Our inspections tend to be very close up – one of my first, in 1988, had me lying on the floor in an abandoned building with my arm, up to the shoulder, inside a hole in the wall, trying to get the sense of a beam-to-column connection by touch – but sometimes long-distance tools help. The picture above shows some random rowhouses on the Upper West Side as seen from Google Earth. The resolution is good enough to tell which side of each party wall has the fireplaces and chimneys but also which are active (A) and which are inactive (B).
I’m not going to use any information gathered this way for an entire analysis, but another tool to gather information is always helpful.
