make way for the Forty-Second Division's new headquarters.


Sources:
Souvenir - Opening of the Armory - Ninth Regiment, N.G., N.Y. (22 Feb 1897).
The Armory Board, 1884-1911 (1912, New York City Armory Board).
Proceedings of the Commissioners of the Sinking Fund of the City of New York (1894-96).
The Sun (New York), 7 Oct 1894 and 4 Sept 1895.
New-York Tribune, 28 Feb 1894 and 8 April 1896.
Family papers.
New York's Historic Armories: An Illustrated History, by Nancy L. Todd (2006).  This is an excellent book, if you're interested in learning more about arsenals and armories throughout New York City and State.
America's Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order by Robert M. Fogelson (1989).
Daytonian in Manhattan: "The Lost 1895 9th Regiment Armory - 125 West 14th Street".
Exterior photo from Library of Congress (and posted on Daytonian in Manhattan).
Drill hall photo from New York State Military Museum (and included in Todd's book).

Aldrich Court in World War I

I am often amused and amazed by the connections that crop up during my research.

In the book I'm currently reading about World War I - The Last of the Doughboys - I have just come across a reference to 45 Broadway in New York City.  That same address featured heavily in my post just last week as the location of the offices of Union Iron Works and Youngs & Cable.

Apparently, that same building was a center for German espionage and sabotage efforts during the war.  How did that come about?  In 1905, it was purchased by Germany's Hamburg-American steamship line and was renamed from Aldrich Court to the Hamburg-American Building.  It housed some German government offices, including those of Heinrich Albert who was suspected of organizing sabotage efforts on American soil.  The best known of those was the destruction of a munitions depot on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in July 1916 (a fascinating tale on its own).  The building was seized by the U.S. government in November 1917, seven months after the U.S. entered the war.


Sources:
Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys, Mariner Books 2014.
The New York Times, 29 Oct 1905 and 9 Nov 1917.

Union Iron Works and the Columbia Building

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten which company I'm researching here.  Please bear with me for a minute...

I got curious about how the founders of Atlas Iron might have met and decided to work together.  As a reminder, the four gentlemen in question are Henry Williams, Philip Raqué, Frank Harrison and Frederick Youngs. 

Frank Harrison was the cousin of Henry Williams' first wife, Mary Harrison.  Mary passed away in 1878.  By 1889, Henry and Frank both lived in Brooklyn so it's reasonable to imagine them being in contact with each other.

I did some research on all four men to see what else I could learn, and I found a really interesting connection...

Philip Raqué and Frank Harrison were both engineers, and in 1889 and '90 they both worked at a company called Union Iron Works.¹  Founded in early 1889, Union Iron had a factory in Greenpoint and an office at 45 Broadway - a building called Aldrich Court.  The company gained distinction for its involvement in putting up the third skeleton frame building in New York City: the Columbia Building.²

The Columbia was twelve stories tall and stretched from Broadway along Morris Street to Trinity Place (just a few doors down from Aldrich Court - both buildings were owned by the Aldrich estate).  The plot was long but narrow.  As The Sun reported:

To build solid masonry walls in compliance with the laws of the Building Bureau for a structure of that great height would have necessitated walls ten feet in thickness, and thus twenty feet of the ground space would have been required for walls on the basement and first floors, leaving only a little more than nineteen feet of available floor space.

The president of Union Iron Works, P. Minturn Smith, convinced the owner of the Columbia lot that skeleton frame construction would be both safe and economical.  Thus the building went up in 1890-91, with the walls of "the first story measuring only 2.8 feet."³

Skeleton frame construction was slowly adopted in the city over the next several years, and it was a method used regularly by Atlas Iron.  Philip Raqué and Frank Harrison seem to have gained excellent first-hand experience with this practice at Union Iron Works.

The connection doesn't end there, though.  The Columbia building was designed by architects William Youngs and William Cable.  Incidentally, they had designed Aldrich Court and also had their offices there.

William Youngs was the father of our Frederick Youngs.  I haven't been able to find details on Frederick's education or where he was working prior to the founding of Atlas Iron.  It's possible that he worked at his father's firm, where he could have been closely involved with the Columbia building as well, and would have known Philip and Frank.  Even if he didn't work there, he might have known those men and that project.

