I want to tell about a project that I have been involved with a few BPrs
in real time, real life... but I won’t mention any names.
I am a bit paranoid about talking about ongoing projects while I am in
the middle of them. They called me in last month to look at a brownstone
church. We started out they wanted me to look from the ‘contractor’
perspective to help them figure out if they could build on some new
details to the bell tower. It was an old church, and I thought that
their request was a bit odd, but they had found drawings made by the
original architect that showed details that had never been built. Some
famous guy I never heard of. There was some sort of weird argument they
gave as to why adding on these details would be historically correct...
the original vision of the architect, yada yada all that stuff you guys
think up that confuses the crap out of me.
I had done work on this church in the past and I was familiar with the
layout of the place, as well as had done work on the tower, put a roof
on it... a flat roof, the top of the tower was flat with a crenellated
parapet. I digress but will get to the point here soon enough. And we
were being asked how feasible it would be from the contractor
perspective to add on a small tower on each of the four corners of the
main tower... and some stuff about axis of alignment, polarity with lay
lines, Christian symbolism and how it related to the liturgy of this
particular Korean Presbyterianism. I mean, I was really getting confused
by the whole thing. But it turned out that was not really what they were
after from me. They were paying me for my time so I don’t really mind
how much they want to tell me weird stuff. Actually, I kind of enjoy it.
We went down and through these doors that had really neat electric
buttons on the walls – I suspect it was a DC system, and a door would
open out of the wall (really nice carved oak wainscot with grape leaves
and grapes that looked so real I felt like biting them) and we were
going through these narrow corridors kind of behind the scenes and I was
thinking, gosh, this is neat, then we went into a small auditorium.
All the years I had worked at this church off and on I had never seen
this auditorium. It reminded me of one we were in at Yale last year.
There were a few people in there milling about. Richard was fiddling
with the projector, and they were getting ready to show a Powerpoint
presentation and I’m thinking they are going to go on and on about the
structural details of the church... I knew two of the folks there were
from XYZ engineers, but no names here.
But what they showed me was that buried inside the church was this other
structure that was made out of copper and it was like this large round
building that they had dated to 1857 and that it had a pointed roof,
like an upside down funnel, and they traced out how there had been long
wrought iron piles, supports, whatever that came out from the bottom of
the building. What had everyone perplexed was that this building inside
of the church, that the church it seems had been literally built over
the top of, that this building on the inside did not sit level, it was
slanted at like a 40 degree angle with one side buried deeper than the
other. Oh, yeah, it was ringed around with windows, too. The drawings
they had made looked like it was intended for some sort of tourist use,
more so than military, or maybe it was meant for observation. I have no
clue but I began to catch on that they were hoping I would be interested
in doing some test pits. As usual I asked them how deep? They had no
clue how deep. I told them if we need to do shoring it makes things more
complicated. They agreed.
We went on, turns out they had got enough stuff from the not to be named
archive and newspaper searching guy to realize that the copper building
had not been built on site, actually that it had been built over in
Hoboken and that it walked over to Manhattan, or the people inside it
walked it over to Manhattan where it had fallen over. We finally worked
out the details and the insurance and all that crap and we start the dig
next week.
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