The Astor Building 2

Keeping on with the construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel under its temporary name “the Astor Building”… Unlike my previous dive into the construction photos of the Equitable Trust Building on Broad Street, the main sequence photos here (which are numbered and dated) begin with the superstructure steel being erected. There are two foundation photos in the scrapbook digitized by the New York Public Library, and they offer some hints but not a full picture. The first photo is almost meaningless: Note that the photographer (and the fellow on the right) are standing on a steel-framed floor. The portion in the foreground has temporary wood planks on the beams, the part further away has either concrete floor slabs or non-structural concrete on top of another structural floor (most likely tile arch). The diamond-pattern mesh not something I’d expect to see in a draped-mesh concrete slab but it was used occasionally. Is this the first floor? A cellar above a sub-cellar? Can’t tell. The…