No matter how many buildings you’ve seen, you can always find something that will surprise you. The picture above is not an underwater shot from the Titanic, it’s the cellar of a circa-1900 rowhouse. This was a house of some pretension when first built. As in most wider rowhouses, the stair-hall partition is a wood-stud bearing wall, cutting the span of the joists from 25 feet down to about 18. Usually, the bottom floor of that partition in a house consists of masonry piers supporting heavy wood beams. Sometimes it’s timber posts supporting wood beams. A few times, I’ve seen brick piers suppo ..read more

In January 1958, Angelo Rizzuto took this photo from the east side of Lexington Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, looking west toward Park Avenue. The block bounded by those four streets was at that time entirely empty except for this old rowhouse at 620 Lexington. It was demolished soon after, and that block is the site of 399 Park Avenue, completed in 1961. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/70300.70337 Holdouts like this are not very common, but they happen. In this case, it was the pharmacy that insisted it was going to stay until the end of its lease; it’s hard to tell if the apartments abo ..read more

This is the Bradbury Building, an 1893 office building in downtown Los Angeles: It’s a nice enough facade but really nothing special. A lot of people are familiar with the building because of its inside: The office space is a rectangle donut around the atrium, connected by balconies rather than hallways. The original elevators are open cages rising up through the space and connecting the balconies. I first became aware of the building’s existence in 1982, watching Blade Runner. Given how spectacular the space is, the obvious question is why don’t we have more such buildings? There are sever ..read more

I had not seen a close-up of the demolition of the Wanamaker Store at Broadway and 9th Street until I stumbled across this one, taken in September 1956 by Angelo Rizutto. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/70000.70018 This shows the partially-intact second floor, marked on the facade by a water-table, and the last remnants of the third floor facade and interior framing. The building had burned that summer, and was being demolished. The store had been built in 1862 as the uptown branch of A. T. Stewart and had the structure you would expect from the 1860s: cast-iron street facades, brick walls on the ..read more

One of my favorite views of tall buildings, again: in the fog. New York Bay has more than it’s fair share of fog, and sometimes it creeps back up into the city. We had one of those days last week ..read more

In 1941, Robert Moses demolished the New York Aquarium, located in Castle Clinton in Battery Park, in a fit of pique over losing his fight to build a bridge from the Battery to Brooklyn. (That project became the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.) The aquarium was a three-story building on top and around the old fort, which was incorporated into its base. The park itself was mostly closed from 1941 to 1951 due to the slowness of construction of the tunnel and the underpass connecting West Street and South Streets. The lack of speed was partly the result of materials, skilled laborers, and equipment bein ..read more

I’ve been trawling in the HABS index and came across a survey from 1974 of the Bronx portion of the Third Avenue elevated. After the rest of the line (in Manhattan and the very southernmost bit of the Bronx) was closed and demolished in the early 1950s, the portion from 149th Street to Gun Hill Road continued in use until 1973. For the last few years of its existence, the Bronx portion was known as the IRT 8 train. It connected to the 2 train on each end. It was built, like the other els, with some flair in the steel design, even though it was serving areas filled with industry and low-cost h ..read more

From Angelo Rizzuto in 1950, “Broad Street.” It doesn’t instantly look familiar because we’re all used to seeing the north end of Broad Street, where the Stock Exchange and Federal Hall are, or views looking up the street to the north. This is the sound end of Broad, as it runs down to the East River. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca. The FDR Drive hadn’t yet been extended south of the Brooklyn Bridge, so the street really does run right down to South Street along the river bulkhead. The building past South Street on the right, behind the Sabrett’s billboard, is the old ferry terminal now us ..read more

This detail takes some explanation. This is from a late-1800s factory building. It’s a bearing-wall building with heavy-timber floors, and it appears to have been constructed to code for that type and era. There were a number of almost-modern code requirements that end up being responsible for that detail. I generally think about wrought-iron and steel framing combined with terra cotta tile-arch floors as the first real fire-rated floors in New York, but heavy timber was a contemporary to iron. It was used almost exclusively in industrial buildings, which is why it’s more common in cities and ..read more

Not all infrastructure is hidden – some, like elevated railroads, is more visible and audible than most people would prefer – but it often is and that can make it easy to forget. “The Cloud Under the Sea” by John Dzieza, with visuals by Kristen Radtke and Go Takayana, is an in-depth discussion of a topic that’s niche even by the standards of infrastructure geeks. The article is about the breakage and repairs of the underwater cables that carry communications – these days, the internet – from continent to continent, island to island. These are fiber-optic cables, carrying information as light t ..read more