February 23, 2007
Moving Right Along
Before any work started at the site we hired Don Friedman of Old Structures Engineering to do a structural analysis of the foundation and floor joists of the building. This engineering report and the structural drawings that resulted were used in lieu of architects plans to obtain DOB permits so that we could begin working on the building. After each floor is cleared of debris, Don and our contractor, Greg Toledo of Action Construction Corp., will meet to reassess the stability of the floor and see how much of the existing wood is salvagable. A fire from 1975 and the ensuing water damage did weaken a lot of joists, but a surprising number of them are in good condition. There is a certain romanticism to the idea of keeping as much of the original building intact as possible, particularly wooden beams that have held the floor up for over a hundred and fifty years. Stability comes first, but we will leave any joist that can continue to do its job properly. When the joists are replaced and the floor is level, a new 3/4 inch plywood subfloor will placed on top.
With the debris cleared out and the first set of subfloor down, it's easy to see how a gracious apartment layout fit easily into each side the building. I've seen the floorplans for how the units were laid out before the fire gutted the building. The building is forty feet wide and sixty-five feet deep with approximately twenty-six hundred square feet per floor. Subracting the hallways and various light shafts, each side-by-side apartment was roughly 1100 square feet. On the first floor where we are working, each unit may be slightly smaller because of the entry hallway, but they are still quite large.
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February 15, 2007
Rolling The Ball
After the fire last October, the Department of Buildings decided that they were done letting Arthur flout their regulations in the name of art, and came down on him with the full force of the law. While they may have acted a bit heavy-handedly when they had the police department drag him away in handcuffs, they acted well within their directives with the issuance of a number of unsafe building violations. The lack of fire stairs and the lack of egress on each floor due to large piles of debris were clearly violations of the building code. 
Other parts of their mandate against Arthur were more puzzling. While the stop work order instructing him to cease all work on the distinctive wooden structure at the top of the building was understandable, he hadn't actually built anything new up there in a few years. Furthermore, the DOBs insistance that they would show up with cranes and raze as much of the building as they deemed necessary if the top structure wasn't removed right away was a strange reaction to the building not having fire stairs or egress. Their claim that the top structure was going to blow off and kill someone not only had little basis in fact, but they didn't even bother to issue an unsafe building violation for it. If New York's brutal winter gales hadn't destroyed the structure during the years it had been there, the odds of it blowing away without many more years of deterioration were pretty low.
Part of Arthur's argument when he was able to get the criminal case against him dismissed was that no engineer from the DOB had ever stepped foot inside the building, and two separate engineers that inspected the building pro bono declared that the structure was in no imminent danger of collapse. Regardless, what Arthur and I both learned from his arrest and subsequent exculpation was that the DOB can act first and admit they were wrong later (I had actually insisted that the DOB wouldn't physically remove him from the house after he received the vacate order). While their strategy of act first and shrug later might be the grounds for a lawsuit, they could have potentially leveled the entire building when they came to remove the top structure, particularly since the strongest ECBs were against issues on the lower floors.
In order to guarantee that this wouldn't happen, we had to convince the DOB that we were serious about removing the top structure ourselves. This would allow us to save as much of the building as possible. With the help of Tish James' office as a negotiator, we put together a timeline for the work to be done. The first few weeks of this timeline are compised of debris removal, shoring or replacement of floor joists, installation of a subfloor where it has been removed, and the construction of temporary internal stairs. When all of that is completed, we will build our scaffolding and begin removing the top structure the way it was built - from the inside.
On Thursday, February 8th, we attempted to have our first 30 yard container delivered into the lot next door to Broken Angel. The delivery truck tried for 45 minutes to angle his way into the lot, but with Downing street so narrow and cars parked on the opposite side of the street, there was no safe way in. We had to take most of our workers off of the site and come back the next day. Friday, the street scaffold went up, and the street cleaning rules made it much easier to get a container into the site. We were one day ahead of our proposed schedule with the DOB, and we were able to remove 30 cubic yards of debris. We ran into the same problem again on Monday the 12th. Cars blocked the driveway all morning, and we weren't able to get the container traded out or the two new ones delivered. With this experience in mind, it became apparent that we were going to have to take a different approach to the debris removal.
