Old Structures Engineering

Kieran Healey – a man who does some truly fascinating things with sociology, data visualization, and the intersection between sociology and data visualization – some years ago used the data available from the NYC government’s open-data policy to make a map of the ages of building in the city. Here’s Manhattan, with new buildings in bright yellow and most of OSE’s projects in purple (get the full size image at the link by clicking on the map): Here’s our office in the light purple indicating the…

From “Daredevil Noir,” an alternate history story with the Daredevil characters set in the 1930s, a gangster acting gangsterish: There’s an interesting peculiarity to the background: the marquee (currently showing The Mask of Zorro, which is what the Wayne family went to see the night that Thomas and Martha were shot and Bruce discovered a career path) says that this is the Pal… Theater (almost certainly the Palace Theater) while the facade higher up says that this is the ORP… (almost certainly…

From 29th Street east of Second Avenue, the spire of the Empire State Building, hidden behind a nearby fence and a far away apartment house water tank: No matter where you go, there you are.

I was walking down a street on Long Island when I saw an interesting building. The gable roof extended past the front facade, to give the front porch a pediment top. This house is probably no more than 60 or 70 years old, but that kind of temple front was surprisingly popular for houses in the early 1800s. Something about the US following in the footsteps of the Greek democratic cities and the Roman republic… As you might notice, there’s something a bit odd here. Specifically, the leftmost…

Apparently, the MTA has decided it’s time to get rid of the social-distancing decals that were put down in 2020 on the subway platforms as part of the Covid response. The Pacific Street station a few days ago, with some minor glue remnants where the sticker used to be: The vast majority of the stickers showed a couple of generic shoe prints, which could be men’s dress shoes or women’s flats, but there were also horseshoes, hooves, and pawprints mixed in. In any case, I expect to see fewer…

From 1915 or so, a postcard showing the Brooklyn Bridge: I suspect this was hand-painted over a photo. The detail of the bridge would be very difficult to get this accurate without a guide, but the Woolworth Building (the tallest in sight) and the Municipal Building on the far right are represented in a surprisingly crude manner. Similarly, the top of Bankers Trust is shown as an actual pyramid rather than the stepped pyramid it is. The angle is interesting. There’s a steep bluff above the East…

From Julia Rez, a group of NASA reports found in the trash: And from Nanoraptor, a slightly modified image: The fake NASA technical report titles are: STRUCTURAL MARGINS OBSERVED IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO EXCEEDANCE PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF UNEXPECTED WOBBLE IN A RIGIDLY NON-WOBBLING SYSTEM OBSERVED PERFORMANCE OF COMPONENTS KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN INSTALLED BACKWARDS COGNITIVE LOAD IMPLICATIONS OF ACRONYMS REFERRING TO OTHER ACRONYMS THERMAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MATERIALS DESCRIBED INFORMALLY AS “PROBABLY…

The end is here: both for the construction of the Equitable Trust Building at 15 Broad Street in 1926-1928, and for this series of posts. Some views of the finished interior, and the story is done. First, the main public banking hall: I find it interesting that, in a building with reasonably-modern architectural styling on its exterior, the banking hall was so very retro. Apparently, in the 1920s, it was good public relations for your banker to pretend it was 1890. Ordinary employees got modern…

Batman continues to think deep thoughts about the past, as he looks at the Gotham Stock Exchange and its very slender Corinthian columns: The New York Stock Exchange shortly after the NYSE extension (on the right) had its exterior completed in late 1927: Not as close as I’d like, but close enough.

This series has focussed on relating images of New York (with the occasional foray elsewhere) in comic books to actual images of the city. But sometimes the allusions are in narrative…Batman ponders the history of Gotham City: Some actual history: the second (of the three total) Great Fire of New York began at night in December 1835. At that time, the city’s population was around 250,000; given that the population in 1790 was 33,000, it’s a fair bet that it was 25,000 or less in the 1830s. As…

A 1913 or so postcard showing the Manhattan end of the Manhattan Bridge, looking east towards Brooklyn: If that looks a bit more Parisian than you remember Chinatown as being, you’re not wrong. This is a fantasy in part, and some pleasantly-misguided design optimism in part. The colonnade is real, designed by Carrère and Hastings (the architects of the New York Public Library) and still there. Here’s an early photo of it, from the center of the bridge approach off Canal Street: It’s a bit much.…

One of my weirder old projects…The Verdi Monument at Verdi Square, which is the narrow triangle[1] bounded by Broadway on the west-southwest, Amsterdam Avenue on the east, and 73rd Street on the north, as photographed by Max Hubacher on April 27, 1961: The composer Giuseppe Verdi is on the high plinth in the middle, surrounded by characters from his operas. That’s Falstaff on the left, Leonora on the right, and Aida and Otello are on the other side, hidden at this angle by the base. The base is…

This is not my lunch’s view after I swallow: It is, rather, a picture I took inside a steel tube post – an HSS section, to be pedantic – used as part of some newish dunnage on an old industrial building. I positioned my phone’s camera lens and flash over the end of the tube and here’s the photo. The thing that looks like a bar crossing the interior space of the tube is actually a plate, which extends out on both sides to provide bolted connections for two beams. The fabricator cut a slot in the…

The end is in sight: both for the construction of the Equitable Trust Building at 15 Broad Street in 1926-1928, and for this series of posts. Today’s the last post with exterior photos because, in skyscraper construction, once the facade is complete and the windows are installed, photographing the outside of the building every week gets sort of boring. First, a good overall view on October 4, 1927, of the upper portions of the Broad Street (left) and Exchange Place facades, with masonry work…

