Walkabout: The Brooklyn Architect Smackdown, Part 2

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this story.

Building a large civic building is a prize for any architect, be that back in the early 20th century, or now. The chance to put your stamp on a city, to build something both useful and necessary and quite public is a great coup and a huge ego boost.

By those criteria and more, architect Rudolf Daus was a very successful man. Part One of this story tells about his rise to the top of Brooklyn’s architectural world. By 1900, he had a number of very public buildings to his credit; the Lincoln Club, the St. John’s Orphanage for Boys, and most recently, the impressive NY and NJ Telephone Building, downtown on Willoughby Street.

He had designed several of the new Brooklyn Carnegie Libraries, and perhaps the biggest and most noticeable building of all – the massive 13th Regiment Armory in Bedford that took up almost an entire city block. Now he was looking for another hotly contested prize; the expansion of Brooklyn’s Hall of Records, which stood on the corner of Boerum Place and Fulton Street.

The commission would be decided by a mayoral committee that looked at submissions by several interested architects or firms. They submitted drawings, floor plans, scale models and budgets.

Budget was everything in a civil project, and the winner of the contest would be expected to deliver on time and on budget. As one of three fine architects vying for the job, Daus had one disadvantage: all of his other projects, most especially the recent armory, were way over budget.

Daus did not like limits, not on his work, or on the money it would take to make it work. But he had connections, he was the consummate insider, and this time, his Brooklyn connection was Hugh McLaughlin, the powerful boss of the Democratic machine in Brooklyn, which was itself a subsidiary of Manhattan’s Tammany Hall. When Daus beat two other architects out for this Hall of Records job, some cried “Foul!” Daus really didn’t care.

The old Hall of Records Building was a two story building that stood facing out onto Fulton Street. The expansion would take the building back along Boerum Place, almost to Livingston Street. The new extension would be four stories tall, so two more stories would be added to the old building.

The old building’s original façade would be retained, and the extension and new stories would all be similarly faced, creating in effect, an entirely new building. Modern advances in electricity, plumbing and ventilation systems would make the new building last for a century.

The $500,000 project began in 1901. So did the problems. Originally, the plan was to begin preparing the lot for the new foundation in the fall of 1900.

Four city commissioners had oversight on the project, including the Superintendent of the Hall of Records. They were quite put out that in June of 1901, ground was just being broken. They suspected that the delay had to do with money. They thought Daus was looking for more.

The Superintendent of Records had requested that all of the valuable records stored in the old hall be packed up in metal bins to protect them from the renovation. A sensible request, considering the records of an entire city were stored in rooms that could easily be damaged by the work going on around them.

$100,000 of the $500,000 budget had been allotted for storage needs. Daus told them he needed the money for the building, and if they wanted metal boxes, then more money would have to be appropriated for the project. The commissioners felt that Daus was delaying, holding the project up to force them to budget more money.

Daus defended the delays saying that his original plan had been to use the old building’s foundation as a base, and add the addition to the back, building it the same way as the original building. But his engineers had come back to him with news that the old foundation was not strong enough.

He had to rethink his plans, and now he wanted to tear down the old building walls and rebuild them, using the old materials, but reinforcing them within and below. He would add structural pillars inside, and other features to carry the new load. He had to redesign his design, and that is what the delay was about. When asked if this would cost more than originally planned, the answer was basically, “Well, duh.”

“Of course it will cost more than simply adding to the old building,” he said. But the result would be worth it. He went on to say that the commissioners should have investigated the metal storage boxes before the budget was drawn up, and inferred that it wasn’t his job to take care of the records, and they should have thought of that before, and gotten additional funding for it.

He was hired to add an addition. However, he would be glad to hear about the boxes and would be willing to advise them of what they should do, if asked.

A week or so later, the project was in the news again. When Daus had announced that the old foundation wasn’t strong enough, he had gone to Buildings Department with a handful of old crumbling concrete, laid it before them and told them that this was why he needed to tear down the old walls.

The Superintendent of Buildings sent his top engineer, P. A. Faribault, to accompany Daus on site, and take more samples. Faribault said that Daus’ samples came from the outside of the old building, and were not indicative of anything, as the material was not load bearing.

He took his own samples from the interior of the foundation and found them to be more than sound, and capable of sustaining twice the load that they were already carrying. In his opinion, there was no need to overbuild and delay further.

When asked by the Eagle why Daus had gotten his samples from the wrong place, Faribault demurred, and said it was not his job to tell an architect where to get his samples. When asked whether or not a “competent architect”, (not mentioning any names, mind you) should know if his samples are coming from the right place, Faribault only said, “I would prefer not to say.”

He did go on to say that he thought the walls of the old building needed reinforcement by new steel girders so that they could handle the load of two new stories, but the foundation was fine, and there was no reason to delay the project any longer.

This news story also revealed that Daus had gone over the Commissioners’ heads and asked one of his politically connected friends to get more money appropriated for the project. The Commissioners were not happy.

They were really unhappy when Daus came back to them after his foundation test with an entirely new design than what he had originally come up with; the design that won him the job over the submissions of the other architects. On top of that, they suspected another reason beyond just more money for a better building.

The city was coming up on an election year, and Tammany Hall had promised jobs to its supporters. Daus’ planned expanded project meant more men than originally slated were needed for the job of building the new Hall of Records. What a coincidence!

In spite of all the shenanigans, the Corporation Council voted to pay Daus for his professional services that year. He had been contracted to receive 3% of the $250,000 allotted for the new building, and 6% of the $150,000 slated for the alterations and renovations on the old building. His bill of $16,500 was approved in December. Rudolf Daus would have a fine Christmas.

Coming up: By 1903, the building was done. But the battle between Brooklyn’s architectural community and Rudolf Daus was just beginning. The new Hall of Records looked awfully familiar to one of the architects who lost the initial contest to build the structure.

Frank Helmle accused Daus of copying and using his designs. Meanwhile, the American Institute of Architects was looking into Daus’ involvement in the choice of architects who were chosen by the committee he had led, to design the Carnegie funded branches of the Brooklyn Public Library.

There were cries of favoritism and elitism. Daus had also chosen himself for four libraries. The very public investigation ends our story next time. Oh, and the newly completed Hall of Records? There were cracks in the foundations. Oy.

(Above: 1912 postcard of the Hall of Records)