The Construction Site

Re-Creating The Construction Site on 48th st. and Braodway, Times Square

I think it was when they first tore down the building at 1100 Broadway that I decided I wanted this chapter to take place right around the corner from me. It was difficult to get the pictures that I needed to study the interior, though. Times Square is heavily guarded these days due to the terrorist attacks (No pun intended, really) and so the pictures I took were done, How should I say? Very secretively!

For instance, each morning as I would get my cup of coffee on the way to work I would get my camera ready and without stopping or looking in the direction of the construction site, begin snapping pictures randomly. I am not kidding. The last thing I wanted was the NYC Anti Terror squad with their Swat gear and M-16A2s questioning me on the sidewalk. And it is because of this that I do not have too many shots that I would share here because most are very blurry.

The construction sight was actually easy on the imagination but pretty hard on the wallet. The first thing that hurt was the Play Mobile Construction sight play sets that gave me all of the little details that filled the construction site, like the porta-poties, danger cones, scaffolding, and yes, THE CRANE! Oh I love that crane.

The rest was pretty easy and a lot of it just came right from the hardware store and hobby shop, like

Supplies

2 bags of Play sand (fine grain)
14 garden style concrete blocks
6 wooden dowels (all cut into three pieces of equal length)
Dollhouse shingle style wood bags
4 planks of thin model style wood
A large tarp of heavy gauge plastic sheet


Tools

Wood glue
Grey and blue spray paint
Saw

This is so simple its disgusting. Lay down your plastic sheet. Please the concrete blocks into a square pattern leaving an empty space in the center of about 23 square feet. Pour sand into the empty section.


Paint three pieces of your model wood blue, cut the forth piece into three equal sections and paint them gray along with your wooden dowels that you also cut into three equal sections each. Once dry glue the dowels (One to each corner) to the gray painted wood, you will basically have three four legged gray (small) tables. You can put these together any way you like; you can see how I did it.

The wood that was painted blue is used to line the outside rim of the concrete pieces that form the perimeter of the construction site. Take the Dollhouse shingle wood and line the inside of the concrete block perimeter as well as building yourself some planks by basically taking three pieces of the Dollhouse wood and lying them down parallel to each other, then take a forth piece and cut it (This wood is thin enough to cut) into three pieces, glue these pieces to the bottom of the three parallel pieces to hold them together and provide support. Make as many of these as your heart is content with. Use them as walkways, random wood lying around, whatever.

All that is really left to do is place your Playschool items around the site, cones, ladders, scaffolding, Porta-poties, THE CRANE!.

Click to view this Diorama in Chapter 4: Target Pitfall