https://oldstructures.nyc/blog
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From a 30-year-old comic, Bruce Wayne attends a reception at an odd-looking hotel: Union Terminal in Cincinnati: Photo by Greg Hume Curiously, DC Comics long ago had already used the train station as the Hall of Justice, the headquarters of the Justice League. However, I find JL comics excruciating to read, so I don’t often see it.
A long time ago, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that he couldn’t define it but “I know it when I see it.” I could write a thousand words here on why this postcard of the Manhattan Bridge captures its appearance well and makes it look good and this one does not but in the end, all my arguments boil down to I know it when I see it. The bridge has notably slender steel towers and a nice curve to its cables (neither too steep not too shallow) and the second…
In the last post, the Equitable building had finally made it out of the ground, with steel columns sticking up through the timber foundation bracing like garden shoots coming up through leaves on the ground. As usually happens with steel-frame construction, things started moving a lot faster after that. Here’s January 24, 1927, with steel up to the second floor along part of the Broad Street side…if you can see anything behind that plume of smoke and steam from the engine running the derricks:…
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash One of the odder effects of the internet is that it’s possible to become semi-obsessed with someone else’s obsessions. I’ve been reading pieces by Marcin Wichary for a couple of years now. His day job, as far as I can tell, is as a software designer and is particularly concerned with user interfaces. It’s not a huge leap conceptually from there to his extraordinarily-detailed[1] interest in keyboards. It’s also not much of a leap from there to an interest in…
Looking east on 23rd Street from between Madison and Fifth Avenues: Note the street sign below the McDonald’s flag: Madison Avenue starts (or ends, if you prefer orienting yourself to the south) at 23rd Street and runs off to the left, out of frame. Also off to the left, Madison Square. With one exception – the tallest building on view, the new (2008) glass-facade residential tower to the right of McDonald’s[1] – the whole south side of the street is a series of late-nineteenth- and…
When I left off last week, with a photo from November 15, 1926, the caissons were in place, and the cellar hole was mostly excavated with support-of-excavation shoring in place. Pictures for the next two months or so showed little visible progress because the work was mostly taking place under that huge grid of timbers. There were two items of work down there, neither of them particularly photogenic: the final excavation of the cellar floor, and setting the bases of the steel columns on top of…
Who wouldn’t want their food served by weird contraptions and acrobatics? I may never get to the Lunch of Little Mechanics, but I can dream. The combination of street theater with industrial design, as explained by Rain Noe – In France, Lunch Delivered Via Steampunk-Like Contraptions – is one I find irresistible. The idea appeals to me in part because I had a vision of a much smaller scale version of it long ago, using O or G scale electric trains as in an-home delivery system. That idea, of…
A lamppost after a February snowstorm: Art in the office of Yellow House Architects: It’s the end of the week, and I’m feeling a bit saggy myself.
From January 11, 1952, Max Hubacher gives us “View of the tip of Manhattan from the new Brooklyn Heights Esplanade”: The circle is the end of Remsen Street (then, newly redesigned) just south of the esplanade (promenade, as I think of it) over the Brooklyn Heights segment of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. To prove that things […]
The last photo from yesterday’s discussion of caissons at the construction of 15 Broad Street showed the beginning of the next stage of work. On September 21, 1926, the construction photograph captured the installation of sheet piling along the east edge of the site, adjacent to 43 Exchange Place: This was the beginning of the […]
The demolition of the superstructure of the Mills Building left a cellar hole full of masonry walls, as seen on July 20, 1926: If you look closely at the photo, you can see that some of the old walls and piers were repurposed to support the steel beams that served as the base for construction […]
The first order of business for constructing the new Equitable Building at 15 Broad Street was the demolition of the old Mills Building and its immediate neighbor to the east, 51 Exchange Place. The new building had a basically identical footprint at the first floor compared to the two old buildings combined, as both filled […]
I’m going to spend a few days on a sequence of construction photos from 1926, because the sequence is more informative than any single photo. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a famous site with a lot of available information; it also doesn’t hurt that early in my career I worked on facade investigation and repair […]
I may have used this picture before, but I can’t find it if I have. One of the stairs at the old Customs House, on Bowling Green: To put it simply, this is a working stair, not meant to be particularly monumental. But in a building designed on this monumental scale, even an ordinary egress […]
Spring must be here: the blossoms are out.
