Old Structures Engineering

Sometimes, very old buildings gain glamor as they age. Another of our pre-Revolution projects with John G. Waite Associates, Architects is the Roslyn Grist Mill, an industrial building from the early eighteenth century that has somehow become glamorous over time. 1919 A grist mill grinds grain, and needs a source of power to turn its wheels. At the town of Roslyn, on Long Island, there’s a stream- and spring-fed pond south of the mill (and south of the original line of the road that used to be…

Matt Murdoch, in his day job of being not Daredevil, is at the law school of Empire State University: The NYU law school, as seen from West 4th Street:

As is only fair with a horror movie, I’m not going to give any plot spoilers. To some extent that’s quite easy: like a lot of A24‘s movies, I’m not sure the plot entirely makes sense. But you don’t go see their movies, including this one, for the plot as much for the feel of it, and for individual scenes, and those are both very good. The feel of it, as described below, is based on some Youtube shorts by the director, Kane Parsons, which were in turn based on an existing internet meme. In other…

There are at least 23 memorials of various types to the Union armed forces of the US Civil War in Manhattan alone. (See here, scroll down to New York County.) There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it does tend to obscure the meaning of the war. As a matter of fact, only one of those 23 memorials – the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park – is dedicated to someone other than an officer. Most of the 23 were built between 1890 and 1930, which was an era in New York and the US when…

Ticker tape, as such, has been defunct for more than 50 years. The machines were a form of telegraph connected to printers: since they wasn’t carrying general messages but only a constrained set of letters and numbers in series, a simple printer onto a roll of paper was sufficient. This led to Financial District offices being full of long pieces of narrow paper tape, and offices used to have operable windows… 1888, a political campaign parade, looking west on Wall Street towards Trinity Church.…

Kami was on site and saw some interesting buildings across the street: Every place has a feel to it based on the local architecture and things like signage, street paving, and street furniture. These four small apartment houses don’t feel very much like the Bronx to me – something about the narrow side-courts at the street facades and the chamfered corners… Anyway, they are small (4 or 8 unit) apartment houses built in the early 1900s, and so are technically New Law tenements. Most of the…

From somewhere between 1901 to 1907, a picture of the Sands Street gate to enter the Brooklyn Navy Yard: The purpose of crenelations is to give archers places to hide and to shoot outward. The large ground-floor windows of the two gatehouses suggest that maybe, just maybe, the crenelated towers are for show only. There are towers like that all over New York on old arsenals of various types, and there used to be more. I guess once you’ve decided on an architectural symbol (such as crenelations…

Old houses tend to pile up names, even more so than old buildings in general. An old office building in a downtown area might be known by the names of two companies that owned it, but even then one tends to be dominant in public perception. An old house that is not famous might have been owned for a long time by two or three or four different families, and in historic and preservation literature, they tend to get strung together. That brings us to today’s building older than the United States:…

The word entered common use as a meaningless but Dutch-sounding name, used by Washington Irving in 1809 as a pen-name for his fake history of the New Amsterdam colony. Later in the nineteenth century it came to mean whatever Dutch-ancestry families were in New York as well as whatever remnants – physical, literary, or linguistic – of the Dutch colony had survived into the present. It somehow is also a name for short baggy pants that have tight cuffs below the knee. Since 1946, it has been used…

Looking into the space above the ceiling and below the roof joists in a tenement: The vertical surface past the studs on the left is the back side of a plaster-on-expanded-metal-lath partition; the bottom is the backside of a similar ceiling. There’s a lot of dust – a dust ocean rather than dust bunnies – on top of the ceiling; the black spots on the studs are dirt of some kind. It’s amusing – in a “it gives me coughing fits” kind of way – how difficult it is to tell plaster from dust in this…

Buildings and reputations can change over time. The oldest building in Westchester County, New York, (immediately north of the city, abutting the Bronx) is Philipse Manor Hall in the city of Yonkers. Philipse Manor Hall in 2023, courtesy of ajay_suresh. The cannon on the lawn is ridiculous, but I guess harmless. The original house was constructed in 1682 and enlarged twice in the following 90 years. The Philipse family were loyalists during the Revolutionary War who abandoned the house in 1776…

A nice day in Tribeca, and a couple of old buildings with a shared retail space: Unlike in Soho, further north and generally built up somewhat later, masonry-front buildings are common in Tribeca. The red brick and sandstone of the building on the right is good example. That beautiful rusticated stone on the left deserves a closer look… That is some truly incredibly regular stone work for a mid-1800s industrial buildings. And so perfectly unweathered… Yeah, no, it’s all cast iron, built in…

Max Hubacher, April 9, 1954, has me reliving my childhood with “(Queens, N.Y.) Subway and Manhattan’s skyline.” That was the 7 train in 1954 and still is today, the IRT line running from (then) Times Square to Flushing. All of the line but the far west end is in Queens; all of the line but the Manhattan portion, the first two Queens stations, and the Flushing terminus is elevated. A chunk of the western part of the Queens portion runs over Queens Boulevard on a fancyish viaduct of…

Back to the theme of buildings that are both very old and not old, we’re proud to have been working at Fort Ticonderoga. In order to understand why three different countries wanted this fort you need to think about geography and eighteenth-century technology. There were few roads in the North American colonies once you got away from the east coast, and the relatively small Appalachian Mountains were a serious obstacle to anyone traveling inland. There was (and still is) a relatively easy route…

