Westinghouse Collapse

Stuart Chirls, who works near the site of the Westinghouse Building demolition, saw a mishap this morning that crushed four cars:

I'm your Westinghouse Bureau reporter. Please see attached image, use only with credit, thanks. My co-worker Craig [Wilson, as in foto below] was walking across Orange Street when the collapse occurred; he said a guy near the destroyed cars narrowly missed being hit by the debris, laughed it off and walked away. No one was injured, according to Ledger.

Golly. The cars look like convertibles now. I hope the owners had full insurance. This is what the top looked like before the collapse. From the Star-Ledger foto, it would seem the only thing that dropped was the decorative brick buttresses (corbels) that line the top of the building, and anything that may have been on the roof in that area. I have litened this foto a bit to show the brickwork that sheared off.

News 12 New Jersey says that two people were slitely injured, one passing by in a car and one on the sidewalk who suffered a slite cut to his hand. It clearly could have been much worse. Here's a fuller view, sidewalk to roofline, of part of the façade that dropped.

I was by there Sunday taking pix, and I wasn't the only one. As I drove from Broad Street on Lackawanna Avenue, the one-block road that ends at the Westinghouse Building, I saw from behind a guy in the street near the left corner with what looked like metal crutches sticking out on either side. I thought it unwise for a guy on crutches to be standing in the street, back to traffic, but as I got closer, I saw it was a tripod. Another fotografer was out doing what I was about to do, taking pix of the Westinghouse Building before it's gone. I looked carefully at him as I rounded the corner to park on University Avenue, thinking it might be Matt Gosser or someone else I knew, but I didn't recognize him. He was not then in the area where debris fell today. Nor did I go that close, taking my pix from the opposite sides of Orange and University too.
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The closer view below shows the fine brickwork that apparently wasn't very strong after all the years the building stood. The fine lines in the right window are the stems of weeds!

The News 12 report speculated that windy weather added to lots of vibration during demolition of adjoining areas of the building may have precipitated the fall. I'm not clear as to the height of the area that fell, as compared to the width of the sidewalk. Perhaps some of the rubble fell onto the sidewalk and bounced onto the cars.

The sign above is near the right end of the fallen section, but not clear of it. The Star-Ledger foto shows it to be right under an area that fell, but the sign was not knocked off the building. I don't know if the remnants of fluorescent tubing on the W and G on this side (there appears to be more on the right side) were knocked off.

This fuller view of the sign area shows graffiti art below it. There is very little glass left in the building, but there's some left in the vestiges of the elegant rounded, many-paned window at upper right. I hope all the missing glass was recycled rather than broken up to be deposited as perpetually dangerous waste in a landfill.

In the wide view above of the section already smashed, I find two things worth noting. First, there appears to have been no steel skeleton, but only structural masonry. Second, the metal chimney is held in place by guy wires.

BUT this foto shows what is plainly steelwork, so I'm puzzled. It seems to be present only in that area. So either appearances are deceiving, or there might have been some particularly heavy equipment there. Note that the rubble is still on-site and in large pieces rather than ground up into gravel-sized bits as I have seen at other demolition sites, in Harrison near the PATH station and at the former Pabst brewery/Hoffman bottling plant on South Orange Avenue.

In the two fotos above and below, we see an intact section still standing beyond the equipment that will destroy it. Only in reviewing the foto below did I notice the A-shaped supports for barriers echoing the larger points formed by the equipment.

This next foto shows a fire extinguisher and metal sliding door, signs that the designers understood well the need for fire control in a plant that was to make electrical equipment. You can see a farther wall thru the destroyed section. I don't know what that would be part of. It looks like a glass-walled structure, but I thought only the Broad Street Station lay there.

The foto below shows the only glass left on the east face of the building, in the crescent-shaped window at top left that is one of the great features of what was, once, a wonderful building. The kid who painted the poster I showed on the upper left in the first foto and in a closer view in the 8th foto of my entry of February 7th of last year had the number of panels in the crescent slitely wrong, but did a great job giving a sense of the place.

Remember that this was a factory, not an art museum. It costs little more to build a beautiful factory — or other structure — than an ugly one. So why are there so many ugly buildings in the world?

I hope whatever goes up in place of the wonderful old Westinghouse Building is worthy of the site.