The coal bin is gone. A test hole is now drilled in the wall of the library basement. Mason Wayne Morris found that when they created the stucco Wing addition, they opened the foundation of the schoolhouse and poured it full of concrete. These are two separated buildings sandwiched together and the Wing was built to be fireproof. By filling the foundation voids with concrete that were likely trying to reinforce that fireproof status but boy, is it going to make for a long haul to cut a door through the two basements to join them. We need that cut so that the HVAC system for the basement can be one zone and not two and to allow staff to move through the collections easily – rather than having to go up one flight, over, and down another flight to get to the rest of the collections.
And as you can see by the removal of the ashbin – I had shared photographs of it in an earlier post – they did a very neat job!
JNLF
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