75 Years + 2 Days

I blame the trip, but here’s your two-days-late birthday girl/boy/other: The Golden Gate Bridge. It had a convoluted conception and birth, but the results came out just fine. Papa number 1 was waaaaaay out of his depth, papa number 2 was damned good at his job but terrible at project politics, and papa number 3 is arguably the reason the bridge is so loved.

It’s a beautiful bridge at a dramatic location, similar in some ways to the Firth of Forth bridge. Because it was designed during the period when engineers thought they could get the stiffness they wanted through synchronized cable and deck deflection, it’s a bit on the lively side under variable load, although that may actually be a good thing in a high seismic zone.

Eh…on to the prettiness:

Architectural Criticism in Gotham

I’m looking forward to this. The dark brooding city has always been a character in its own right in the Batman comics, and deserves its own story. I read a description once that I thought was right on target: Superman’s city Metropolis is midtown Manhattan, while Gotham is the rest of NYC.

 

It’s been done before. In Destroyer, Batman concludes that assigning spiritual meaning to an architectural style is insane.

Body Parts

I’m sick with the cold that Mrs__B and Mini__B had last week. So I’m obsessed with body parts…like this arm someone left in Madison Square Park:

Weekend in the City

First, looking east from our living room at sunset. The building with the copper pyramid roof is 40 Wall, nicely lit by the setting sun and with some dark cloud behind.

Second, Darth Vader trying to avoid a ticket:

What’s in a Name?

To start with, the East River isn’t a river. It’s a tidal straight connecting the Long Island Sound and the upper bay; when the tide changes, the entire Atlantic tries to pour through. The current gets up to about 7 mph and changes direction at each slack tide. Fun times if you’re in a sailboat.

The straight stretch of the East River north of Corlears Hook is divided into two channels by a long narrow island. It was originally called Blackwell’s Island after the damned soul who thought that putting a farm on an island surrounded by salt water and with limited spring water was a good idea. It became the municipal dumping ground in the nineteenth century, starting with a poorhouse, an insane asylum, a jail, and a smallpox hospital, and eventually was renamed Welfare Island as a result.

When urban renewal came along, the island was renamed Roosevelt after FDR, although given what it was in his lifetime, I don’t know that he would have appreciated the gesture. It’s now a pleasant if excruciatingly boring place to live, with its own subway stop and an elevated tram to Manhattan. The reality of it was pegged nicely in the opening scene of Dark Water: as a mother and daughter take the tram to go look at an apartment on the island, the little girl says, in an accusing tone of voice, “This isn’t Manhattan.”

Mayor Mike’s latest grand project, a new engineering school, will be located on the south end of the island, where presumably the ghosts of the dead lunatics will serve as teaching assistants.

Island Hospital – the hospital for indigents – after twenty years of abandonment in 1989:

Sloppiness

Mrs__B has a bad cold, Mini__B still stumbles over the rules of poker, and I’m too tired to read, so I’ve got the tube on. They’re showing both parts of a two-part Criminal Minds back to back and, as usual, the plot ranges from ridiculous to laughable. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

The episode supposedly takes place in downtown Washington and was obviously filmed on a back lot in L.A. The set looks nothing like any american city I know – and I know what a fair number of them look like – and certainly nothing like DC. The streets are too narrow, there are too many T intersections, there are too many romanesque commercial buildings, and it’s overall too dense. It does’t look like any part of New York either: the streets are too too narrow for midtown or uptown and too straight and parallel for downtown, and the buildings are too low for the downtown commercial district and really anywhere in Manhattan but western Greenwich Village. Why do I bring up New York? Because the camera passes over street signs that say Barclay, Murray, and Dey Streets, all of which are in the downtown financial district, within half a mile of my office. They actually show Barclay and Murray intersecting, when in real life they’re parallel.

Of course sets get reused. They represent a huge sunk cost and this set filled in for lower Manhattan on some other TV show, or in some movie. But would it have been so hard to remove the fake street signs that have nothing to do with the show at hand? Has no one told them that being barely competent is in the details?

Down on the Farm

Latest project – and a minor one since the house is in good condition, structurally – is the Onderdonk House in Ridgewood. (That’s Queens, about two blocks from the Brooklyn border.) It’s a farmhouse that goes back to the Dutch colony, but the land around it has gradually become entirely industrial, leaving it a bit out of place.

This blogger got a nice shot of the house with a warehouse in the background:

When HABS visited, mid-1900s, only some of the factories and warehouses had been built.

A Day Late and a Focus Short

From our new living room, the day-past-super-full moon between 40 and 60 Wall Street.

That’s the new 4 WTC on the left, my office is the right building with the yellow-tinted lighting mid-range, and 90 West Street on the right.

Assuming the iPrecious 5 has a better camera when it comes out this fall, I’ll be shooting better when the real camera is at the office.

Lilliput in the Village

Here’s the lede: you can buy a 35 square foot storefront – and no, that’s not a typo – in Greenwich Village for $319,000. It’s almost exactly the same size as one of the old cells at the Tombs or Sing Sing; you can touch all three walls* at once; sweeping at the end of the day is a snap.

Why does this building exist? The subway. In midtown and uptown, running trains under the streets is easy. In the fucked-up street layout of Greenwich Village, it was basically impossible…so the city carved out extensions of Seventh and Sixth Avenues to create transportation corridors. Cutting Seventh through the angled grid of the Village created a lot of small left-over spaces and someone decided to make money by building on this one.

Bonus points: it’s in the Greenwich Village historic district, so it’s landmarks protected.

*It’s triangular.

Size Queen

Since the design was first announced, we all knew this day would come, and here it is: the new 1WTC is taller than the Empire State. Half the media got the description wrong, saying that the ESB observation deck is at 1250 feet when that’s actually the top of the antenna, but who cares when the competition is a nightlight on a paperweight.

