Old Structures Engineering

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…

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…