Old Structures Engineering

Marie is working (with Tom Fenniman) on the Old Field Point Light – a lighthouse in, you guessed it, the town of Old Field, New York. It’s among the older lighthouses we’ve worked on, with the base building over two hundred years old. (The light itself is newer…more on that in a future post.) Marie took this picture on a recent site visit: As Marie noted (when she posted the picture on our internal “Beautiful Buildings” Slack channel) the arched window and door lintels are each a single piece…

Two photos from Max Hubacher. First, from January 26, 1956, “View of lower Manhattan as seen from Brooklyn Bridge on a dreary winter day”: Second, a year earlier on February 2, 1955, “Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn side) on a cold, dreary winter day”: I’d say that he gives the impression of simply not liking the winter, except that the collection contains a lot of photos that prove he was out with his camera in the winter. Seasonal Affective Disorder was not yet known as such in the 50s, although…

I wrote about this small bridge in the Boston Public Garden seven years ago, when I took these pictures, but it turns out I have more to say about it. It’s a wrought-iron chain suspension bridge, constructed in 1867 with a wood deck and altered in 1921 with steel beams an a concrete deck. The modern deck beams, of course, could have easily been made strong enough to carry the load without the chains. And for all I know, they may be. I suspect that the original design had a “live” deck that…

The Highrise Campsite by Willem De Haan is a clever idea. By using elements of construction scaffold, he was able to create a compact five-tier place for tents and space for living. I just have one question: since the tents create sail area that catches the wind, and the structure is significantly taller than it is wide, what holds down the windward side in conditions other than dead calm? Photo by Kristel Hayes on Unsplash

Pamela Isley, otherwise known as Poison Ivy, leaves a courthouse in Gotham City: H. H. Richardson’s Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh: Photo by Jamie Stillman, via the Society of Architectural Historians “Archipedia.” I didn’t immediately identify the building when I saw the comic, but I immediately identified the architect. Richardson had what most architects want: a style so personal that people could copy it but never quite equal it.

Two weeks ago, Aqueduct Racetrack closed permanently. If you are not interested in horse racing – and the sport has declined precipitously from its peak before World War II – it was possible to live in New York and not know that Aqueduct existed. Its location in southern Queens is out of the way unless you’re heading to JFK airport, the disappearance of Off-Track Betting parlors killed TV coverage of its races, and whatever attention non-fans pay to horse racing here tends to go to the track at…

From “1915-1930”, “Aquarium and fire boat, New York”: The Aquarium is Castle Clinton, buried within a wood and stucco shell (and full of huge glass tanks on several levels). That’s Battery Park to the left, and the seawall with a rather casual chain barrier rather than the serious fence that is there now. The hills in the background on the right are Brooklyn, with buildings lost to the combination of distance and low resolution. The fireboat is either tied up at or just launched from the pier…

New York City has a garbage problem. Not because we produce a lot of garbage, but because of our physical configuration. Manhattan, and nearly all of the area of the other boroughs, was laid out without back alleys. The street layout you see is the street layout you get. Worse, because of long-held habit of building the full width of lots, we don’t have places to put side alleys between buildings.[1] As a result, garbage has traditionally been left at the curb in front of buildings for…

A view of the ground floor os a small industrial building in the Bronx: The building has no cellar, so this is its bottom. The interesting thing here is the design of the column bases, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The floors are wood joists in two bays: spanning between the side walls on the left and right and a line of steel girders down the middle; the columns support the girders. (You can see one of the girder, painted green, just to the left of the big red pipe.) So, if we engage in…

From Max Hubacher’s tour of elevated trains and streetcars, “Lexington Avenue El” from October 13, 1950: If you’re reasonably familiar with NYC’s transit, that sounds very strange. The Lexington Avenue subway was constructed to replace the Third Avenue el. The clarification is simple: this is Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and we’re talking about a completely different street called “Lexington Avenue.” Subway maps are just about always distorted, but let’s start with one, a 1924 map of the…

Sometimes, the Monopoly game that divided up New York’s lots left a small piece of land behind, and you get a strangely-narrow house as a result. This isn’t one of those cases. You’d have to be both very weird and looking to lose money to build a tenement on a lot that is 12 feet, 3 inches (per the city records) across. The reality is still weird but makes more sense: this block got stuck with a strange diagonal property line from some former, pre-street-grid ownership. The narrow-looking…

A photo from 2020, apparently showing an inter-dimensional portal opening up over Kips Bay: Or maybe it’s the fluorescent light fixture behind me, reflected off the window glass.

From a 1915 book titled Engineering Office Systems and Methods, some thoughts on how to design a steel-frame building: My thoughts on the thoughts: No one today would attempt to write a single book that covered every possible topic for a consulting engineering company from the design requirements for a half-dozen building types to how to manage the office budget. One could argue that the world is more complicated now than then, but I’m not really sure how true that is. We have a lot of tools…

There has been a lot of discussion in our office – as there has been everywhere in NYC – about the ongoing issues at 235 East 42nd Street. All the information I have is from the press and therefore is pretty much the same information everyone else has. The silly errors from the early reporting – the live load in an apartment house is less than the live load in an office building, not more; the piece of steel running vertically is a “column,” not a “beam” – are mostly gone, and there have been…

I saw Supergirl over the weekend and found it enjoyable. There’s a flashback scene where Kara meets her cousin Clark for the first time, as she arrives on Earth from the ruins of Krypton. She’s in a spacesuit and he’s in his Superman costume, and she says to herself “Why is he in his underwear?” I realized yesterday why this question resonated with me, beyond the fact that I’ve been wondering about his costume for a very long time. Here’s a picture looking east on Liberty Street from Church…

