Street level and below...

Demolition of the old building is now complete and the site is down to street level. It is now an "empty lot" and we are awaiting on D.O.B. sign off before removing material below street level to begin work on the building's foundation. Here are a few pics of how things looked during a site visit yesterday afternoon:

From across the street, the progress on demolition can be clearly seen.
One can now see all the way to through the back of the lot.

Looking through the wooden fence protecting the site.

An empty lot on 16th street.
Looking South.

An empty lot on 16th street.
Looking North.

On both sides of the lot you can see that during the demolition, stucco has been added to the bricks of the buildings to stabilize them until our building goes up. Yiannes said that since the bricks and mortar on the building to east were never finished we could tell that the now-gone building on our site pre-dated our neighbors' building. This accounts for the roughness you can see here in the stucco:

Stucco on the stabilize bricks on our neighboring building to the east.

 In the previous post about demolition, we could see the bricks piling up in the basement. These bricks are now under all of the dirt that you can see in the open lot. They will all be removed along with the dirt when we start digging to make the basement and foundation. This little backhoe moved all of dirt from the back yard to cover and grade the whole site:

Finished with covering the bricks and grading.

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Lots of people asked me how the site did during Hurricane Sandy. As you can see, we were quite fortunate and everything was fine. Demolition was almost entirely done so there wasn't too much to blow around or fall over. Anything that could be blown about was tied down. More importantly, we were out of the main flooding areas of NYC so the site remained high and dry.

All the flooding did remind me of a post I saw a few weeks ago about the underwater rivers that still run below Manhattan. These are remnants of the rivers that existed here before it came one of the most densely populated islands in the world. Part of the post describes an amazing map drawn in 1865 by Egbert Viele that superimposes the original waterways and topographic features of Manhattan on the current day street grid. Apparently this map is still used to this day to predict potential issues for major building projects in Manhattan (high res version here).

At our site on 16th street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, you can see that there were no waterways. However, a river did appear to start just down the block on the corner of 16th and Sixth. The river merges with another small stream that ran right past the building I grew up on 19th and Broadway and runs through the village into the Hudson River.

Detail of the Viele map of Manhattan