I was on the roof of an apartment house at 52nd Street and the East River, unfortunately with only the mediocre iPrecious camera.
Looking east:
The arrow points to the eastern of the two Skyline Towers on Kissena Boulevard. I grew up on Beech Avenue, on the block between Kissena and Bowne, about a hundred feet from that building.
Looking ESE:
The ‘rents place on Queens Boulevard.
Looking SSE:
Off in the far distance (about seven miles away), Chez__B in all its rampant glory.
I’ve dealt with fire-fighters through much of my career, in part because of my forensic work and in part because I’ve worked on upgrading some 30 or so firehouses. I could not do what they do, either physically or emotionally. That said, modern fire-fighters have protective clothing, radios, air masks, power tools, and so on.
What equipment did their predecessors have?
In the 1860s, the fire-fighters hauled this hose by hand to the fire (note that the bar has hand-holds, not places to attach horses’ harnesses), hauled engines by hand, and then pumped by hand.
Holy fucking shit.
Part of the vast sea of media-created and media-mediated pablum is the loss of meaning of actual physical objects. For example, cars, in addition to their ever-so-important roles as substitute penises and markers of coolness, are actual a form of transportation that billions of people use and carry with them actual physical benefits and problems.
Mill buildings are in great demand as theme restaurants, as visibly hip apartment houses, and as reminders of the past as told by Walt Disney and Ken Burns. They are, also, actual places connected with industrial and agricultural history. I’ve been working on and off for several years on a probably futile project to save a grist mill on Long Island. The building is slowly rotting away and no one has both the will and the money to stop that process.
From the street it doesn’t look like much because the street grade is some 20 feet higher than when the building was built in the 1700s.
The building has a heavy timber frame supporting its two floors and roof…
but I actually find the most interesting piece of the interior to be the frames that held the grinding stones.
I’m (probably) going to lay off bridges for a bit. You can get your fix here.
The first-leg flight home today, College Station to Houston, had 33 people on the plane and 7 boarding groups. Bias confirmation is a serious issue in experimentation, but it’s nice to get a reminder that the airlines are managed by morons.
I’m at a conference at Texas A&M. College Station, excluding the very large campus, is basically a wide spot on a wide-open prairie.
All HABS could offer me was a 1914 warren pony truss, which is the structural engineering equivalent of lukewarm porridge. As for the notes, “gracile” my ass.
The abutment on the left side of the picture is vaguely amusing.
Buddy, you don’t know me and you never will. But here’s some free advice:
In addition to the advice, an observation: if, as you said, you’ve known for months that she’s cheating and saved up this fact to throw in her face when it was convenient for you, you’re a douchebag.
This afternoon, in a fancy church on the Upper East Side. The plaster ceiling collapsed 40 years ago, and it turned out the acoustics were better with the roof underside exposed, so the plaster was never restored.
Last Friday, I was in a church tower in Troy, NY. There were some shitty ladders from the base up to the belfrey, some shitty ladders from the belfrey to the top, and nothing between except the bell frame. So we climbed up the bell frame to get from the ladders below to the ladders above.
The bottom of the picture is looking straight down. You can’t see out the windows for the glare, but ground is about sixty feet down. And yes, that’s pigeon shit all over everything.
Arkansas, 1908*:
The description in the text calls it – correctly – a camelback through truss, but that’s incomplete. The most important distinguishing characteristic of a bridge is the web layout: the pattern of verticals and diagonals. In this case, the three panels at each end of the bridge are those of a Pratt truss, while the four center panels are double-diagonal, indicating that someone was willing to do the extra work required for a statically-indeterminate truss analysis.
We don’t build short truss bridges anymore, as labor costs now govern rather than material costs, so it’s easy to forget how light and fluffy airy they can be.
We also no longer commonly use pin connections or laced built-up members.
*Also, its name is Nimrod.
Mrs__B was making a new pea soup recipe for Mini__B that included the step of blending the cooked soup to give it a smooth, chunkless consistency.
The lid came off the blender and we had santorum all over the damned kitchen. It took me twenty minutes with a wet towel to clean up.
I made a flippant remark on Sadly, No! in response to a flippant remark by A Journal of the Plague Year; AJofPY responded and here’s my response (in which it’s painfully obvious that we agree) to the response to my flippancy regarding AJotPY’s flippancy:
Gustave Eiffel was one of the most talented structural engineers who has ever lived. Since he worked in the mid- to late-1800s, he used more primitive tools than we do today, but measuring what he accomplished doesn’t even require grading on that past-versus-present curve. His bridges and buildings are still beautiful and efficient structures today, with the Garabit Viaduct being one of the better known examples.
Just before Eiffel built his famous tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, he designed the skeleton of the Statue of Liberty. At the time of the statue’s construction, there was not a single skeleton-frame building in the world; his design of central pylon (with a cantilevered extension for her arm) carrying the skin on flexible straps prefigures modern curtain-wall design by some fifty years.
The Americans who actually built Eiffel’s design messed up the structural shoulder – the connection of the cantilever to the pylon – and the 1980s repair effectively returned to his original plan.
