Equitable on Broad Street 5

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…