Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1903. Journal digs deep to build new foundation

The front page of The Providence Journal did not have a single news story on May 11, 1903, just architectural renderings of the new building The Journal had begun erecting for itself near City Hall, with a small block of explanatory text.

The drawings showed a graceful three-story building in the Italian Renaissance style, with fancy stone columns, intricate stone carvings around windows and doors and lots of glass.

But the true marvel of the building could not be seen in the drawings that filled the front page. The part that really begged to be seen was below ground, in the 27-foot-deep basement.

The Journal had decided to put all the heavy machinery below ground: the coal-fired boilers that would generate steam, the steam engines that would turn electrical generators and brand-new R. Hoe & Co. presses able to print 48,000 newspapers an hour.

Digging that deep presented problems. The site had once been a salt marsh, if not open water, and engineers, no matter how deeply they drilled, could not find bedrock, just soft and peculiarly treacherous mud.

More than 800 piles had to be driven into the mud. On several occasions, workmen sank past their knees and had to be rescued with derricks, often being hoisted right out of their boots. The Journal at the time described the basement as a "concrete boat," supported entirely by the upward pressure of the water and the friction of the mud on the piles. Nothing solid supported the foundation on which rested a 10,000-ton building.

Work began in December 1902, when old wooden buildings were removed from the site. Before the basement could be excavated, workers had to install a coffer dam around the site, essentially a big wooden bathtub that would hold back the soil and water from adjacent parcels, protecting workers and preventing neighboring buildings from collapse.

Digging of the basement started April 12, 1903. Workmen found old coins. At 12 feet below street level, well below the cellars of the buildings that had been removed, they discovered a living peat bog. Eight feet below that, they found a perfectly preserved ancient tree trunk, thought to be locust wood.

Journal files

In 1905, The Journal opened a new building adjacent to its old headquarters along Eddy Street near City Hall. The old building was torn down and the new building extended.

When the building opened on June 18, 1905, work was only half done. The new building had been built next to The Journal's old building, which was called the Fletcher Building and ran along Eddy Street on the block next to City Hall, between Fulton and Westminster Streets. The Journal had moved into the five-story building in 1889. After the new building opened in 1905, the Fletcher Building was torn down and the new building was extended all the way to Eddy Street.

In 1955, two decades after The Journal had abandoned the building, new owners hacked away the columns and stone carvings to wrap the building in modernist aquamarine aluminum siding. In 1984, banker Joseph Mollicone Jr. and developer Joseph M. Cerilli came to the Old Journal Building's rescue, spending $6.8 million to remove the siding and restore the ornate stone work. In 2004, the building is mostly vacant.