The Boulevard (née The Times/Littlest Bar) | 110 Broad St | Downtown

DQwfl2Uh.jpg
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I hope they get slapped with a major fine for that, but I doubt they will.
 
Five will get you ten that Inspectional Services will require that side to be pulled down...its falling apart.

Shocked, as in Captain Reynauld shocked.
 
What should happen is they should be forced to comb through the rubble for any exterior bricks and then hire a master mason to carefully replace all the brick, weathered side out until the facade is made whole again.

But yeah, they will probably just tear it down.
 
Yeah. Lintel too. Worst job of preservation since ????

A lobby. Great idea, buttmunch developer.
 
you guys called it.

whighlander said:
Stellar -- I think the later 19th C part of the hybrid 110 Broad Building was clearly truncated when the Fitzgerald Expressway was being built in the 1950's -- or if not truncated then the windows were bricked-up to shield the internals from the traffic just beyond

https://goo.gl/maps/QiKZoJfzaaR2

centralartery005-1224.r.jpg

circa 1954
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darn it... i can't identify anything in this photo or it's relation to the corner where the Littlest Bar redo is happening. :banghead:
 
Here, does this help? This is from roughly the same angle in Google Earth:



Also, holy hell is Google Earth terrible if you have a modern device with a high pixel density that requires UI scaling in Windows... it took me at least 10 mins to position the camera with that viewport because the UI doesn't scale.
 
There needs to be some kind of regulation in regards to what constitutes "preservation" and have the contractors doing the work have some kind of certification for "preservation". We can all see any efforts to even spare the facade were lackluster here.

Edit: note the crack in the bricks of the facade. It really is structurally unsound now and it will have to come down.
 
At this point, what is the point? Saving a few bricks and some old windows? It's really just pandering to a few people to shut them up about "saving old Boston." Just pull the band aid off, get it over with.
 
Basically, this never should have been allowed to be touched at all. Now its probably too late

Seems like they made no effort when demolishing the building to keep the facade intact.
 
Jouhou said:
Edit: note the crack in the bricks of the facade. It really is structurally unsound now and it will have to come down.
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Why? It's not load bearing in the new building. They can easily attach it to the concrete structure behind and reset the bricks...
 
Suffolk 83 said:
Basically, this never should have been allowed to be touched at all. Now its probably too late

Seems like they made no effort when demolishing the building to keep the facade intact.
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If one looks at the photos, the bracing is on both sides. Almost certainly the interior braces were only installed after they cut the floor joists and gained access to the wall. The loss of the top right window was probably deliberate, as it was found to be too unstable. And, yes, they would save the bricks and the lintel.

There is a big financial incentive for restoring the Bulfinch building, its called Historic Preservation tax credit.
 
Suffolk 83 said:
Seems like they made no effort when demolishing the building to keep the facade intact.
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In fairness, I wouldn't say "no" effort (not optimal effort, perhaps), but they installed all that temporary steel gusseting clearly with specific intent to save that facade. They would not have bothered with that otherwise.

I am still on the fence as to whether this is salvageable. It's definitely not going to be load bearing, so if they have a good plan for preserving it as a veneer while building the interior structure, then tying it in (as well as restoring it), it could still be saved. Great work for an artisan mason, for sure.

One other thought (and this is entirely speculative). The approach we're seeing could well be for ease (and $ saving) of general contracting: call JDC in once to do all demo and site prep, rather than having to have them in multiple times. It seems the plan was to install the temp. steel gusseting, and get all demo done in one shot. A more costly but more delicate approach would have been to do partial demo and site clean-up to allow sufficient access for a crew to build some permanent interior support structure, then precisely cut away remaining interfaces to the old buildings, then call the demo crew back in again to remove all remaining material. This would not be tenable if, say, one were building a tower on top of the old structure, because of the substantiality of the foundation work, etc., but as we see from renderings, there's nothing going on top of the Bulfinch portion, so a simple steel skeleton could have been surgically inserted within it solely for local (but permanent) load bearing purposes. This approach would have been much more costly. They opted instead for the nuclear option: call in the demo crew to tackle it in one fell swoop. Experts please weigh in to correct my ignorance.
 
stellarfun said:
If one looks at the photos, the bracing is on both sides. Almost certainly the interior braces were only installed after they cut the floor joists and gained access to the wall. The loss of the top right window was probably deliberate, as it was found to be too unstable. And, yes, they would save the bricks and the lintel.

There is a big financial incentive for restoring the Bulfinch building, its called Historic Preservation tax credit.
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There must be some metric though where after a certain percentage of alteration its no longer "preservation?"
 
stellarfun said:
If one looks at the photos, the bracing is on both sides. Almost certainly the interior braces were only installed after they cut the floor joists and gained access to the wall. The loss of the top right window was probably deliberate, as it was found to be too unstable. And, yes, they would save the bricks and the lintel.

There is a big financial incentive for restoring the Bulfinch building, its called Historic Preservation tax credit.
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This sounds reasonable. I will give them benefit of the doubt for now.
 
mdd said:
There must be some metric though where after a certain percentage of alteration its no longer "preservation?"
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Probably. I think the bigger question, though, is what is it important to preserve? I can't really see how preserving the unsound internal structure of a masonry building whose interior walls no one can ever see is of critical importance. Buildings wear out and need to come down at some point.

It seems like the "preservation" here is in the aesthetic integrity - that the finished building will still look like Bulfinch intended, and that it still brings a moment of old-Boston authenticity to the street.

The approved plans required them to preserve the facade. I don't think seeing one crack among the bricks when they're shored up is reason to start doubting that the developers will.
 
mdd said:
There must be some metric though where after a certain percentage of alteration its no longer "preservation?"
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Historic preservation tax credit mostly involves facades; one can include interiors, but the tax credit is for commercial or other income-producing properties, so generally bringing the interior to code for commercial business involves too much demolition.

https://www.nps.gov/tps/tax-incentives/before-you-apply.htm

JDC is part of Derenzo.
 
stellarfun said:
Historic preservation tax credit mostly involves facades; one can include interiors, but the tax credit is for commercial or other income-producing properties, so generally bringing the interior to code for commercial business involves too much demolition.

https://www.nps.gov/tps/tax-incentives/before-you-apply.htm

JDC is part of Derenzo.
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Stellarfun -- this is just a logical extension to the process which began with the steel frame structure and a curtain wall

Once you separate the building skin from the structure -- it doesn't matter whether the building is someone's suburban house sheathed with repurposed barn boards, or a skyscraper wrapped with the skin of older era city buildings

Or for that matter a skyscraper wrapped with repurposed barn boards

The next phase is to wrap the structure with OLED panels and then display whatever exterior you want -- perhaps dynamically
 
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