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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

The diagonal stays were not original and were added after a wind storm took down the original deck. Ooops.

Still pretty, though.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.”

• st paul building new york

I’ve mentioned this building – long since demolished, and where my father had an office circa 1955-1960 – a few times.

• nazi zombie ss tower

What the fuckity fuck are you talking about?

• street photography new york

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.

• freaky statue

Must be a Lady Gaga fan.

• brooklyn water towers sunset

I had, and have managed to lose, an actual tie from the 50s with “sunrise over Miami Beach” hand-painted on it.

• lenticular truss

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• chicago building looks like a screw

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.

• deco skyscraper big city

Yoda: “Streamlined your building is.”

• wrought iron bracket bridge

Nice try, but the March Madness assigning of brackets for competitive bridge is still a month off.

• non ductile concrete buildings

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• polar bear peeking over top

Uh…my avatar is not “peeking.” She…I mean he…I mean she…is presenting.

• flat paper buildings

Watch out for the lines!

• train coming out of subway tunnel

Paging Doctor Freud! Paging Doctor Freud!

• island layout cartoon

That’s not a nice way to treat the urban planners.

• 1904 irt subway map

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• straight lines architecture

Someone objects to the use of faggy french curves.

• non-ductile concrete buildings in christchurch

(A) Hey, someone actually reads what I write. (B) You’ve already asked about that.

• foggy city street

So, so romantic.

• bow bridge

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• the core of city new york

Don’t let the tour guides fool you. It’s Maspeth.

• famous modern structure between 1900

Between what? I’m not a fucking mind-reader.

____________

*The violence! I must clutch my pearls!

This will not end well.

I’ve never been in a classroom at a Catholic college before. There was a little man – maybe a foot high – nailed to the wall next to the blackboard. I decided against using him as a chalk-holder.

The list of tickertape* parades has its amusements. Wrong-way Corrigan? Einstein? The Knights of Pythias? WTF?

This cameraman was standing directly in front of my office front door.

*I regret that they were not renamed greenbar parades in the 1970s.

Crane was an army officer and led a relatively uneventful life, devoid of headless horsemen and Johnny Depp. He did, however, once meet Washington Irving.

The end of the movie has a montage of the future, after the action has ended: a graveyard in Brooklyn (one that does not exist, BTW), with a beautiful view of lower Manhattan, falls into decay as the city grows. The CGI was based on real photographs, which Gothamist has been nice enough to collect.

Personally, I like all of the views after it’s recognizably modern New York, which is to say after the Brooklyn Bridge was built, but I think the most romantic views are from the 30s, after the art deco skyscrapers were built and before the chunkier modern towers:

What do you call it when looking at the same thing gives you different results at different times?