This afternoon I will be attending the 2026 Preservation Conference of the Historic Districts Council, on the topic of “Making It In New York: The Preservation Of Manufacturing.” I’m expecting an interesting afternoon. As a bonus, one of the speakers, Cassandra Smith, works at a long-time client, the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center. GMDC is […]
Forest Hills Gardens in Queens was constructed as a rail suburb, taking advantage of the nearby main line of the Long Island Railroad, and was as centrally planned as any suburban development today. It was swallowed up by the growth of the city, and specifically by the growth of central Queens spurred by the construction […]
Last week, I was talking about a postcard showing the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. From 1912, here’s the Brooklyn end: The photo that this was based on is probably a year or two older than that, since we should be seeing the Woolworth Building and we’re not. The curve to the approach was […]
It’s a cliché to state that land is expensive in Manhattan because it’s an island surrounded by large rivers and therefore the supply is inherently limited. That cliché is also, to a large degree, only partially true, particularly in the past. Taxpayers exist because the land is worth holding on to but isn’t so valuable […]
Ten years ago (!) I discussed[1] the restoration of a portion of the Saw Mill River in central Yonkers to something approaching its natural state, as it was before it was buried early in the 1900s. This was not a one-off project: similar attempts to re-established rivers and streams buried by people in the past […]
My first thought was to wonder why someone had been using spray-foam insulation in an abandoned building. Then I realized that wasn’t foam…it was growing.
I don’t go into the Port Authority Bus Terminal expecting to agree with the management on much, but on January 19, 2024, it was like they read my mind:
A good article on life in a city near sea level: “A Fifth of NYC Built on Bygone Water Now at Risk: Study Maps City’s ‘Blue Zones’” BY Samantha Maldonado. The source for much of the research cited in the article is “Blue Zones: Identifying Adaptation Opportunities UsingPast, Present, and Future Flooding in New York City” […]
This is not Artemis II: That’s Apollo 11. I have some vague memories from the summer of 1969, when I was four and a half, of watching the first moon landing on our black-and-white TV set. I certainly watched bits and pieces of the later Apollo missions, and Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, and Viking’s landing on […]
From 1911, a much-worn postcard showing Park Row: City Hall is off to the left, amongst the trees; the big stone building on the right is the old New York Times headquarters, although the Times had moved uptown to Longacre Square, renamed after them, seven years earlier. The light-colored building on the left with the […]
A photo of a tile arch floor from a 2018 site visit: Starting with the easy stuff: the hung ceiling was demolished shortly before we got there. The terra-cotta blocks are corrugated to act as lath for directly-applied plaster, but in this case the ceiling was on metal lath suspended below the vaults, so there […]
February 1, 1956, Max Hubacher shows us the demolition of the el, titled “42nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan”: The elevated steel structure ends abruptly about a block or two up the avenue, with the sun fittingly glaring on the street beyond. There are piles of demolition debris – wood and steel – on the […]
An outside-the-courthouse dramatic moment in a Daredevil comic: Looking south from the sidewalk in front of the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre Street: The building with the colonnade at the left is 40 Center Street, the federal courthouse; the vaguely parklike area more visible in the drawing than street views is Foley Square […]
We use Slack for intraoffice communication. Even before Covid, when we were not working hybrid, people were often on site, away from their desks, so asynchronous communication was absolutely necessary. That does not mean that everything in our Slack discussion is life-and-death engineering… Two takes on the same topic, yesterday: exactly how self-absorbed are New […]
A circa-1811 postcard named after the Ansonia, one of the nicest apartment houses on the Upper West Side: The flip side extolls the virtues of a high-end apartment living: The only problem is that I can’t find the Ansonia in the photo. It’s a very large building, but it looks nothing like the only large […]
