One nice thing about being too sick to move much is that you have the time to really look at things, between bouts of running to the toilet. I watched half an hour of TV last night and one of the Cialis-why-the-fuck-are-they-in-two-tubs-if-they’re-supposed-to-be-having-sex commercials came on.
In the print at the bottom of the screen: “See our ad in Golf Digest.”
On July 23, 1788, a parade was held in New York to honor the new constitution. 76 distinct groups of men (I assume they were all men, as women were not typically recognized in organized trades, regardless of whether or not they worked in them) were given their order of march. By my count 62 of the groups were skilled laborers of some type, and no I’m not counting “Civil Engineers” as laborers. Probably some of the men were members of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, which was founded in 1785 and which admitted me as a member in 2000.
As for the names, Broadway and Hanover Square have not changed. Great Dock Street and Queen Street are now part of Pearl Street, Chatham Street is now Park Row, Division Street is now part of Fulton Street, Arundel Street is now Clinton Street, Bullock Street is now Broome Street, and Bayard’s house was near Gansevoort Street.
People involved in reuse and preservation get accused of being romantics or fixated on the past. The concept that old things might have inherent value runs counter to consumerism and is therefore heresy.
The FDNY used to maintain six fireboats because of the danger of fire at a pier. With the decline of freight in New York harbor, and particularly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, I believe we’re now down to one. One of the retired boats, the John J. Harvey, has been restored as a museum exhibit, but its last use showed why it was built in the first place.
The collapse of WTC 1 and 2 on 9-11 badly damaged the water supply in the surrounding area. Basically, columns from the buildings became spears that destroyed everything in their path as they embedded in the street, including water mains. So when the fire department regrouped and set about putting out the fires in neighboring buildings (90 West Street, for example), they had poor pressure and limited water. A fireboat is really a big set of pumps, and the Harvey was tied up off Battery Park City, where it sucked in water from the Hudson and pumped it out to engine trucks on the street.
Apparently, having multiple options is a good thing in emergencies, when ordinary systems might fail. Who could have guessed?
From an interior construction site, looking west through the window at Battery Park City, the Hudson, and Jersey City. Rain on the glass, the reflection of the temp lights behind me, and, off to the left, the Central Railroad of NJ terminal poking up out of the fog.
My phone contract expires at the end of the year and I expect the iPhone 5 will have a good enough camera that these off-the-cuff shots will be worthwhile.
From the NYPL Digital Gallery, the U.S. Navy conducts an unholy experiment in cross-breeding:
The thing about buildings like the Samuel Smith* Infirmary is that it was worth saving.
Buildings of this era often are functionally obsolete – as this one was – long before their basic integrity is compromised. Given people who know how to adapt a late-Victorian structure to modern use** it could have had another hundred years of useful existence scaring the shit out of local kids. But people who don’t understand reuse*** always believe, incorrectly, that it’s cheaper to build new. So the old buildings rot until they’re nearly unsalvageable.
Even at this late stage, this building could be successfully saved and reused. But someone other than professional preservationists has to believe that this building is better than a bunch of new condos built so well that an enraged child can put his fist through a wall.
*No relation to the beer, unfortunately.
**Me and the Zombie.
***Most of real estate.
Some weird shit, via Gothamist:
Click the link for the whole sordid tale.
Also, the Met Life tower – an inflated replica of the Campanile San Marco – wasn’t completed until 1909, so I’m guessing this took place in the adjacent low-rise office building.
Before mechanical ventilation and modern light bulbs, office space was kept close to windows. Old buildings have multiple light courts to get windows near all of the interior space. This stopped being true in the 1950s, and we now building office buildings where interior space may be 50 to 100 feet from the nearest window. The distance doesn’t really matter, since we’ve also stopped building buildings with operable windows.
People produce heat, and office equipment produces heat, and air is a fairly good insulator; the end result is that big buildings need to air-condition their interior spaces even in the middle of the winter. On humid winter days this is visible as the rooftop cooling towers spew warm air that causes condensation above.
One day, maybe fifteen years ago, I was waiting at a bus stop and a woman noticed the condensation above Worldwide Plaza – a fifty-story building – and said to me “Do you see that? It’s on fire!” I tried to explain that it was just the air conditioning, but she quickly decided that I was lying. After all, who runs the a/c in January?
There are about twenty different morals to this story, but let’s go with “there’s more to green building than insulation.”
Mini__B got his first haircut yesterday.
Another good one, from the Ladies’ Home Journal and brought to you by Gothamist. Fortunately, it was written by a civil engineer, so it’s completely accurate (click to engorge…if you dare!):
In a moment of weakness three years ago, I bought a Bluray player to replace our DVD player. The movies look good, but it’s been a pain in my ass from day one. At first it would randomly lock up (maybe once a month) to the point where the only solution was to pull the plug. So I went through some now-forgotten contortions, had Sony mail me a firmware upgrade in CD, and it got mostly better. The last year or so, we’ve had a problem when playing Blurays with fancy menus: they won’t play. We sat down yesterday to finally watch season 1 of Boardwalk Empire and we couldn’t even get the menu to show. Since I didn’t want to wait on Sony again, I decided to download the new firmware upgrade, burn it to CD and try again. Sony, in its infinite corporate-is-a-people-too wisdom, only provides the firmware in a Windows format. We’re a Mac house, but Mrs__B’s new job gave her a Dell laptop, so I got on that, grabbed the file, burned the CD, ran the upgrade, and we just watched the first episode.
1. Fuck Sony and everyone connected with Bluray. A player is nothing more than a computer dedicated to a single purpose, and the fact that it can be crashed by a badly-written Java menu applet tells me that it’s a poorly designed computer. Fuck the morons who think that I pay extra for a fancy menu rather than for the better picture and sound. Fuck the morons who misprogrammed the menu.
