Nine Buildings Have Doors Below The Pavement

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Eleven buildings, all civic, all put up between 1857 and 1893, in four American cities. Nine of them have windows or doorways whose sills sit below the pavement outside.

This is true. It is also, in eight of the nine cases, written down in a municipal ordinance, with a date, a budget, and a contractor.

The measurement first, the archive second

We commissioned Marisol Iturbe-Hanley to survey the eleven buildings before anyone went near a records office, and we published her specification in advance so that nobody — including us — could adjust the method after seeing the result.

She measured 214 openings. Of those, 31 sit below present grade, distributed across nine buildings. The deepest is the north elevation of the 1873 customs house in Springfield, where the sill of the lower course is 1.9 metres below the pavement.

Then, and only then, we went to the archives.

What the archives say

Ephraim Coulthard-Bayliss, who was Springfield's city engineer for nineteen years and is now retired and mildly delighted to be asked about this, opened the 1904 regrade files on a table and let our reporter photograph every page.

Between 1890 and 1925, a great many American and European cities raised their street levels, sometimes by two or three metres, and they did it for reasons that were urgent, expensive, and thoroughly minuted. The reason was almost always sewage.

Constance Ferreira-Ludlow, who has written a book about this and did not entirely enjoy being asked to summarise it, put the mechanism plainly:

Seattle did it. Chicago did it, jacking whole blocks up on screws while the shops stayed open. Springfield did it in two phases, in 1904 and 1911, and the ordinances survive with the contractors' names on them.

Eight of the nine buildings with below-grade openings have a file. Date, budget, contractor, complaint letters from shopkeepers about the dust.

The two that do not

Two buildings — a county courthouse annexe of 1868 and a Masonic hall of 1877, both in the same city — have below-grade openings and no file.

Wilbur Nnaji-Strand, the county archivist, has looked four times, once with our reporter standing beside him. His own view is that the 1911 file for that district was never deposited rather than lost, because the deposit register for that year has a gap in the sequence rather than a missing entry.

"People want me to say the file was removed," he said. "I have been an archivist for twenty-six years. Files are not removed. Files are not deposited, by a clerk, on a Friday, in 1911, and then that clerk dies and nobody notices for a century. That is what happens. That is what always happens."

Our surveyor could not core beneath the customs house to establish the depth or composition of the fill, because the city declined the permit. Its stated reason was that it did not want a hole in that pavement. We are reporting that as the reason because it is the reason we were given, and we have no basis to report a different one.

What this survey establishes

That nine of eleven surveyed buildings have openings below present grade; that eight of those nine have a documented municipal explanation involving sewerage and a named contractor; that one does not have a document and one has a gap in a deposit register; and that our surveyor could not establish the fill composition at the deepest of them because she was refused a permit.

An earlier headline on this story used the word "buried". We changed it. "Buried" describes a mechanism. The survey measured a relationship between a sill and a pavement, and the difference between those two sentences is the whole of the discipline.