A new tool for reviewing new technologies, the Seinfeld Test: There has been some discussion in our office about the use of AI. There has not, to date, been any use outside of a couple of experiments. Before I describe the way we see the issues, I should discuss my bias: I am pretty much against the use of generative AI in design, although some lesser forms of machine learning are fine. (I’m not giving up predictive spellcheck any time soon.) I’m not particularly against new technology, but I…

From a site visit in 2019, some steel beams in a former restaurant space that might, just maybe, need to be replaced:

Bad guys, scheming, high up (from Ghost-Spider): Note the tall building with a curved facade facing us, underneath the speech bubble. See the smaller building with masonry walls at its base? That combination, with the new wrapped around the old should be easy to identify… Google Earth, looking south over Fifth Avenue, with all sixty stories of 500 Fifth at the bottom of the frame, the roof of the New York Public Library in the middle, and West 40th Street at the top with, at the left, the 1902…

Fraunces Tavern was originally built in 1719, so if you ignore the massive changes to the building over the years, it’s the oldest extant building in Manhattan, constructed some 95 years after the Dutch arrived. In other words, we have nothing standing from the first quarter of our history. The next-oldest extant building in Manhattan is the Morris-Jumel Mansion uptown, and it was built in 1765. Note that there are older buildings elsewhere in the city – some of which will be discussed in this…

I’m Not Going to Use Profanity Here

Time for a new, short-lived series of posts! Time to steal an idea! I’m going to assuage my guilt over this blatant theft by giving credit in each post of the series: Beth Acly, principal of Cirrus Structural Engineering, has been reposting a series credited to her firm on LinkedIn called “Witnessing the Revolution,” in which they describe various buildings that were constructed before 1776. In other words, buildings that are older than the United States and, as they say, “Still standing. Still…

From Max Hubacher, May 14, 1950, “Manhattan (Elevated)”: Both the tall buildings and the rolling stock were at least thirty years old at that point. It also feels like if you opened the windows on the train[1] you could grab a brass ring off the fire-escape on the left. It must have been quite loud in the offices directly adjacent on both sides of that street; before electrification, the smoke from the engines must have been unbearable in those offices. It’s easy enough to place the photo. The…

Part of investigating buildings is simply recognizing when something is wrong. If something looks wrong, it may mean that there’s a problem, or it may mean that there was an old renovation. Case in point, a random building I walked by in the South Slope: First thing that’s wrong: what is that weird drum on top of the corner turret? A lot of victorian-era buildings with turrets have pointy hats over them, and this could be the base of one of such a hat. Second thing that’s wrong: the…

From a 1902 postcard, a profile view of the Brooklyn Bridge (with bonus Fulton ferry) and a smaller view of the walkway. If you know the bridge well, as I do, the promenade view is actually quite accurate, but I suspect it’s a little bit difficult to parse for people who haven’t been on that walkway again and again. Also, it’s a little weird that there’s a big group of people up ahead by the tower but none closer. Is it something I said? This 1910 postcard of the walkway has a much more modern…

Option 1: I was standing in a primitive shelter in the forest primeval. Option 2: This is a leftover picture from the Belvedere Summerhouse from last Wednesday.

Usually, when I post a photo I took from a scaffold it’s to show off the view in a touristy sense, or to show an interesting building nearby. I took this picture a couple of days ago because it gives the feeling of being on the scaffold, or more precisely being on the stairs between levels of the scaffold. We’re looking north up Broadway from Duane Street.

From, maybe, 1911, a postcard that is so heavily retouched it might as well be a cartoon: There really was a big electric sign there showing a kitten tangled in silk thread, but I assume the actual sign had supports that are not visible here. The front gives us a short explanation of the wonders of electric-sign advertising – a new thing at that time – but the back goes all out: The preprinted text is more “gee whiz” stuff about the sign. The handwritten text makes it clear that this particular…

Yesterday, Old Structures personnel competed in the Corporate Challenge Race for the first time. Our team average time was 36:43 for the 3.5 mile course, very much based on the strong performances by Tim Michiels and Melanie McCloy. That was good enough to rank 145th out of the 428 companies competing in New York, and 7th out of 26 NYC A/E companies, which sure sounds like good news to me. As it happens, the route to the starting line passed an auspicious landmark: All of the original entrances…

I spent some time a couple of years ago looking at the photos of Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” project. Abbott was, of course, a spectacularly skilled photographer, and she made art out of photographing ordinary street scenes. That said, one of the recurring themes of that project was juxtaposing the past and (1930s) present in a single frame. Almost thirty years later, May 5, 1961, here’s Max Hubacher with “Manhattan, NY, 2nd Avenue”: We’re looking north up the avenue, probably from a…

A recent notice concerning area codes: When I was a kid, all of NYC was area code 212. In 1984, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were moved to the new 718 area code because 212 was running out of numbers. In 1992, the Bronx was also moved to 718. In 1992, 917 was assigned as an overlay for the whole city. In 1999, 646 was added as an overlay in the Manhattan. In 2011, 347 and 929 were added as overlays in the outer boroughs. And, per above, we now have 465 being added to the outer boroughs.…

The news of the first nationwide Memorial Day, remembrance for the Civil War: Reporting from all over the country in the Times, including as far away as Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The local news that begins in the third column serves to remind us that life goes on.