Looking north up Broadway, from about Fulton Street, in 1820: The fancy building is City Hall, then eight years old. The street running off to the right is Park Row. Given that everything other than the street layout and City Hall has changed multiple times in the last two centuries, even City Hall Park, there’s nothing else here that’s familiar. If you just saw the picture without knowing anything else, and if City Hall was less recognizable, this looks like a long-ago and prosperous small…

After Perseus killed Medusa by cutting off her head, he carried her head around for a while, using it as a weapon. Apparently the head worked as well to turn people to stone as she had while alive, which seems odd. He eventually gave her head to Athena, who had it mounted on her shield, as one does. On an old high-rise building with classically-inspired ornament, some terra cotta in the shape of a shield with Medusa’s head: Medusa’s gaze turned people to stone, not terra cotta, but eh close…

In retrospect, it’s obvious that Isamu Noguchi’s “Red Cube” sculpture in front of 140 Broadway would have to be repainted once in a while. It just feels a little weird to see it.

Back to the construction work at the interior of 15 Broad Street, which was picking up speed in the late summer and fall of 1927. First, a beautiful display of plumbing geometry and asbestos pipe wrap at the “pipe offset, 2nd floor”: Next up, a “coal tunnel,” either to move coal from the delivery chute (i’m going to assume on Exchange Place, which was far less heavily trafficked both then and now) to storage or from storage to the boiler room. Note the narrow-gage railroad tracks for coal cars…

Once: I took the picture below during the first panel of the “Progress and Preservation: Reuse for a Resilient City” event yesterday, put on by the Municipal Art Society. The speaker at that moment was Emily Hoffman, the Director of Building Energy & Emissions Performance at the New York City Department of Buildings. Ms. Hoffman had a lot of interesting things to say, but I was moved to photograph that slide by the text in blue below the first bullet point. In the context of New York having…

…until it is. From a recent site visit, a view of a piece of 1910s steel: The dark red is the beam web, the light strip at the top is the underside of the top flange, and the slightly darker strip below the web is the top of the bottom flange. Then there’s a piece of wood below that. It was dark and my flash lit the beam peculiarly. The word EASTERN is in projecting relief, rolled into the beam web when it was made in the mill a bit over 110 years ago. I’ve talked about this practice before and…

After a digression to the interior last time – which will be revisited in a post or two as the exterior heads toward completion – we’re back watching the exterior of the Equitable Trust building at 15 Broad Street inch forwards. As of July 12, 1927, the frame looks to have been topped out. Note the lack of derricks at the top: August 1, and the brick facade is being completed at the upper office floors: A week later and derricks are back, to get masonry to the logistically-awkward upper…

From Max Hubacher, April 9, 1949, “View from the Liberty Street-CNF ferry on lower Manhattan”: Had he turned a bit more to the right, this would have been a classic view of the Financial District. As it is, he got the Woolworth Building, New York Telephone on the left (behind the pier with two pyramids at its free end), the West Street Building (on the far right) with Singer sticking up behind it, and (between Woolworth and West Street) a bunch of buildings that were demolished about twenty…

From a site visit to an old mansion upstate, a weird detail in the basement: It took a minute to place what was going on in this room. Those are sections of terra cotta flu liner set in mass concrete. That is not the way to ordinarily build anything, but I’ll admit it makes a nice set of bottle racks for a wine cellar.

From Ellen, “stairway to heaven.” Note the church-tower wind bracing on the right and the nice detail of the treads being inset within the stringers. Note, too, how insanely dangerous the lack of handrails makes the stair.

This series of blog posts may end up taking longer than the actual construction of the Equitable building, but I feel like it’s not often we get to see such thorough documentation of the construction technology of a moment in time. I’m going to switch gears today from the exterior views used so far for demolition, foundations, frame, and facade, to take a look at the interior in the early stages. The following photos show what was going on inside the building before the frame was topped out in…

I said yesterday that we have a recent trend of small projects winning Lucy Moses awards. The second project that won an award this year where we were involved is quite large, but our role was small: the restoration of the stained glass windows at the Riverside Church in upper Manhattan. This project included “30 monumental lancet windows, 32 smaller lancet windows, and 12 rose windows. This [is] 6,917 square feet of stained glass, or 662,262 individual pieces of glass.” The glass is supported…

Continuing a trend of recent years, two small-scale projects we worked on won Lucy Moses awards this year. First, the Stuyvesant-Fish House at 21 Stuyvesant Street, an 1804 house that was only the seventh building in NYC designated as a landmark after the Landmarks Preservation Commission was created in 1965. Our work was initially only the repair of the damaged brownstone stoop, but in the end also included repair of a rotted timber beneath the entry threshold, which required careful work to…

In the last post, the frame of the Equitable building was making good progress in April of 1927. Here’s a view from April 25, looking west along Exchange Place and showing the “canyon” effect of tall buildings on lower Manhattan’s narrow streets: Even Broad Street doesn’t look quite so broad: By May 11, the setback at the upper floors were becoming quite clear. Note that the construction of the brick facade had begin on the Broad Street side and a bit on the Wall Street wing. It feels like…

In a week and a half, I will be a panelist at the event “Progress and Preservation: Reuse for a Resilient City” organized by the Municipal Art Society of New York. Wednesday, May 6, 8:30 to 2, at 165 West 65th Street, 10th Floor; tickets are available at the first link. The MAS has long been involved with historic preservation; this event uses that framework (“advance climate goals, and sustain the cultural life of our neighborhoods”) to discuss adaptive reuse in general, and to deal with New…

I stand with Mr. Maverick: