There are obvious forms of observation bias, such as thinking that because nearly every building I see has some serious damage that they all do. If I’m looking at a building professionally, it’s usually because there’s something wrong with it. The photo above shows a more subtle version. That’s the station at Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street, part of an interchange between the Eighth Avenue subway lines, the Sixth Avenue lines, and the Queens line of the IND. In other words, the B and D trains stop there as they move east from Eighth Avenue to Sixth Avenue, and the E stops there as it moves from east-west travel between Eighth Avenue and Queens and north-south travel on Eighth Avenue. (As a side note, there is a fundamental difference between the organization of the two early privately-built subway systems, the IRT and BMT, and the later city-built IND. The first two have trunk lines with branches at each end; the latter is a series of main lines that are interconnected at various points.)
The station was constructed in the 1930s, long after wide-flange steel sections were commercially available. A lot of the steel we see from the 30s is single-piece sections, as opposed to the riveted built-up column in the photo. Heavier sections in the 30s were often still built-up, as here, but it doesn’t feel like that to me because such a very large percentage of the built-up steel I see is earlier.
