Multiple Eras

The picture above nicely encapsulates an issue we deal with on a daily basis. That’s the northwest corner of Chambers Street and Broadway, taken from the west (down Chambers) looking northeast.

I took that picture five years ago to use as the background for an ad we ran until last year. For the ad, we had an artist photoshop our contact information onto the blank brick wall in the center, so that it looked like it had been painted there.

The tall building is the Broadway Chambers Building of 1899, a fine example of a first-generation skyscraper. The glass facade to its left is the back of a 2010 condo facing Broadway, the taller buildings in the foreground on Chambers Street date from the mid-1800s, and the low building with the white and black parapet is from the 1920s. This mix includes a steel frame, a concrete frame, brick bearing walls, brick curtain walls, architectural terra cotta, glass curtain walls, wood-joist floors, and a cast-iron facade. In other words, this is an unremarkable block in lower Manhattan.

The challenge in old-building engineering in New York isn’t that any given building type is so obscure. It’s that we have so many types jammed up against one another and without knowing the specifics of the buildings on a given block there’s no way to predict which are the important buildings. Sometimes it’s the cast iron loft, sometimes it’s the older buildings, sometimes it’s the old skyscraper. They’re all important in their own way and they each have their own requirements for analysis and design. As a result, we have reference materials from every decade between the 1820s and the present and we use them all.