Old Structures Engineering

I was minding my own business in Noho when this building forced me to look at it: Completed in 1883, it was not actually the Mercantile Exchange, which was about a mile away, but apparently was back-office and sales space for the exchange. Physically, it’s a building with a cast-iron front facade, brick side and rear walls and (probably) wood-joist floors, just like most cast-iron-front commercial buildings in lower Manhattan, but the ornament on the facade is maybe unique. Since the building…

Yet another trip down a rabbit hole courtesy of a random trip to a National Park Service web page: 1906 Earthquake Cottages. Just a reminder: as awful as that earthquake was, a lot of the worst damage to smaller buildings – wood-framed houses, for example – came from the fires that followed the quake. A lot of people were temporarily without housing in a city where every building had to be treated as potentially dangerous. Enter the cottages, miniature houses built of 2xs and plank that could…

When I started my research into old skyscrapers, I faced a chicken-and-egg problem. What is a skyscraper? is one of the questions that I was attempting to answer with data about the physical structure of actual buildings, but I didn’t have that data when I started, as that was the point of the research. The only way to deal with a knot like that is to make a decision and later go back and fix it (meaning redoing research as needed) if the early decision turned out to be wrong. My decision was…

An apartment house in Greenwich Village, looking rather outer-boroughish: Something funny at the corner…oh, it’s a whole bunch of cell phone antennas painted to be look brick: The population density in Manhattan means a lot of cell antennas are needed. Given the lack of interest on the part of the phone companies to spend money unnecessarily, the two choices seem to be this kind of fake facade, or a crown of white rectangles on the roof.

Batman strikes a pose with a skyscraper in the background: I was walking down Lexington Avenue and thought to myself “Chrysler looks better than usual from this angle”:

The fact that I have to explain what this is would have astonished New Yorkers of the late nineteenth century. The picture is taken in a stairwell – you can see the sloped wainscoting along the stair on the left. And this thing is the base of a gas lamp. It’s missing the enclosure, which would likely have been a small glass cylinder (or something similar) on the far left end/ The thing that looks like a pipe is a pipe, which was filled with coal gas, and the bottom-most projection is the…

From 1908, “Lower Manhattan from Governors Island – The City of Skyscrapers – Made possible by the development of the Otis Elevator.” I wonder who could possibly have paid for this card to be printed? Obviously, yes, safe elevators were necessary for the development of tall buildings, but I feel safe in saying that if Elisha Otis had not invented and popularized a safety elevator someone else would have. The state of tall buildings in lower Manhattan is well illustrated: the land here is pretty…

A minor example of a common trail for building research: Starting with a Wurts Brothers photo of a street… Note the stone slab sidewalk on the right. The old cars are nice, but I know nothing about cars. The writing at the bottom is legible if you’re patient (or, like me, can pretend to be patient): “Christ P.E. Church N.W. Cor 71st St @ Broadway. N.Y.C. Looking West at section of street in front of Easterly Entrance to Church. Oct 13 [or maybe 18] 1925. 11-25. AM”. Okay, the first thing I did…

This series ends here – neither with a bang nor a whimper – at the end of the sequence of construction photos. As of the last post, construction at the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building,” had proceeded at the end of March 1902 as far as the topping out of the structure and enclosure of the main facades, up to the bottom of the mansard roof. April 10, 1902: The facade below the mansard roof looks done, except for the boarded-up windows. There’s a fine collection of small…

Various streets in the outer boroughs used to be roads for long-distance (as defined in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries) travel, usually named for the town, or former town, at the further end. Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn was the road to Flushing; Jamaica Avenue in Queens was the road to Jamaica. There were two similar roads in Manhattan, but one was wiped off the map and the other has a name that doesn’t fit the pattern. The remaining one is, of course, Broadway north of Union Square,…

The east side of Broadway, just above Houston Street: On the right, an obviously modern building. On the left, a cast-iron facade well within the norms on the late nineteenth century. In between, a surprisingly good ashlar stone facade, painted a bit peculiarly…nope. That’s a cast iron facade from 1859, designed by John Snook and developed by (and presumably cast by) Daniel Badger. That early on, the cast-iron designers and builders were still directly imitating stone. In the black and white of…

A random two-story commercial building in Queens, with a big chimney for its boiler flue: Closer: It took amazingly little masonry detail – amazingly little effort – to make that chimney look good.

A name that you don’t hear used much anymore is “The Great White Way” for the showy part of Broadway, now at Times Square. It is a name that is unfortunately prone to an obvious but incorrect reading, and it’s hard to correct that reading because the original meaning is gone. First, a pair of postcards: The daytime view is from 1913 or so, the night view from 1917. Note that during those four years the Hotel Marlborough added a lit vertical sign on its street facade. Also note that, in the…

I’ve been mining the digital collections of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress for over ten years for dramatic pictures of NYC. Here’s one you won’t find in a library, taken by Tim Michiels: I have not changed anything from the way Tim’s phone recorded the view (looking south along Central Park West). The air-quality index was good the last few days, so I think that glow was “golden hour” sunset rather than pollution; there’s either a bit of fisheye distortion going on, or…

The New York Times, like every newspaper in the city founded before 1900, started downtown. After renting space for its first few years, the paper built the old 41 Park Row in 1858, then reconfigured and expanded that building (to the point where it was effective rebuilt) at the same site and address in 1889. The rebuilt 41 Park Row is still there and is now landmarked, but the Times was only there for a few years. After a few years, the paper was again looking for more space, and ended up at…

The combination of scaffold and netting makes it look like the picture is slightly out of focus. This is Building T in 2019. I had no intention of taking an arty photo, but sometimes the subject speaks for itself.