The spiral stair runs up the center of the pylon:
1866, Charles Clark was inspired by Ellet and Roebling and took it out on New Portland, Maine:
186 feet long by – wait for it – 12 feet wide. Since the stability of a bridge deck increases non-linearly with the deck width, this is asking for trouble, as is the lack of stiffening trusses.
I’m a bridge tower, short and stout…
Having the suspenders cables sloped (i.e., having the deck narrower than the natural spread of the cables) helps a bit with stability, as it means wind pushing the deck sideways is, in part, resisted by increased tension in the windward main cable. The Brooklyn Bridge inner main cables are, similarly, in non-vertical planes.
Overall, a sweet little bridge.
Suspension bridges in the modern sense – with a deck that does not follow the cable/rope curve and that is, at least theoretically, stable rather than moving with every gust of wind – really became popular in the mid-1800s. In the U.S. there were two popular, charismatic suspension bridge builders before the Civil War: John Roebling and Charles Ellet. They subscribed to different theories of bridge design, with Roebling saying that the way to make a suspension bridge safe was to heavily brace the deck using diagonal stay cables (most famously at Cincinnati and Brooklyn) and Ellet preferring a thinner, lighter deck. Roebling’s method proved better in the long run, but Ellet’s produced some beautiful results, such as the Wheeling Bridge.
The diagonal stays were not original and were added after a wind storm took down the original deck. Ooops.
Still pretty, though.
There are over 300 truss bridges in the HABS/HAER online index. Most are, frankly, boring. A few are worthy of note, such as this little beauty built by the B&O Railroad (yes, it exists outside of Monopoly) over the Little Patuxent River, in Savage, Maryland. (Click all pix to engorge enormously.)
It’s a Bollman truss, which (a) the B&O was quite fond of using and (b) has a unique appearance. Each lower truss node in a Bollman is separately attached by tension members (rods in this case) to the tower tops, making it something of a hybrid between a truss and a stay bridge. The difficulty of having so many intersecting diagonals made the Bollman type expensive, and limited the span by limiting how many panels (between nodes) a span could contain.
I also love the date and name plate at the end portal top.
Overall, quite elegant.
Every so often I’ll randomly skip through the online HABS/HAER collection looking for an interesting building. Ordinarily I do it by location; this time I was going through the “Subject” index, looking specifically for subjects with only one record.
How could I resist “aquatic sports“? Good for you, Adams, Colorado. Happy Valentines.
In case anyone but me cares, the roof is supported by double-angle Fink trusses.
The Flushing Creek flood plain:
1924:
1925: This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
1936:
2007:
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (to give it its full name) is basically the same age I am, given that its current form was built for the 1963-64 World’s Fair. In my memories, from childhood, it’s grassland with spindly little trees. Those trees – my age – are now quite large. It feels like a different place.
The MTA currently has a number of big construction projects, filling in blanks on the subway map and making connections between separated chunks of the rail network. One that is near, if not to my heart than to my colon*, is the extension of the 7 train from Times Square to 34th Street. This is a relatively small connector, but it can serve as the basis for future, better things (the “missing station” at 42nd and 10th, the proposed extension down to 14th).
The problem with building new subways and underground rail is the existing network. The 7 extension, for example, has to duck under the 8th Avenue subway, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Penn Station tunnels to NJ. Each tunnel that is built becomes an obstacle for the next.
*I grew up in Flushing, at the opposite end of the 7.
I had a meeting for a project on a city-owned building, at the Department of Design and Construction. DDC is located in the “International Design Center New York,” a bunch of old factories in Long Island City that someone in the 1980s thought could be made hip. They aren’t, and when the rents dropped the city grabbed space.
The biggest building in the complex is where the American Chicle Company made Black Jack, Chiclets, and Dentyne until the company left the city after an explosion and fire in 1976.
But really, I just like saying “chicle.”
For the 600th post, time for a search-term round-up. Actual search terms from today are bulleted.*
I’ve mentioned this building – long since demolished, and where my father had an office circa 1955-1960 – a few times.
What the fuckity fuck are you talking about?
Interestingly, I’ve linked to such pictures (and included a few of my own pix) but I don’t think I’ve ever used this phrase.
Must be a Lady Gaga fan.
I had, and have managed to lose, an actual tie from the 50s with “sunrise over Miami Beach” hand-painted on it.
Hey, someone actually reads what I write.
There is better internet porn than this, buddy. Even better, wash up and maybe you can find a woman/man/donkey willing to throw a leg over you in real life.
Yoda: “Streamlined your building is.”
Nice try, but the March Madness assigning of brackets for competitive bridge is still a month off.
Hey, someone actually reads what I write.
Uh…my avatar is not “peeking.” She…I mean he…I mean she…is presenting.
Paging Doctor Freud! Paging Doctor Freud!
That’s not a nice way to treat the urban planners.
Hey, someone actually reads what I write.
Someone objects to the use of faggy french curves.
(A) Hey, someone actually reads what I write. (B) You’ve already asked about that.
So, so romantic.
Hey, someone actually reads what I write.
Don’t let the tour guides fool you. It’s Maspeth.
Between what? I’m not a fucking mind-reader.
____________
*The violence! I must clutch my pearls!
