Old Structures Engineering

I’ve talked more than once about the Reuse Reduce Recycle mantra and how it relates to our work. Here’s a very small, but not negligible, example: That’s from 2017, right about the time we moved to our current office. (The carpet is unworn! The paint is so clean!) It’s a tanker table, used, like almost all the tables and desks (and some chairs) in the office. This one had just arrived and needed some work: cleaning the rust off the top and tightening the bolts holding the legs. The thing about…

During an apartment renovation in a converted 1860s loft building, a view of one of the cast-iron columns that makes up the front facade, as seen from inside: As is typical of these buildings, there’s a column between every pair of windows, so the iron makes up a grid of about 5 feet spacing horizontally and about 10 feet vertically (between floors). The shaft of that column – the 3/4 round and the engaged rectangular pier behind it – is one piece; the moldings and base plinth are separate,…

The kind of construction-sequence photos that I showed a while back for 15 Broad Street exist for other buildings and, crucially, for other building types. The following photo sequence is an example for the George Blumenthal house at 50 East 70th Street. “House” is a bit understated: Blumenthal bought part of the former site of the Union Theological Seminary after that institution moved uptown to Morningside Heights. UTS had formerly been on the west side of Park Avenue between 69th and 70th…

The northwest corner of North 6th Street and Berry Street in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) in 1940: The four-story building on the left is 111 North 6th, “Jersey Hogs Pork Products” is 115 North 6th, and the building between (the second fire-escape from the corner) is 113 North 6th. Here’s a better view of 111 which was a wood-framed building with wood clapboard siding. Looking at the 1916 fire map for the area, that kind of construction (in yellow) was common: Those buildings have been demolished,…

From the 1930s, postcard nostalgia about the “days of the Square Rigger”: “Stokes” in this case is Isaac Newtown Phelps Stokes, who wrote the definitive book, in six volumes, on the physical and visual history of New York City up to the early twentieth century: The iconography of Manhattan Island. The Stokes Collection is, at least in part, the material that I.N.P. gathered during his research. The ships on the left are tied up at the South Street piers south of Maiden Lane, and are a mix of…

This is pretty far afield for me, but it concerns the built environment, so close enough. Another old photo, from a snowy, icy day in 2019: That’s the side of the front facade of Albany City Hall (the front facade is on the left), with a pair of plaques from 1897 and 1930 (the building is from 1883). Note that the upper 1897 plaque was “Erected in the mayoralty of John Boyd Thatcher” and the lower 1930 plaque was “Erected in the mayoralty of John Boyd Thatcher 2nd”, JBT’s nephew. The lower…

More old photos: from Newark Airport in 2019, looking northeast (on the left) and east (on the right): A close-up on the horizon: The cluster of building on the right is lower Manhattan, with One World Trade Center as the tallest tower. The cluster on the left is midtown, with the Empire State Building to the right of the right-tilted crane and Billionaire’s Row around the candy-striped whatever that is. For reference, 1WTC is about ten miles in a straight line from where I was standing, and…

Fireworks over the East River as seen from Battery Park City: Tastes vary, but I find this more interesting than fireworks up in a clear sky.

Circa 1910, a postcard of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Morningside Heights: There’s only one problem: that’s not what the cathedral looked like then or looks like now. The biggest difference is that the crossing tower was never started. There’s a Guastavino dome at the crossing serving as a “temporary” roof…built 123 years ago, now part of the landmarks designation, and still not covered by the big tower. The front (west) towers are not there either, although the south tower was…

From 2018, a nasty surprise after the ceiling was removed: More specifically, the gypsum board ceiling that had been put in place below the original plaster was removed, exposing the plaster, and the failure of the plaster, and the failure of the bottom of the cinder-concrete slab, and the failure of much of the wire-mesh reinforcing. The short version: the roof terrace above leaked, and the rusting mesh spalled the slab and plaster. Obviously installing a new gypsum-board ceiling had solved…

I let this series languish for a while… The stoop of an 1825 rowhouse, with a simple wrought-iron handrail: The newel post is, of course, cast iron, but the rest of the rail is wrought iron. If you look carefully at the stone steps, you can see that the part of each step from the handrail embedments to the near edge is darker colored than the body of the step. This is presumably a series of repairs to the edge, probably for damage from rusting of the embedded iron ends. The iron rods are a…

More evident alterations at an old subway station, similar to one I discussed a couple of years ago. A view of the westbound-platform roof at the Kosciuszko Street station on the J train: (I’ve redacted a few passers-by.) There’s a lot going, only some of which is germane. The line is three tracks here, with the express running in the direction of the rush, and we see the eastbound platform on the far side. The green-painted material is a series of cantilevered steel “bents”, with the base of…

Max Hubacher, on December 21, 1954, titled this photo “New York City: Third Avenue Elevated”: And, sure enough, there’s the el over Third Avenue on the right. The small park being enjoyed only by pigeons is Cooper Square, where (if you are heading south to north) the Bowery splits into Third Avenue (on its proper line) and Fourth Avenue (on a temporary diagonal that runs up to Union Square, where it straightens out). A large chunk of the Third Avenue el’s tracks south of 7th Street were over…

The “valley of ashes” as portrayed in a graphic-novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby: A pile of coal ash in the dump created in the swamp adjacent to the Flushing River, circa 1920: The site was drained and cleaned up for the 1939-40 World’s Fair, and has been the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park ever since. The name is a good reminder that the word “meadow” in a place name in the New York area typically means it used to be a swamp.

In the foreground, the rear facade of the Seventh Regiment Armory, famous for its ornate rooms in front, some designed by a young Louis Tiffany, but also containing a huge arched-truss drill hall that stretched the long-span roof technology of the US in 1880. In the background, 432 Park Avenue, the first of the Billionaire’s Row supertall buildings, and (I’m pretty sure) the first building in the US with a height-to-base ratio of 15. I was on Lexington Avenue for a site visit and looked up at a…

From “1922 – 1940” (according to the New York Public Library) a postcard of “Bryant Park in 1853”: Except, of course, it wasn’t Bryant Park then (a) because it wasn’t a park, just vacant land behind the big distribution reservoir located where the NYPL is now and (b) William Cullen Bryant was, in 1853, a late-middle-aged poet and newspaper editor who was well-known but not yet someone you’d name a park after. As is so often true, the postcard image was very low resolution. This 1853 engraving…

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…