Old Structures Engineering

Too narrow to be an alley, too wide to be a seismic gap.

Art Nouveau, as an architectural style, is quite rare in New York, which is odd if you think about it. The style was popular in the 1890s and up to World War I, which is a period when NYC had an enormous building boom. You’d expect some link there. Instead, you have to search for any examples at all. I’m sure there’s a rational reason – or reasons – but maybe the answer is as simple as architectural styles are styles and so vary by society, by location, by time, and so on. Maybe developers and…

We1 are pleased to announce that the Structural Engineers Association of New York has made it official: Donald Friedman is now an Honorary Member. The award comes as SEAoNY celebrates its 30th anniversary—which is particularly appropriate since Don was one of the organization’s founding board members. In announcing the award, SEAoNY highlighted Don’s longstanding devotion to structural engineering and to SEAoNY, as well as his extensive research and writing on the structural engineering of…

On a regular basis, I walk past the building at 111 Cedar Street/112 Trinity Place/108 Liberty Street, which no one ever thinks about unless they’re looking for Burger King. Here’s streetview of the Liberty Steet facade: According to the Certificate of Occupancy, the top two floors are vacant and the windowless third floor is back-of-house space for the restaurant. So, today, the building and Burger King are one and the same. Here’s the photo I took that got me thinking about the past of the…

Keeping on with the construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel under its temporary name “the Astor Building”… Unlike my previous dive into the construction photos of the Equitable Trust Building on Broad Street, the main sequence photos here (which are numbered and dated) begin with the superstructure steel being erected. There are two foundation photos in the scrapbook digitized by the New York Public Library, and they offer some hints but not a full picture. The first photo is almost…

Another set of construction photos to look at, starting with a mystery. Here’s photo 22 in the sequence, from August 13, 1902: The title of the photo, and all the photos in this book, is “The Astor Building,” which raises the question: which Astor Building? The Astor family built a lot of big buildings in Manhattan over the years, and a fair percentage were named after themselves. This is obviously (because of the date) neither the Waldorf or the Astoria wings of the Waldorf-Astoria; it’s far…

Kate Kane[1], AKA Batwoman, goes for a walk and some errands.[2]: Looking south on William Street, in Street View, with 62 William directly above the W. B. Mason truck: Pure dumb luck that I recognized this one. Bruce Wayne’s cousin. So his mother was Martha Kane Wayne, which would make me feel sorry for her even if she wasn’t murdered in an alley.↩︎ It’s actually not Kate, it’s her crazy twin sister thinking that she’s Kate…it’s a whole big deal…↩︎

From a December late afternoon in 2019, a cruise ship heading down the Hudson: A side comment: the fog makes the Jersey City skyline almost romantic. Supposedly I’m blogging about the built environment, and occasionally people have asked why I discuss ships at all. The short answer is that the only ordinary objects that can compete with big buildings for physical complexity are large ships. The ship in the picture has roughly the same volume of enclosed space, has about the same number of…

From Max Hubacher, January 11, 1952, “Old red brick house in downtown Brooklyn, L.I., on the site a park is planned. In background the Manhattan Bridge.” It’s amazing that it could be so hard to place a photo taken in downtown Brooklyn within living memory, but it is. The obvious location is the stretch of park between Cadman Plaza West (formerly Fulton Street) and Cadman Plaza East (formerly Washington Street) between Brooklyn Borough Hall and the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. Technically,…

From 1914, a postcard misnamed “Hudson Terminal Building.” It’s misnamed because those are two buildings, each of which had deep light courts on their north and south sides, making them look from many angles like four buildings. Here’s a 1916 map: The pretty curved title “Hudson & Manhattan R. R. Terminal” refers to the train tracks and platforms below, in what is now the PATH train World Trade Center station. The Fulton Building is the north H&M terminal building, and the smaller of the two:…

Two boot scrapers on the same block. First, a fairly ordinary wrought-iron scraper next to an ornate cast-iron newel post: This is quite similar to the last scraper, except for the boring (in my opinion) curved bar over the top of the foot opening. I like the figured lower edge of the scraper blade. The presence of the areaway fence on the right raises an unpleasant point: after you’ve scraped mud (or less pleasant forms of ooze) off the sole of your shoe, where does it go? In this case, it…

Continuing yesterday‘s thought for a bit, here’s a Wurts Brothers photo from the early 1920s, showing the intersection of Madison Avenue and 24th Street, taken from Madison Square Park. The building on the right that runs past the right and top edges of the photo is the Met Life Tower, the record-breaking skyscraper. The building centered in the view is an annex building that was torn down around 1928 for the construction of the Met Life North Building that covers the entire block from Madison…

…in postcard form! The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company decided in 1892 to move uptown, to Madison Square. The new company headquarters was a building at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 23rd Street. Business was good, and expansion was necessary, and over the following 35 years the company assembled a group of buildings that covered the entire block between 23rd and 24th Streets, Madison and Park Avenue South, and then the next block to the north between 24th and 25th Streets. Two…

…you find the perfect angle for a photograph. Chrysler, September 20, 2019: In 1986, I assembled a cardboard model of this building, about three feet high. It’s served my household ever since. Despite temptation, I have never built an alter to sacrifice a pigeon to it.

I’ve talked more than once about the Reuse Reduce Recycle mantra and how it relates to our work. Here’s a very small, but not negligible, example: That’s from 2017, right about the time we moved to our current office. (The carpet is unworn! The paint is so clean!) It’s a tanker table, used, like almost all the tables and desks (and some chairs) in the office. This one had just arrived and needed some work: cleaning the rust off the top and tightening the bolts holding the legs. The thing about…

During an apartment renovation in a converted 1860s loft building, a view of one of the cast-iron columns that makes up the front facade, as seen from inside: As is typical of these buildings, there’s a column between every pair of windows, so the iron makes up a grid of about 5 feet spacing horizontally and about 10 feet vertically (between floors). The shaft of that column – the 3/4 round and the engaged rectangular pier behind it – is one piece; the moldings and base plinth are separate,…

The kind of construction-sequence photos that I showed a while back for 15 Broad Street exist for other buildings and, crucially, for other building types. The following photo sequence is an example for the George Blumenthal house at 50 East 70th Street. “House” is a bit understated: Blumenthal bought part of the former site of the Union Theological Seminary after that institution moved uptown to Morningside Heights. UTS had formerly been on the west side of Park Avenue between 69th and 70th…

The northwest corner of North 6th Street and Berry Street in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) in 1940: The four-story building on the left is 111 North 6th, “Jersey Hogs Pork Products” is 115 North 6th, and the building between (the second fire-escape from the corner) is 113 North 6th. Here’s a better view of 111 which was a wood-framed building with wood clapboard siding. Looking at the 1916 fire map for the area, that kind of construction (in yellow) was common: Those buildings have been demolished,…

From the 1930s, postcard nostalgia about the “days of the Square Rigger”: “Stokes” in this case is Isaac Newtown Phelps Stokes, who wrote the definitive book, in six volumes, on the physical and visual history of New York City up to the early twentieth century: The iconography of Manhattan Island. The Stokes Collection is, at least in part, the material that I.N.P. gathered during his research. The ships on the left are tied up at the South Street piers south of Maiden Lane, and are a mix of…

This is pretty far afield for me, but it concerns the built environment, so close enough. Another old photo, from a snowy, icy day in 2019: That’s the side of the front facade of Albany City Hall (the front facade is on the left), with a pair of plaques from 1897 and 1930 (the building is from 1883). Note that the upper 1897 plaque was “Erected in the mayoralty of John Boyd Thatcher” and the lower 1930 plaque was “Erected in the mayoralty of John Boyd Thatcher 2nd”, JBT’s nephew. The lower…

More old photos: from Newark Airport in 2019, looking northeast (on the left) and east (on the right): A close-up on the horizon: The cluster of building on the right is lower Manhattan, with One World Trade Center as the tallest tower. The cluster on the left is midtown, with the Empire State Building to the right of the right-tilted crane and Billionaire’s Row around the candy-striped whatever that is. For reference, 1WTC is about ten miles in a straight line from where I was standing, and…

Fireworks over the East River as seen from Battery Park City: Tastes vary, but I find this more interesting than fireworks up in a clear sky.

Circa 1910, a postcard of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Morningside Heights: There’s only one problem: that’s not what the cathedral looked like then or looks like now. The biggest difference is that the crossing tower was never started. There’s a Guastavino dome at the crossing serving as a “temporary” roof…built 123 years ago, now part of the landmarks designation, and still not covered by the big tower. The front (west) towers are not there either, although the south tower was…

From 2018, a nasty surprise after the ceiling was removed: More specifically, the gypsum board ceiling that had been put in place below the original plaster was removed, exposing the plaster, and the failure of the plaster, and the failure of the bottom of the cinder-concrete slab, and the failure of much of the wire-mesh reinforcing. The short version: the roof terrace above leaked, and the rusting mesh spalled the slab and plaster. Obviously installing a new gypsum-board ceiling had solved…

I let this series languish for a while… The stoop of an 1825 rowhouse, with a simple wrought-iron handrail: The newel post is, of course, cast iron, but the rest of the rail is wrought iron. If you look carefully at the stone steps, you can see that the part of each step from the handrail embedments to the near edge is darker colored than the body of the step. This is presumably a series of repairs to the edge, probably for damage from rusting of the embedded iron ends. The iron rods are a…

More evident alterations at an old subway station, similar to one I discussed a couple of years ago. A view of the westbound-platform roof at the Kosciuszko Street station on the J train: (I’ve redacted a few passers-by.) There’s a lot going, only some of which is germane. The line is three tracks here, with the express running in the direction of the rush, and we see the eastbound platform on the far side. The green-painted material is a series of cantilevered steel “bents”, with the base of…

Max Hubacher, on December 21, 1954, titled this photo “New York City: Third Avenue Elevated”: And, sure enough, there’s the el over Third Avenue on the right. The small park being enjoyed only by pigeons is Cooper Square, where (if you are heading south to north) the Bowery splits into Third Avenue (on its proper line) and Fourth Avenue (on a temporary diagonal that runs up to Union Square, where it straightens out). A large chunk of the Third Avenue el’s tracks south of 7th Street were over…

The “valley of ashes” as portrayed in a graphic-novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby: A pile of coal ash in the dump created in the swamp adjacent to the Flushing River, circa 1920: The site was drained and cleaned up for the 1939-40 World’s Fair, and has been the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park ever since. The name is a good reminder that the word “meadow” in a place name in the New York area typically means it used to be a swamp.

In the foreground, the rear facade of the Seventh Regiment Armory, famous for its ornate rooms in front, some designed by a young Louis Tiffany, but also containing a huge arched-truss drill hall that stretched the long-span roof technology of the US in 1880. In the background, 432 Park Avenue, the first of the Billionaire’s Row supertall buildings, and (I’m pretty sure) the first building in the US with a height-to-base ratio of 15. I was on Lexington Avenue for a site visit and looked up at a…

From “1922 – 1940” (according to the New York Public Library) a postcard of “Bryant Park in 1853”: Except, of course, it wasn’t Bryant Park then (a) because it wasn’t a park, just vacant land behind the big distribution reservoir located where the NYPL is now and (b) William Cullen Bryant was, in 1853, a late-middle-aged poet and newspaper editor who was well-known but not yet someone you’d name a park after. As is so often true, the postcard image was very low resolution. This 1853 engraving…