firm's senior partners had been noncommittal about participating in the competition, though they named junior partner William Mitchell Kendall as the principal architect of the submission. The firm submitted plans for a building to the New York City Department of Buildings in October 1908. The city had initially intended to erect the Manhattan Municipal Building on a plot immediately to the south of the current site, bounded by Park Row, the Brooklyn Bridge, and North William Street. The final plan, however, called for the building to be located between Park Row, Centre Street, and Duane Street, with Chambers Street running under the Municipal Building's center. Construction By late 1908, the site was being cleared. Bids for foundation work were opened in December 1908, with the contract being awarded to the J. H. Gray Company. However, the original building plans were rejected by the city's buildings superintendent the same month because he felt that the underlying layer of soil and sand was not strong enough to carry the building. This resulted in delays in the construction of the proposed Brooklyn loop line under the building. Ultimately, the Foundation Company was contracted to dig the foundation with caissons under a very high air pressure of . Work was done in 20 shifts of five men working for forty minutes each day; only two workers developed decompression sickness and neither of them died. In a January 1909 speech, McClellan praised the project as "one of the most important projects the City has ever undertaken". At the time, he predicted that the building would cost $8 million. Work on the Municipal Building officially started on July 17, 1909. One observer predicted that the building's construction would result in an increase in real-estate values, similar to what the Flatiron Building had done for the Flatiron District. Foundation work was completed in October 1909, and revised building plans were approved by the Board of Estimate that November. Bids for the construction of the superstructure were opened on December 21, but an injunction against the awarding of the contract was placed less than an hour after the bidding process started, after a lawsuit was filed over the fireproofing material that was supposed to be used in the building. Furthermore, the presence of the sand posed issues for the superstructure, though McClellan said that he believed it was safe to build on sand. The building's cornerstone was laid