March 1902 saw the gradual completion of the mansard roof framing and the masonry facades of the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building.” The following three pairs of photos, from March 4, 18, and 26, show the Fifth Avenue (west) and 55th Street (north) sides. Note that the windows were being temporarily boarded in, presumably to allow interi

You get the best geometric views from old fashioned stairs with wells. Fans of Escher and Piranesi, unite.

A chunk of what is now called east Midtown, in 1867: This was officially part of the city, but the opening of the numbered street grid had created more buildable lots than were needed, so development was, as can be readily seen, patchy. There is very little on this map that is recognizable or still present. I’ll flag those things that are, everything else is gone. Reservoir Square at the lower left, is still there and now called Bryant Park. The big distribution reservoir next to it is the site…

I don’t think I’ve used this picture before. When we say New York’s “Pennsylvania Station was demolished in the 1960s” we’re obviously lying/exaggerating/obscuring. Penn Station is there! It serves half a million passengers every work day! So, what do we mean by “Penn Station”? There are the platforms for the long-distance and commuter-rail trains coming from east and west (and, as of 1991, some from the north). Those are still there, as built between 1900 and 1910, and hardly changed in…

I really intended to post this when it was the correct week (I don’t remember the day)…four weeks ago…but in any case last month marks the 50th anniversary of me starting to commute by subway, in 7th grade. At first it was simply the 7 train to Grand Central for school in east Midtown; the following year, it was the 7 to Grand Central, change to the 6, and head to the Upper East Side. To put 50 years of commuting (and now, when I walk to work, travel for work) by subway into perspective, the…

I read Rain Noe’s article “An Architectural-Scale Kintsugi Project” with some interest. Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with joints that deliberately contrast against the base material in appearance, leaving visible scars in the repair. Repair work (right) on Mishima ware hakeme-type tea bowl with kintsugi gold lacquer, 16th century, by Daderot Noe is using the term for a proposal to repair a badly damaged 257-year-old house in Virginia. It seems from his descrip

I’m mildly surprised that I’ve only written about two of the ghost subway stations – Worth Street and the famous City Hall Station. (I’ve written about discontinued lines, but that’s not quite the same thing as a now-unused station that trains pass every hour of every day.) Today’s topic is not a ghost station since it was never built – it was an idea that was rejected, twice, and is now probably moot. Most mass transit system have a few heavily travelled trunk lines in the center of the city…

The beginning of 1902 saw the frame of the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building,” reach its full height in two stages. On January 21, the frame for the main block of the building had reached its full height, although there were no visual cues to that fact. The Fifth Avenue (west) side: The 55th Street (north) side: Unlike a couple of months earlier, the frame, the heavy masonry walls, and the concrete floors were all rising more or less in sync, suggesting that the earlier…

So, it’s raining all day. And it rained all day yesterday. But the sky looked really pretty on Friday just before the rain started. My view of the sunset from lower Manhattan Marie’s view from a train in Norwalk, with bonus rainbow: Ellie’s view from a train in Stamford: And Kate’s view on the East Side:

In honor of the nor’easter that yesterday, today, and tomorrow will give NYC about 2 inches of rain, here’s a few pictures of another storm: snow on December 16, 2020: The beginning of the snowfall in Battery Park. Heavy snow fall across the World Trade Center site. The next day, wet snow in the trees.

Central Park has always had various forms of food concessions, ranging from high to low. Most people are aware of Tavern on the Green, a pricey restaurant, on the west side of the park near 68th Street; most people are not aware that the core of its building is the sheepfold for the adjacent Sheep Meadow. After the sheep were forcibly removed from the park in 1934, the building was converted. About the same time, the restaurant called the Central Park Casino, operating out of a converted…

A lesson that structural engineers learn early on is to keep load paths as simple as possible, within the context of the architectural design. Here’s a bad load path: What you’re looking at: the white glazed brick veneer has been removed to expose the steel lintel. The mason was concerned, with good reason, that the unsupported brick above the lintel might shift, so they installed the upper, single 2×4 to carry load from the unsupported veneer to the lintel. And since the lintel end was later…

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street: In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained: Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything…

From before 1916, “Entrance to Central Park at 5th Avenue and 59th Street, New York City”: and the somewhat hyperbolic description on the back: The plaza (for which the Plaza Hotel is named) consists of two roughly equal pieces, north and south of 59th Street. The north half takes a small bite out of the park, the south half cuts off the end of the block between 58th and 59th Streets. In the postcard photo, the south half is missing, with just an open paved area. The memorial fountain dedicated…