That pleasant ivy-covered campus above is the machine shop of the Merchants Despatch Transportation Company circa 1906, in East Rochester, New York. Merchants Despatch was founded as a rail freight service and later moved into providing refrigerated rail delivery of perishables. In the 1880s when it began the new service, “refrigerated” meant an insulated boxcar with ice inside. The shops were built in 1887 to constructed refrigerated boxcars, AKA reefers, for the New York Central and other railroads. So that’s only about twenty years of ivy growth, which is quite impressive.
Despite dealing with a product that was a leading technology of the era, the inside of the shop shows that the building’s construction and operation was fairly primitive.
Ford hadn’t yet revolutionized the American factory, so we’ve got a bunch of men working at their individual machines running drill presses, lathes, saws, and other equipment, with piles of work on the floor. I’m a fan of belt drives (although the pre-OSHA bare pulleys and gears give me the creeps) and this is an interesting layout: instead of one long shaft running the long axis of the building to provide power to the belts, we have a series of short shafts running across the narrow direction. Here’s another view:
That’s a whole lot of latheing going on. Here’s a close up on the wood-and steel roof trusses, with bonus supports for the belt pulleys and what appears to be a track for some kind of hanging transporter.
A few thoughts come to mind looking at these pictures. First, you can work up the scale of complexity in technology. In other words, the reefer cars of the early 1900s were more technologically-complex objects than the tools in this shop. If you couldn’t work up the scale, technology could not advance: new tech is always first built using old tech.
Second, closely related to the first point, don’t get fancier than you need to be. There was no reason for the shops to have structure of greater complexity than brick bearing walls supporting truss roofs, and so they did not.
Third: Things change. The secondary structure supporting the various pulleys for the belts looks like it’s been altered at least once, and the shop floor is undifferentiated space to allow machines to be relocated or replaced as needed. This shop was in use until 1970, and I’m willing to bet that the belt-drove machines were replaced with electric machines in the mid-century. When the shops closed they were probably running a mixture of machines from the 1930s to the 1960s, inside buildings constructed in the 1880s.
Five years ago, I ranted a bit about the Star Trek Fallacies. I listed three of them, but the discussion above suggests a fourth: the world isn’t created anew, every so often or ever. Anywhere I’ve ever been there is a range of building ages, conditions, and types. Even the houses in a new suburban development vary: not all of the floor plans will be equally successful, not all of the construction proceeded equally smoothly, not all of the houses have equal access to the parks, or have equal protection from the noise and pollution of the main roads, and so on. Buildings are repaired and altered, and so change over time. Most importantly, building contents change far more frequently than buildings, so there’s always a mismatch in style and technology visible.
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