Old Structures Engineering

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:

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 […]