Old Structures Engineering

Annexing the Bronx made perfect sense from the perspective of nineteenth-century New Yorkers. The city of New York was growing northward up Manhattan island and, while it had not yet filled all of the space, the end of that form of expansion was in sight. The semi-rival city of Brooklyn had far more space to expand and, prior to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, discussion of New York and Brooklyn being something other than rivals was rare. The area we call the Bronx, on the other…

From the New York Public Library’s collection of stereoscopic views, “Syndicate and St. Paul Buildings, Highest Office Buildings in the World, New York City.” We’re looking east down Vesey Street, towards Broadway and Park Row. The treed area to the right isn’t a park – that’s the grounds of St. Paul’s Chapel. The low-rise building at the corner of Vesey and Broadway, on the left at the far end of the row, was the Astor House hotel, built in 1834; the low-rise buildings on the north side of…

In my head – and I suspect in most people’s heads – there is a sharp distinction between subways and similar mass transit and other heavy rail. Light rail, particularly street cars running on a shared right-of-way seem like a third different thing. But in reality, the differences get very blurry the longer you look. Boston’s Green Line, for example, is about half subway and half street car. One of the blurry differences concerns branches. On long-distance railroads (including commuter rail)…

The NYC Department of Building has launched a monthly newsletter specifically about the new Existing Building Code: here. They don’t explicitly say, but given that the code goes into effect next July, my guess is that there will be exactly twelve issues of the newsletter, explaining various aspects of the code. The Standard Oil Building, as photographed by Irving Underhill in 1915. The lower building immediately to its left is 32 Broadway, the taller buidling past that is 42 Broadway. The…

We have filled in our fair share of coal chutes. They’re small tunnels into building cellars from the sidewalk, or from areaways adjacent to the front of old buildings, that were used so that coal could be shoveled from a cart or truck to cellar storage without having to be carried. They’ve long since been closed off, usually by having a concrete sidewalk slab placed over the top end, but sometimes the body of the chute leaks and has to be filled solid. Anyway, here’s a surviving cast-iron…

From an indie comic called “Bit Torment” – not really my taste, but that’s just an opinion – a view of the Regency Spire, which houses the World Parliament: From Carol Highsmith, a view of the south facade of the Empire State Building:

I am not going to say that the New York Times is copying my blog posts with “The New York of the Past Is Still Visible Today. You Just Have to Look.” People have been mining New York’s past for fiction, weird history, straight history…stories for a very long time. There’s a good argument to be made that the publication of A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty in 1809 marked the beginning of people consciously treating the city’s history as a…

That’s Max Hubacher’s title for this April 13, 1953 photo: Some mildly conclusive sleuthing: most of the visible company names aren’t rare enough to make searching for business addresses from 70 years ago very easy. The best bet is the building at the corner on the left, which has a compnay that sure looks like “Listokin & Sons.” That company was at 125 Hester Street on the Lower East Side in 1970 and 87 Hester in 1981. If we guess that they liked Hester Street, the building at the northwest…

From 1907, a postcard of “The Block House, Central Park, New York”: The Blockhouse looks like a toy fort, an impression not lessened by having three children standing at the door. It was in fact, quite real when built in 1814, part of a series of similar miniature forts across hilltops that are now in Central and Morningside Parks. At that time the US was at war with Britain, and the British had burned much of Washington and attacked (and been repulsed) at Baltimore. In other words, the fear…

From an industrial building turned offices, a vaulted lobby: The vaults are quite shallow, which tends to increase the horizontal thrust; the vaults have a decently long span as well. The arches separating the vaults are the most heavily loaded elements in the floor structure… Oh yeah: there’s an air vent in the middle of that first arch, in case you had any doubt that this 1910s industrial building in Brooklyn actually has a reinforced-concrete flat-slab frame. I’m not entirely sure why this…

Yesterday, I mentioned the events at the beginning of Covid, six years ago. Today, we go back eight years further, to Hurricane Sandy. We’ve been repairing damage since the storm ended, but we’re not done. Some damage isn’t worth repairing. Sidewalks all over lower Manhattan moved a bit when they were underwater or when the water subsided, or maybe both. That movement is visible mostly where sidewalks abut buildings and I haven’t seen anyone replacing the sidewalks. There have been some major…

From just over six years ago, a view of Battery Park: At the time I took that picture, I thought that section of the park was badly overgrown because maintenance had been cut back or paused with the Covid restrictions. Now, I’m not as certain, but I think that was probably the case. It’s amazing, really, how fast a crisis becomes history.

This series has been highlighting real buildings (and other structures) that end up as backgrounds in comics. Sometimes the artists draw their own instead of copying. With buildings, that’s usually fine; today’s excerpts – from a 1990s Catwoman comic – are not so great. We first see the bridge where the action takes place in this frame: And that’s a doozy. My first thought is that this was based on some vague memory of the Brooklyn Bridge, because there are only two large urban suspension…

I mentioned the Old Field Point Light – a 200-year-old lighthouse on Long Island – earlier this week to discuss its masonry. The technology for the masonry building from 1823 still works fine, but the light portion of lighthouse technology has gone through several generations of improvement since then. The original light was a whale-oil lamp with a glass reflector, which is a fancy mirror. That was replaced in the 1860s with a kerosene lamp and then in the 1930s with an electric lamp. The use…

From 1912, a postcard showing Central Park: Pretty. If you know Central Park a bit, you may be asking “Where’s Swan Bridge?”[1] If you know Central Park well, you may be saying “There is no Swan Bridge.”[2] And if you know the park extremely well, you’re saying “That’s Bow Bridge.”[3] Which it is. Apparently, it was sometimes called Swan Bridge in the early 1900s. Any way, the title of this blog post does not refer to the front of the postcard, but rather the back of the specific card that the…

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…