New York City Center

When the Shriners built their Mecca Temple in 1923, they needed a 92-foot steel beam weighing 65 tons to create an unobstructed auditorium. As the massive girder crept through Midtown on a flatbed truck, more than fifty cast iron manhole covers snapped like tiddly-winks beneath it, engineers feared the whole thing would crash into the subway tunnels below. Two decades later, the cash-strapped Shriners lost the building to back taxes, and Mayor La Guardia saved it from demolition, transforming the Neo-Moorish palace into Manhattan’s first performing arts center for the people.

The beam alone required two barges to cross the Hudson and two derricks to hoist it onto the truck, all so the Shriners could have a ceremonial hall with no columns interrupting the view. It was, by any measure, an absurd amount of engineering for a fraternal organization’s meeting space, and it turned out to be a poor long-term investment. The same building that couldn’t survive on Shriner membership dues thrived once La Guardia stripped away the exclusivity and let ordinary New Yorkers buy a ticket. The New York City Ballet and City Opera both got their start under that manhole-cracking beam, which suggests the girder was engineered for exactly the kind of institution the Shriners never intended to house.