I wonder if there was any further connection between these men.  Perhaps William Youngs had been a client of Henry Williams during his days as a stock broker, for instance.  Perhaps Henry simply met the other men through his cousin-in-law.  In any case, he could have dropped by at Aldrich Court in 1890 to meet with two if not all three of the men who would join him in forming Atlas Iron, and they would have been working on and discussing the Columbia Building at the time.


Notes:
1. For Philip Raqué: Stevens Indicator, vol. 6, 1889, p161.  For Frank Harrison: Yale University Obituary Record, 1921, p217.
2. "The First 'Skeleton' Building", Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide, 12 Aug 1899, p239.  The first skeleton frame building in the city was the Tower Building, constructed in 1889, designed by Branford Gilbert.  The second was the Lancashire Insurance Co. building, constructed in 1889-90, designed by J. C. Cady & Co.
3. "New Down-town Buildings", The Sun, 19 April 1891, p27.
Photo. Excerpt from "Broadway - Morris Street", 1894, from Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library.

The End of an Old Theater

I have been enjoying going through the photo archive at oldnyc.org.  This photo jumped out at me:

It shows the Civic Repertory Theater (also known as the Theatre Francais, the Lyceum and the 14th Street Theatre) as it was being demolished in 1939.  The photo is by Alexander Alland.

For more information about the theater, see Daytonian in Manhattan: The Lost 1866 Theatre Francais. 


Source:
Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. Manhattan: 14th Street (West) - 6th Avenue Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-f8d7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

The Brooklyn Post Office Annex

I recently came across this photograph, showing the Atlas Iron men putting up an annex for the Brooklyn Post Office.

The Brooklyn Federal Building - which stands today between Johnson St., Cadman Plaza East, Tillary St. and Adams St./Brooklyn Bridge Blvd. - is made up of two structures.  The original, four-story building on the southern end of the block was designed to house Brooklyn's main post office and four courtrooms.  Planning began in 1885, construction started in 1888, the exterior was finished in 1891 and the interior followed in 1892.

By early 1890, it was becoming apparent that the building would not be adequate.  Legislation was introduced in Washington, D.C. by Congressman William C. Wallace in April, to allow a single-story annex to be built on the north side of the building.  The annex would increase the working space of the post office by 5000 square feet.  It would have a "roadway under [the] floor" on the Adams St. side, to serve as a loading dock for mail wagons.  Its basement would house the steam heating and electric lighting machinery for the entire Federal Building - which could not be opened until these were in place.  The bill was passed at the end of September.

Bids were finally taken for the construction of the annex in February 1891.  The winning bid ($64,650) went to Bernard Gallagher, who had been the first contractor on the main building.  It was meant to be completed by the start of May, but there were further delays.  The government claimed that there were property boundary disputes to work out with neighbors, and newspapers claimed that the troubles were really financial: the Billion Dollar Congress having drained the Treasury.

The annex and Federal Building were finally completed and the post office was informally opened on 27 March 1892, under postmaster George J. Collins. 

I have not been able to find a photo of the completed annex, but I did find an insurance map from 1904 which shows the footprint of the buildings on that block in detail.  (In this map excerpt, north is to the right.)

By summer, a new problem presented itself.  The annex had an all-glass roof, and with the sun shining down on the mailing division floor plus boilers working below them to power the main building's elevators, it became a sweatbox.  Shades were finally added to the windows at the end of the summer.  The following May, there was still talk of needing to protect "the eyes of the clerks employed in the annex" from the glaring sun.

The further history of the annex is rather unclear.  The post office and other departments in the building faced increasing demands.  More of the property north of the building may have been purchased in 1899.  I have seen mentions of a new addition built in 1908, but haven't found any specifics on that.

The government purchased the remainder of the block, up to Tillary Street, around 1915.  This held a pair of buildings which had operated together as the Columbia Theater, then briefly as a burlesque house called the Alcazar, and then returned to the name Columbia to present silent films.  The second building served as the theater lobby and also housed a bowling alley and perhaps a bank after that.  The Federal Building's supervising architect James Wetmore was later quoted in the Eagle saying, "we utilized first one building and then the other to provide space for the postoffice, and finally connected them with the main building by a temporary structure."