My favorite description to date is that it looks like someone took a carrot peeler to the old WTC.

Guest Coast

In honor of M. Bouffant, Dusty, and Aunt Snow, I’m pretending I know something about L.A.

All of us who don’t live in southern California have a media-supplied image of what it looks like, which is exactly as accurate as the media-supplied image of New York. One aspect of the reality that fascinates me, for obvious reasons, is that the oldest parts of L.A. proper have buildings that look more like their east coast contemporaries than they do California buildings. In other words, there was a style for center-city buildings that overrode local style.

One of my favorites is the Bradbury Building. Like a lot of people, I first learned of it while watching Blade Runner. It’s L.A.’s entry in the cool-atrium sweepstakes. The architectural cast iron is pretty, and the original open-cage elevators are great, but it’s the steel trusses supporting the skylight that take my breath away.

Post Talk Depression

I have never once given a presentation without thinking afterwards how much better it could have been done. Tonight was no exception, although this time I had the excuse that light reflecting off B^4′s dome distracted me.

Anyway,another pic from the talk, looking south on Broadway circa 1907. The construction nearer us is the City Investing Building; the Singer tower is in the process of erection immediately behind.

Getting Ready

In addition to all the crap involved in moving, I’ve had the cold from hell for three weeks now and I’m trying to prepare for a talk tomorrow night. Most of my talks are semiacademic things at conferences, but tomorrow is one of the rare times I’ll be speaking before a general audience. Despite my practice in giving mini lectures here, I have a hard time telling what is general knowledge and what is not. I’ve been living deep inside my professional niche for a long, long time.

Anyway, a lot of the pictures I’ve been putting up are for that lecture. Might as well do one more:

That’s Printing House Square, circa 1900. The shed-looking thing on the left is the Brooklyn Bridge train terminal, the tall building with the dome is the New York World building (Joseph Pulitzer had his office in the drum below the dome), the building with the tower is the New York Tribune, the gray stone building is the New York Times, and the tall building behind the Times is the American Tract Society. The Tract Society is a current project, involving bondage angels.

Abandonment

Yesterday I mentioned that the 18th Street station on the original IRT line (at Park Avenue South, which was Fourth Avenue back then) was abandoned when the trains were lengthened. There are a bunch of stations that were abandoned, mostly for the same reason.

18th Street looked much like the original versions of the 23rd Street (Park South) and Bleecker Street stations:

You can tell it’s the first round of subway construction by the use of cast-iron columns on the platform.

Of course, back then there were ticket takers rather than turnstiles…because no one foresaw a system that would carry 1,600,000,000 fares per year:

Of course, it looks a bit different now, which is why it was used as the setting for a black mass in Falling Angel (before the goddamned movie Angel Heart ruined the story):

Keep your eyes open and watch the right-hand windows as your 6 train heads uptown out of Union Square. Watch for CHUD!

The Heights

Either you can deal with working high or you can’t. I don’t believe it’s possible to learn to be okay with height if you’re not okay with it initially.

Via Gothamist, a video of the Empire State being built:

And one of its window cleaners:

Inherent Drama

The switch to steel-frame construction made possible building shapes and sizes not previously seen, but it took a while for design to catch up. At the new headquarters for the Fuller Construction Company in Daniel Burnham showed off what could be done with an awkward site.

Because Broadway cuts a diagonal across Manhattan’s grid, it creates a bunch of narrow triangular blocks. At the intersection with Fifth Avenue, the south block is the site for the Fuller Building, which was quickly renamed the Flatiron for its shape. (Everyone but bbkf can click for a little engorgement.) I particularly like the curved plate girders at the apex of the building.

For what it’s worth, I’m currently working on the dome with the flagpole just to the right of the Flatiron (and two blocks further away).

This angle shows the best aspect of the building’s shape: if you look at it obliquely from the north, it looks like a wall with nothing behind it…300 feet tall.

Steel Erection

I’m working on a presentation on the history of structure in skyscrapers. Here’s a nice shot of the Singer Building under construction. Based on the state of the work, I’d say it’s probably early to mid 1907. (Click to engorge to inhuman proportions.)

The big building on the right is 115 Broadway, the fraternal twin to my office. The small buildings in the middle are the site of Zuccotti Park and were demolished when the Singer was demolished: the US Steel Building used the air rights to the Zuccotti block as part of its zoning. The curving columns at the top of Singer are the beginning of its – AHEM – mansard. The construction on the far left is the City Investing Building going up.

The Wrong Path

A well-meaning but clueless relative gave Mini__B a book:

It looks cute, but it’s like giving a child encouragement to become a junkie. Why?

Also, I find it impossible to pronounce the title as anything other than “Iggy Peck, Architeck, Tee.”

A Trick Question

What old-fashioned suburban town was I in today?

Look after the jump!

Starrucca

For a long time, the Starrucca Viaduct in Pennsylvania was considered to be one of the engineering wonders of the mid-1800s. It was, for its era of construction, exceptionally long and high; it is, depending on your taste, quite purty.

It’s a little hard to get the scale of it. The elevated portion is 1400 feet long and the center is 100 feet above the creek it passes over.

It’s still in use, carrying freight trains (passenger service on the Erie Railroad disappeared a long time ago).

The thing of it is, it’s how the Romans would have built a railroad bridge. Literally: it’s modeled on Roman aqueducts. So even in 1847, it was backward-looking technology. Bridges were the way structural engineers first made their mark in this country, but this is famous for – from an engineer’s perspective – the wrong reasons.

I’m glad it’s a landmark, but I feel no need to go see it in person.