Two Views Of Home

Above, a nice if somewhat generic view of lower Manhattan in October 1937, with the Hudson River and Jersey City in the background. But if you zoom in a bit…

The big building is 90 Broad Street, the current home of Old Structures Engineering. Here’s a March 1936 view looking the other way, with the East River in the background:

The dark building in the center is the Produce Exchange, an early not-quite-skyscraper, although it was tall enough to make it into The Structure of Skyscrapers. But zoom in…

And there we are again. MAD Magazine once had a gag about a guy who claimed he had been reported in the newspapers, and it turned out he had a bunch of clippings of massive crowds (at the beach, at a ball game) and he had drawn an arrow showing where he was in each. Along those lines, it appears that the army was taking aerial photography of Old Structures, seventy years before the firm was founded!