Big Shot of Centre Street

By Oliver E. Allen

When a friend showed me the above picture, which he found on eBay, he asked if I could tell what it depicted. He had bought it because it was entitled “Reade Street- 7/8/1901” and he lives on Reade. But the scene did not seem to show any part of the street that either of us could identify. Then he located a possible clue. Viewing the picture through a magnifying glass, he had detected the words “Centre Street” on one of the buildings on the right.

That was indeed the key. “Reade Street” evidently referred not to what the photo showed but to the spot from which it was taken. The 1901 date shed further light on the mystery. The photographer probably was chronicling the construction of New York’s first true subway line, which took place from 1900 to 1904, and his photograph, looking north from Reade Street, showed the excavation and framing for the new underground line as it headed uptown from the Brooklyn Bridge station.

The street on the left is Lafayette, while Centre Street leads uptown on the right. New York’s subways were almost all built using the “cut and cover” method: rather than tunneling underground, the builders dug a big trench and then simply covered it over, as shown here. All but one of the buildings that appear in the photograph vanished during the intervening years. Most notably, the group in the middle of the picture between Lafayette and Centre Streets (note the sign advertising cigars) yielded to the open expanse of Foley Square and Thomas Paine Park. The low buildings on the right of Centre Street were replaced by courthouses. But there is one holdout among the buildings on Lafayette Street along the left of the photo, visible in the distance. It is the former New York Life Insurance Company Building, a magnificent 13-story pile that stretches along Leonard Street from Lafayette all the way to Broadway (where it is topped by the well-known Clocktower).

If you use this picture as a reference and look uptown from the sidewalk of Centre Street in front of the Municipal Building, you’ll spot it.

When you gaze at the photograph, however, you may wonder what the tall, round structure is at the very center of the picture. It’s obviously too wide to be a chimney. A little sleuthing produces the answer: it is a shot tower, and a very important one at that, built in 1855.

Shot towers were ammunition factories in which molten lead was dropped from a height into cold water to produce lead gunshot for smooth-bore firearms. But this structure was revolutionary. Designed by the well-known cast-iron architect James Bogardus, it was constructed in a novel way, as Margot Gayle, an expert on cast-iron buildings, explains in her authoritative 1998 work “Cast-Iron Architecture in America.” Shot towers had always been built of masonry, requiring very thick walls to achieve the necessary height. (Baltimore still has one and it’s a popular tourist attraction.) At this location, however, which had once been the site of the Collect Pond, the ground was too swampy to support such weight.

Enter Bogardus, who solved the problem by using thin, cast-iron columns to achieve the necessary height (174 feet) and filling the space between them with nothing but a layer of bricks. The building was light, but strong. A cast-iron staircase spiraling upward just inside the walls provided access to the top of the building.

Along with a somewhat similar structure that Bogardus built the following year for another manufacturer on Beekman Street, the Centre Street tower dominated the skyline, as there was nothing near so tall in the vicinity. The two towers, the Evening Post reported in 1856, “got the attention of all who crossed the Fulton Ferry.”

But their significance transcended their visibility. The two towers, as Margot Gayle observes, “were prophetic of the structural systems that became commonplace in the skyscrapers of the twentieth century.” Another expert has remarked that, “Here, at one stroke, Bogardus anticipated the iron-skeleton, curtain-walled skyscrapers of the next generation.”

Unfortunately the Centre Street tower did not survive long into the skyscraper era. For a while it was highly productive: in the 1870s it was turning out 15 tons of shot daily. But times changed and the demand for shot ebbed, and in 1907—not long after our photograph was made—Bogardus’ innovative structure was demolished.

So that explains one puzzle in our photograph. But there is another. What is that man in the center foreground doing, seemingly emptying a bucket into a long trough that he’s actually standing in? Your guess is as good as mine.

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