From around 1910, the Valentine & Sons Publishing Company gives us “Battery Park” as a postcard: It took me a moment to understand what we’re seeing here. The brown building with the strange spire is One Broadway before its extensive 1919 facade makeover. The big white building to its right is the side of the US Customs House, and the low brown building between them (and with a tower sticking up over the Customs House) is the Produce Exchange. The only way to get those buildings lined up like…

From Max Hubacher, March 1950, “Brooklyn Bridge”: We’re looking west from the Manhattan approach, a bit west of the Manhattan anchorage. The Woolworth and Transportation Buildings on the left, and the Municipal Building on the right are still there; many of the foreground buildings, including the World Building with its four-story dome, were demolished not long after. The most interesting thing is the streetcar. Not its presence, but where it is: those are the elevated-train tracks, immediately…

My thanks to whomever shot and posted this footage, probably Mr. Rabinowitz: A $3 @mta.info subway fare and some good Q train timing can buy you one hell of a view of the July 4th fireworks and the Brooklyn Bridge light show!Huge shoutout to the train operator for slow rolling over the Manhattan Bridge and the conductor for announcing it.— Jason Rabinowitz (@airlineflyer.net) 2026-07-05T02:10:26.706Z For reference, 1883:

A partial list… 402 years ago, the first European outpost in our area started. 400 years ago, the town of Nieuw Amsterdam was created. 369 years ago, the Flushing Remonstrance, an early statement of religious tolerance in the North American colonies, was written about five blocks from where my elementary school would be built 291 years later. 362 years ago, geopolitics led to New Amsterdam becoming New York. 250 years ago, the creation of the United States started. 250 years ago, the Great…

Our last pre-revolution building, for the last day before July 4, 2026, is one that just made it before the construction cut-off date of July 4, 1776: 273 Water Street was constructed in 1773. This is a house, built for Joseph Rose, used by him and his family until 1807, and with many owners, uses, and alterations after that. The original house was mostly wood-frame, with a brick front facade and a gable roof. The biggest alteration was after a fire in 1904, when the gable was removed and two…

A long time ago, Brendan Behan said that New York was “a place where you’re least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.” I’m starting to wonder…in the ten years we’ve been on Broad Street, first we had attack of the non-killer bees, and now we had attack of the bear spray, both within a hundred feet of our front door. Also, for a long time, pigs roamed free in the streets of New York as ambulatory garbage disposals. Here’s an 1860 image of Five Points in 1827, and note the fat pig on the lower…

I doubt I’ll ever run out of blog fodder because of what happened with this photo: I’ve walked by 135 Hudson Street many times, but I finally remembered to take a picture. You don’t see something like this every day. The simple facts: it’s a warehouse completed in 1886, facing the St. John’s Park freight terminal of the New York Central Railroad. It’s been converted to apartments and the freight terminal has been converted to the exit plaza from the Holland Tunnel, but the exterior of the…

I’ve mentioned before that our work is usually invisible in completed projects. With a few exceptions you generally can’t even see the portions of a project building that were our responsibility because what you’re seeing is the architectural design work that we enabled but not create. The project I’m mentioning below is typical in that our work is invisible to just about everyone, but it’s not typical in the sense that the final result is being seen by literally millions of people. Between…

The oldest religious building in New York, the Friends Meeting House in Flushing, was originally constructed in 1694, and greatly expanded by 1719. So even the big alteration was some sixty years before the American Revolution. It is a fairly simply wood-frame building and both physically and in its current use would be recognizable to the early-1700s congregants, although I assume the electric lights would surprise them. While we’ve never worked on the building, it makes up a surprisingly…

While I’m playing with that more-than-hundred-year-old management book…how to reproduce drawings: It occurs to me that most people reading this need one or more terms translated or explained: In addition to “drafter,” there used to be a job called “tracer.” Tracers copied pencil drawings or sketches into ink. That was pretty much gone by the time I started work in 1987, but some people in the office still referred to drawings as “tracings.” What everyone, including me, calls “blueprinting” is…

From an early-1900s textbook on managing an architecture or engineering office, an illustration of a daily log book: It looks very familiar. The most foreign thing about it is that all of the office’s drawings are numbered consecutively, so “Work No. 300” might have “Drawing No. 501 and 502.” The most familiar thing about it is “Letters to Contractors and Sundry” except that those are now letters of the electronic kind.

Structural typologies have been around far longer than modern structural engineering. The last pre-1776 building I discussed was a grist mill on Long Island, and, astonishingly, today’s building, a grist mill on Long Island, looks very similar. It’s really not surprising: if I may be excused some personally laughter, one might say that form follows function. In the case of an eighteenth-century grist mill: you need running water, preferably with a drop in elevation, to power the water wheel; a…

From Max Hubacher, February 9, 1951, “Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y.”: That’s the Willamsburg Bank tower in the center, looking lonely. As I’ve discussed before, this was the third-tallest building on the east coast not in Manhattan when it was built, but today, at some 500 feet, it’s not really on anyone’s radar for height. It’s standing so very alone because the bank made a bet that the downtown area of Brooklyn, which had been growing for some time, would continue to grow until it reached…

From 1907 or so, a postcard of “New York. The site for the Tunnel Terminal of the Pennsylvania Railroad 34th. St.” Why would people want a postcard of a construction site? Particularly one with a photo so blurry that someone familiar with the construction of Penn Station (me) can’t figure out exactly what we’re looking at? Answers to both questions: see the post title. Or maybe heavy civil works used to be really popular.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was in construction, and when it was new, there were any number of reports on how incredibly tall it was. To be fair, the bridges towers were the second and third tallest structures in the city when first built, with only the spire of Trinity Church being higher, but the towers are not in the middle of the city, but rather out at the edges of the East River. Here’s a view from a three-story building (the old Hall of Records in City Hall Park) during construction in…