2. I haven’t used Windows regularly since 2002, and holy shit it sucks. The Dell took – and I timed it – three minutes to boot up. Every single control from XP has been moved or changed in Win 7, so my old and pretty damned thorough knowledge of how to get Win to actually do something is now meaningless. It’s not better, it doesn’t (to my eyes) look better, it’s just different. Fuck Microsoft and their need to churn upgrades for revenue, Fuck Dell and its shitty hardware. Fuck Apple for the “coolness” that has become a selling point rather than useability.
The other picture of my office building was taken from the south, showing the exposed flank of the building above Trinity Church’s graveyard. The north side of the building is Thames Street, which is roughly 30 feet wide and bounded by two near-twin, 240-foot high buildings constructed in 1904 and 1905.
There’s a reason that people used to use the phrase “canyons” to describe the streets of lower Manhattan.
“Luxury,” as an adjective, is effectively meaningless. What makes a Cadillac a luxury car? Their ads say it is, so it is. Meaningless words do not, in themselves, annoy me much although they do provide fodder for endless meaningless chatter. Since I try to avoid listening to such chatter, my response is a resounding “meh.”
The problem is that some people – If I’m being honest, I’d say I believe that the topic at hand is “stupid people” – think that their asses deserve kissing because they bought something labelled “luxury.”
Chez__B was originally an office building constructed as a money-making venture by the bank that occupied the large first-floor space. The grand entrance off the street leads to the bank hall, with a smaller entrance down the block leading to the elevators for the other floors. As part of the residential conversion, a vestibule was installed at the elevator entrance (now the residential lobby) with a door at the street wall and a door about seven feet inwards at the interior lobby wall. (The seven feet is obviously not solid wall, but is where one of the emergency stairs is located.) During the four years we’ve lived in the building (we were among the first residents after the conversion was complete), the interior door of the vestibule has almost never been closed. It is propped open, effectively permanently. Two other physical facts of note: the concierge desk is immediately adjacent to the inner door and it is equipped with a closed-circuit TV that shows the sidewalk outside the outer door. The TV allows the concierges to see if they have to go to the door and help someone.
The other thread of this story comes via Google Groups. The residents established a group before we moved in for general building discussion. I joined and lurk. I don’t participate because reading the comments there quickly convinced me that my fellow tenants are largely a bunch of entitled, whiney yuppies and hipsters. A common refrain is “Why is such-and-such true IN A LUXURY BUILDING?!?” A recent thread discussed spending somewhere in the high five figures to reconfigure the lobby because the concierge desk was very cold during the winter.
Yesterday, I asked one of the concierges why he didn’t close the inner door, since treating the vestibule as an actual vestibule would do a great deal towards stopping cold drafts at his desk. His response was that people had complained of difficulties with baby carriages or shopping carts when the door was closed. In other words, the extra couple of seconds it takes the concierge to help an encumbered person when both doors are closed had spawned enough complaints that he was sitting there in the cold. Because IN A LUXURY BUILDING twelve seconds to get through the door is unacceptable when ten seconds is possible.
The core of my profession, the core of engineering design is making tradeoffs between various goals. Less expensive up front means more maintenance. More functionality means more complex controls. Better looking means more expensive. And so on. The people in my building believe that their sense of luxury outweighs the human comfort of a half-dozen men – their employees – who they see every day. I wish I could say it’s just this building, but judging by the people I meet in my work and what I see of national politics, it’s not. Fuck them all and fuck their luxury.
I spent yesterday in the middle of nowhere in Queens (take the M train to the end and then walk a mile and half…) and I’ll be spending all of today at my desk. We moved two years ago, but I still like the new office. It makes me feel vaguely like an adult:
1908, in it’s rampant glory (click to make it rampanter):
From the right, 17 Battery Place, One Broadway (looking like a Mini__Chez__B), a bunch of buildings I could find out if I could be arsed to do so, Trinity Church, 100 Broadway, 90 West Street, Singer, City Investing, the two Hudson-Manhattan two-winged buildings looking like four towers, 15 Park Row, and the Newspaper Row clump of the Tract Society, Tribune, and World. This may have been taken from a boat, but more likely is from the shore in Jersey City near Montgomery Street/Exchange Place.
Singer was about 600 feet high and would be replaced by Woolworth as the tallest in Manhattan within 5 years. So, so sad.
It was rainy and foggy. Fortunately, someone more enterprising than me had a camera:
That’s West Street in the middle, separating Battery Park City and its 1960s landfill on the left from Washington and Greenwich Streets and their 18th and 19th century landfill on the right. Jersey City past the Hudson, the new 1 WTC with his head in the clouds, and the new 4 WTC showing off his pretty cranes.
We’ve been having very high winds all week, so something like this was inevitable. I’ve designed the supports for a couple of those and one thing I learned was that the owners don’t care about them. I doubt a single billboard in the city – maybe in the country – gets regular maintenance. Meanwhile, we have laws against distracted driving but allow these things to be built…
As for my title, the highway is in barely better condition.
In the world of NYC waterways, Jamaica Bay is an afterthought. Most people only see it when flying into/out of JFK, it’s too shallow for ships and too smelly and full of sandbars for much pleasure boating, even though a lot of people dock on its shore and sail elsewhere.
A portion of Jamaica Bay – incidentally, not far from Sheepshead Bay – is Dead Horse Bay. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia whitewashes the name a bit…as if it were possible to hide the reality:
Via Gothamist, pretty skies over mostly mediocre skylines.
I am worried about the appearance of a glowing, floating man in the Williamsburg skies:
