Two Hundred and Fifty Plus, 1

Time for a new, short-lived series of posts! Time to steal an idea! I’m going to assuage my guilt over this blatant theft by giving credit in each post of the series: Beth Acly, principal of Cirrus Structural Engineering, has been reposting a series credited to her firm on LinkedIn called “Witnessing the Revolution,” in which they describe various buildings that were constructed before 1776. In other words, buildings that are older than the United States and, as they say, “Still standing. Still telling the story.” Given Cirrus’s location in central Connecticut, the buildings identified are all in southern New England. In order to show some respect for Cirrus’s work, I’m going to do the same but focus on buildings in and around New York City. There’s actually a problem with looking for very old buildings in NYC: we have a tendency here to eat our own. The demolition of the past is most obvious in lower Manhattan: our office, at Broad and Stone Streets, is in the oldest part of the…