I haven't been able to determine whether the 1891 Annex, built by Gallagher and Atlas Iron, was replaced by any of this work or simply incorporated into it.  In any case, the entire set of buildings (still referred to as "the annex") was torn down in 1929.  This cleared the way for a seven-story addition, designed by Wetmore and built between 1930 and 1933, which takes up the northern part of the block and stands conjoined with the original Federal Building today.


Sources:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, especially: 11 Apr 1890, 30 Sept 1890, 14 Oct 1890, 12 Feb 1891, 19 June 1891, 26 June 1891, 13 Sept 1891, 17 July 1892, 17 Aug 1892, 4 May 1894, 7 June 1908, 12 Jan 1913, 23 Oct 1928, 15 Oct 1929.
New York Times: 11 Feb 1891, 28 Mar 1892.
Catalog of the Second Annual Exhibition of the Department of Architecture of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (1893).
Insurance Maps, Borough of Brooklyn, City of New York, Vol. 2 (Sanborn Map Co., 1904).  From The New York Public Library.

The Morris Building, Under Construction

I've just come across two terrific photos of Atlas Iron work sites.  I love this type of shot which actually shows something in progress.

Here is one of the two, showing the construction of the Morris Building (about which I have previously written).

The photo comes from an advertisement for Atlas Iron in the Catalog of the Second Annual Exhibition of the Department of Architecture of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (1893).

St. Paul's M. E. Church

I recently had a chance to see some of the iron work which - I believe - Atlas Iron put in place.  This was at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on the Upper West Side.

The church originated on Mulberry Street in 1834.  After one previous move, the congregation decided in 1890 to move further north.  A site was selected and Robert H. Robertson designed what was then called St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church (they later merged with nearby St. Andrew's).  Construction took place between June 1895 and September 1897.

I found out that Atlas Iron was involved in this construction thanks to three mechanic's liens which were placed against the church, naming Atlas Iron as a secondary party.  The liens - placed by Passaic Rolling Mill Co, Bethlehem Foundry and Machine Co, and Theodore Smith (who ran an iron works) - totaled $1184.  They were all paid off.

During my research, I saw on the church's website that they participate in the annual Open House New York program, where sites around the city open their doors for architectural tours.  In a grand stroke of luck, I saw this just a week before this year's event took place!  So, I trekked into the city to visit and see what I could learn.

As soon as I explained what brought me there, I was introduced to their current architect, Skip Boling.  Skip showed me around the building and helped look for any iron or steel structural elements.  The most prominent of these are a set of cast iron columns in the basement, which hold up the sanctuary floor.

There are three rows of these columns.  Two are out in the open in the social hall, and the third runs through the food pantry and kitchens (you can actually see a column from that third row, through the second window in the photo).

The entire basement went through a complete renovation several years ago, under Skip's design and direction.  He told me that they stripped layers of paint from the iron columns and also uncovered nearby brick piers which support the building above.  He decided to bring out the natural beauty of the original iron and brick to give character to the new social hall.

As we toured the rest of the building, we found metal work in several of the stairwells.  I also had a chance to speak with the church's historian, Elizabeth Jensen, and their pastor, K Karpen.  I was told that the sanctuary ceiling and the roof are both supported with steel.  There may be additional steel work which is hidden and thus remains a mystery.

One intriguing possibility is the set of columns running along either side of the sanctuary.  Made to look like ornately carved marble, these actually consist of a thin outer shell made of metal (providing the aesthetic look) and undoubtedly some type of structural column within.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that Atlas Iron went out of business in late 1895 or early 1896.  While the liens indicate that they handled at least $1100 worth of metal from three different sources, I haven't come across any details about which specific parts of the church they worked on.  I like to think that they put up the iron columns in the basement, and perhaps they worked on the columns on the sanctuary level as well, but we simply don't know.  I wasn't able to find company names or markings on any of the metal work that I saw.  I was still very glad to explore the church, talk to everyone there and imagine the possibilities.

A final side note: while researching St. Paul's, I ran across another distant relation.  An article in the New York Tribune listed the church's trustees at the time of the construction.  Among them was Phineas C. Lounsbury - the brother of an ancestor on my mother's side of the family.  Atlas Iron was run by Henry C. Williams, an ancestor on my father's side.  It's actually possible that Phineas and Henry knew each other, as they were both prominent bankers with connections to New York City.


For more on the renovation of the church's basement and other work that has been done recently, with photos and plans, see Skip Boling's website.

For more on the church's history, see their website.