What is beautiful is in the eye of the beholder, except that my taste is always right. This is the Queensboro Bridge in the final stages of construction: the steel is all in place and the roadway is the only thing missing. You’ve got the portal frames that connect the main trusses overhead, the main trusses on the sides, and the deck girders and their wind bracing at the bottom.
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.
…it’s the answer.
The Queensboro under construction, circa 1907*:
The Q is a cantilever truss. That’s a specific category but the name tells you the most important aspect of the category: the spans may look vaguely like the spans of a suspension bridge, but they are not continuous. There’s no such thing as half of a suspended span (unless you’re interested in looking at a collapsed bridge), but this picture shows you half a cantilever span. Half a span with a big-ass crane sitting on its end, to be exact.
What you can’t see is that the Manhattan tower is off to the left of the frame and its half of the span is also under construction, reaching out toward the Roosevelt Island** span half you see here, to anthropomorphize a bit.
Also, CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK.
* From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York.
**The island was first called Blackwell’s, after a sea captain who owned it, then Welfare, because it was where the city’s poorhouse, asylum, and free hospital, then Roosevelt, after FDR.
From the attic of an 1868 school:
True engineered trusses existed in the U.S. in 1868, but a lot of buildings – particularly schools and churches – were still being built with more primitive undesigned trusses supporting roofs over auditoriums.
This isn’t a terrible design. Note the wrought-iron hanger rods extending down from the apex of the main gable and the secondary triangles. The doubled top chord is, depending on your view, useless or a sign of the carpenter’s inability to create a connection that would transfer load properly.
But let’s discuss engineering logic. Empirically, these trusses have performed well for over 140 years. That’s success.
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.
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.”
Shortly before sunset, seen looking west from Long Island City (Queens) to midtown Manhattan, March 10, 1932.
The Queensboro Bridge soars overhead (clunk, clunk, clunk), the Chrysler looks slightly taller than the Empire State because of the angle, and the East River looks almost inviting.
The High Line was an unlikely success. A large part of it runs through an as-yet-ungentrified fringe of Chelsea, it’s a park that by its nature cannot have active play fields, and urban/landscape theory says big changes in grade tend to isolate people. In this case it worked. So, of course, we have the imitation ideas. There’s talk in Philly of doing something similar with an abandoned Reading Railroad viaduct, there’s talk of a Low Line in a trolley yard under the Williamsburg Bridge, and there’s talk of using an abandoned Long Island Railroad viaduct in southern Queens.
I’ve got nothing against the idea, but I think it’s doomed to failure if it’s built, and getting built is unlikely. Chelsea is a densely-populated tourist destination with or without the High Line, while the neighborhoods in Queens with the abandoned half of the Rockaway line are semi-suburban and frankly boring. The idea is to create a destination, but it’s going to have the reverse of bang for the buck. Of course, it’s also possible to run north-south railroad (LIRR or subway) tracks on that viaduct, which is something Queens desperately needs, but that lacks coolness.
Given that people keep getting to this blog by searching for Gustave Lindenthal, it’s time to discuss the only major road bridge to Manhattan that’s not a suspension bridge. The Queensboro Bridge – and no, I don’t know what happened to the “ugh” that should be at the end of the name; and no, I’m not fucking calling it the Edward I. Koch Bridge – is a cantilever truss with four towers: one in Queens, one in Manhattan, and Two on Roosevelt Island. Lindenthal designed this with a bunch of unnamed engineers from the NYC Bridge Department. In the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century, this type of bridge was the runner up to the traditional (i.e., catenary) suspension bridge for the maximum possible length of span. The other East River Bridges had to be single spans and so were built as suspension bridges; the Queensboro could be a cantilever truss by taking advantage of Roosevelt Island.
Because cantilever trusses have their maximum bending moment at the towers, the truss chords are typically sloped to minimize changes in the forces – the same idea as the shape of a lenticular truss, but following a very different moment curve. This makes their profile vaguely resemble a suspension bridge, but the structure is working very differently. Suspension cables must be continuous to carry tension, while you can actually cut apart a cantilever truss at the midspan (where the bending moment and shear are both zero) and nothing will happen.
Unfortunately, the Queensboro is not visually pleasant. Cantilever trusses are generally difficult to make good-looking, although it has been done, with the Firth of Forth rail bridge as the primary example:
A possible use for the huge indoor space at the Kingsbridge Armory would be a velodrome. It’s a nice idea: we could stand to have a non-professional sports venue, and it’s a use that actually makes sense in that building. Probably won’t happen.
There’s an outdoor velodrome near where I grew up. I can’t say what it’s like now, after the renovations, but it was a piece of crap in the ’70s.
I somehow missed the Tour De Crap in Flushing. Until I was 4, we lived on Sanford Avenue; from then until I was 17, we lived on Beech Avenue. Not in the area shown – that’s the eastern, more suburban part of Flushing. We lived Near Main Street and Kissena Boulevard, roughly 140th to 142nd Street, in western, downtown Flushing. Not much prettier, but at least there were no McMansion-wannabes.
From Gothamist, a steer escapes from an abattoir in Queens:
And the only possible background music:
