Old Structures Engineering

December of 1901 at the construction the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building.” At the beginning of the month, the steel skeleton, the concrete floor slabs, and the heavy masonry facade were all simultaneously in progress. The 55th Street (north) side: And the Fifth Avenue (west) side: I mentioned in the last part of this series how out-of-scale the building was with its neighbors, rowhouses on Fifth and more-pretentious single houses on 55th. Obviously that disparity only…

The attic of an early 1900s church tower, with plaster-on-expanded-metal-lath partitions around the structural frame: Nice column built up of four angles and web plate. See that bare cable next to the flange on the left? That’s part of a lightning-arrestor system. Church towers badly needed those when they were built of wood or masonry, to carry the massive change from a lightning hit down to ground. Without the system, a hit would either blow the tower up or set fire to it. But here’s the…

The north side of the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge: From the cable anchorage to the end, most of the roadway is carried on this masonry arcade, with steel bridges at the streets. John Roebling’s original idea, back when the bridge was a private company, was to rent the vaults as warehsoue space. I don’t know if that ever happened. Some were used by the city government for dead storage, although I believe they’re now all empty.[1] So the granite arcade is original as are the brick…

Brooklyn, by far the biggest city or town on Long Island in the mid-1800s, had a water problem as severe as New York’s. The 1840s Croton aqueduct took care of New York’s need for fresh water with a supply from further north, up the Hudson River, while in the 1850s Brooklyn built a system supplied by streams and lakes on the island. Part of the system was a distributing reservoir in Queens, just past the border of Kings County, where Brooklyn is. By 1914, that reservoir was abandoned, as the new…

I was unsure about the title for today’s foray into the cartoon universe…it could have been “It Looked Familiar: City Government.” First, an announcement from our mayor: 17 new public bathrooms. Across all five boroughs. Because you can’t wait — and you shouldn’t have to.— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) 2026-09-16T19:29:21.872Z The critical information: But let’s look at the cover poster: That’s pretty obviously the Empire State Building in the center, but are the other buildings…

An overly zoomed-in view of the Main Building at Ellis Island, completed in 1897: My first reaction is that is a heroic arch, 8 half-bricks deep with limestone bearing and key stones. On second thought, not so much. This is a bearing wall building, with a lot of structural steel used for the interior floors and the roof.[1] There’s also a lot of steel in the exterior walls: the openings have loose lintels made of multiple I-beams through the thickness of the wall. There is a heavy steel lintel…

From 1906 or so, a postcard of “Promenade in Central Park”: And the back side: A thought that has been running around in my head for more than 35 years – one that is neither original to me nor particularly deep, but worth reminding myself of – is that we don’t care about buildings because they have inherent value. They have value because we care about them. Buildings are not alive, have no feelings, have no thoughts, and do not matter except for how we interact with them. This includes new…

More construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building.” In late November 1901, the building was moving along, with the steel skeleton, what appear to be concrete floor slabs, and the heavy masonry facade all simultaneously in progress. First, the 55th Street (north) side: The stone veneer of the facade is complete to the top of the second floor, and is a good story and a half above the heavy-timber sidewalk shed. The riveted steel frame, with its built-up box…

When you start seeing big solar arrays on random rooftops in Brooklyn, solar is mainstream.

View of a set-back roof at the second floor level of an Upper West Side apartment house: The low parapet on the left, with the fence, is at a side lot line. The short wall in the distance (with the two air-conditioners and exuberant planters) and the wall on the right belong to the same building as the roof I was standing on. While this is a nice apartment house, it was classified as a tenement when built in the 1910s, and as a New Law tenement it needed light courts. But needing a place to put…

Anything I have to say is better said here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puPw6WajxQo For more information: Engineers at Ground Zero.

More construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel under its temporary name “the Astor Building.” Once the steel framing of the typical floors got going, it went fast. Here’s November 5, 1901, with the heavy-timber sidewalk shed almost complete and floor beams being erected at the 5th floor: The cylinder on top of the sidewalk on the 55th Street side, visible in the second photo looking at the Fifth Avenue side, is, I believe, the boiler of a steam engine, probably being used to power the…

From the New York Public Library’s postcard collection. First, a nice photo from 1906 of the entrance to Belvedere Castle in Central Park from the terrace: I’m not sure when the “Observatory” name fell out of use, but it was quite some time ago. Next, a slightly blurry, longer view from 1905: And finally, a colorized version of the second picture, listed as from between 1905 and 1914: The colorized postcards are fascinating. They were hand-painted over the photos, which is why the colors seem a…

More construction photos of the St. Regis Hotel under its temporary name “the Astor Building.” Keep in mind that this is the corner of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, an area that had been partially developed in the fifteen years prior to these photos as a high-end residential neighborhood, with some mansions along Fifth and smaller individual houses and rowhouses on Fifth and on the side streets, particularly on the east side of the avenue, on the blocks towards Madison Avenue. Commerce got here…

The Tobacco Workers’ wagon passes in front of the camera during the 1887 Labor Day parade at Union Square: We’re looking west across the north end of the square – the only recognizable landmark is the 1881 Century Building on the far right. You have to look at the left-hand picture to see it: stereoscopes create their three-dimensional image by combining two pictures from slightly different angles, and Century is almost entirely out of frame in the right-hand picture.

Apparently the thing was a vaulted coffered ceiling. The Equitable Life Assurance Building at 120 Broadway, 1915, where the lobby runs through the block from Broadway to Nassau Street: And two terrible views of our lobby at 90 Broad Street, 1931, one with a bonus Peppa Pig balloon:

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.