The economics of debris removal work out like this: A good price for the delivery and removal of a 30 cubic yard container is around $850. A crew of workers can fill roughly two 30 yard containers a day, depending on how packed the debris is that needs to be removed. With a daily payroll of $1,600 for the workers, it costs roughly $3,300 per 60 cubic yards of debris to be removed. If a clean-out company is hired, their price can range from $1,100 - $1,500 per 20 yard container removed by their workers. If a deal is made for a specific amount of debris removal work within a certain amount of time on a particular job, you can often cut a better deal. We have worked out a deal with a clean-out company that is roughly equivalent in price per 60 cubic yards of debris removed with our workers removing the debris and having to deal with container delivery. We also have the added layer of protection of the clean-out company's liability insurance on top of our own. As of 5:00 PM on Wednesday the 14th, we had removed a total of 150 cubic yards of mixed debris, and 20 cubic yards of metal for recycling. At the close of business on Thursday the 15th, we had removed an additional 40 cubic yards of mixed debris, 7 cubic yards of broken bricks, and 15 cubic yards of metal for recycling.
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February 8, 2007
Arthur Fought The Law, And The Law Lost
Ever since the New York Times prematurely announced that Arthur and I had come to an agreement to develop Broken Angel, a number of people have questioned my sanity for taking on the project. Most of those people are business acquaintances of mine whose only knowledge of Arthur are photos they have seen of Broken Angel and anecdotes they have heard of something outlandish he said in a newspaper article or in a film. While I think being called eccentric is one of the highest compliments one could get, Arthur bristles at the suggestion that he is anything other than just more sane than the most people.
Arthur had a chance to prove his sanity in court yesterday. In October he was taken from his home in handcuffs and arrested for violating a vacate order from the Department of Buildings when they deemed his building to be unsafe and uninhabitable after a small fire. Arthur had chosen to represent himself in the criminal case, even though he faced a significant fine or jail time if found guilty of defying the order. I suggested that he get a public defender, or at the very least adjourn the case until he talked to an attorney about the best way to tackle it. Arthur insisted that he knew what he was doing. He attacked the charges against him on both a procedural and factual basis.
The vacate order stated on its front page that it was supposed to have an engineers report attached to it - it didn't. The arresting officers were supposed to have a warrant to arrest him - they didn't have one. They were also supposed to read him his miranda rights when he was being arrested - they didn't. One of the ECB violations used in the vacate order stated that the building was unsafe because it had no roof. Arthur refuted this with a printout from Google Earth showing the roof of the building, and presented photos of different parts of it taken by his son Chris.
I started calling Arthur's cell phone at 5:00 after I hadn't heard from him all day. Every time I dialed his number the phone just rang and rang. I was concerned. I had told him that even though the project could move forward if he did end up getting incarcerated for a short period of time, we could only get so far rebuilding his vision without him. Eventually, he picked up his house phone. "I didn't take my cell phone to court", he said, "And the judge threw out the case against me because they were wrong and I was right". Saner words could not be spoken.
-Shahn
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February 7, 2007
Articles About Broken Angel
The following is a partial list of articles about Broken Angel for people who are not familiar with the building.
Brooklyn Downtown Star:
January 18th, 2007
The Brooklyn Paper:
January 6th, 2007
January 20th, 2007
New York Times:
October 18th, 2006
January 11th, 2007
New York One:
May 9th, 2007
April 26th, 2007
LA Times:
December 3, 2006
The Real Deal:
February 1st, 2007
June 4th, 2007
New York Magazine:
January 11th, 2007
January 15th, 2007
NY Daily News:
October 16th, 2006
October 19th, 2006
January 17th, 2007
Curbed:
October 16th, 2006
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