55 Sheridan Street

Right on schedule, the last of the old building comes down in preparation to initiate work on the rear garden area. Respirators everyone! Architect Michelle Kriebel surprised everyone by climbing up to photograph the newly exposed garden space.

After the soils prep / grout injection project completed, Ryan Engineering finished what they’d begun back in November and removed the remaining foundation.  Here’s a particularly impressive pile of foundation rubble:

Even though [as you can see in this next picture] they followed the recommended method of backfilling earth against the neighboring foundation after removing each few feet of the foundation, when they reached the street end of the property line and removed the grade beam, the neighboring foundation moved ever so slightly, causing a hairline crack where their brick wall meets their concrete floor and their front door to drag when opening.

So we stopped work immediately, covered the backfilled earth against continuing monsoons and prepared a foundation shoring plan to ensure no further movement occurred while work on installing plumbing and reinforcing steel for our foundation continued.

We owe these neighbors an incredible debt of gratitude for the understanding, calm and courtesy they brought to this very difficult situation. Under the circumstances, we’d have excused them if they’d been otherwise. But they were terrific and we count ourselves fortunate.

On Saturday morning, 19-Nov-05 the 1916 vintage building previously known as 55 Sheridan came down in a few short hours. Friends and neighbors dropped by to gaze in slack-jawed awe at how a bulldozer can actually improve a neighborhood. Regretably I could not be there to see it or take pictures. If you [or you know someone who] took pictures, I’d sure like to have copies if possible.  Ryan Engineering left the foundation intact as a convenience to the soils grout injection crew that would come in next so their heavy gear could avoid slogging through a sea of mud.