A 1958 or 59 view of 200 East 42nd Street under construction:
It’s a fairly boring steel-frame, glass-facade office building, remarkable to me for the simple reason that I had my first more-or-less real engineering job there. Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton, later known as TAMS Consultants, a very large transportation and civil-works engineering consulting firm, was headquartered there for quite some time. In the summer of 1984, I was employed at TAMS and spent most of my internship tracking vehicles for two projects. The first was looking at the speed of buses on Manhattan’s east side, a project that eventually, in the very long run, became the First and Second Avenues express bus. That involved riding busses and marking down the time the bus passed major cross streets. The second was counting cars at various intersections in Staten Island for the Environmental Impact Statement for the short-lived Navy Home Port there. Both of those tasks are notable for not requiring much thought on my part, but I enjoyed being out in the field. TAMS was bought by a larger company in 2002, so I have no idea if they still have a presence on 42nd Street.
That’s some fancy scaffolding in the photo, with the steel mostly encased in what looks like a combination of concrete and concrete block. We’ve got another construction site on the far left, on the north side of 42nd Street. I think it’s 666 Third Avenue. The building on the right is the Socony-Mobil Building with it’s “self-cleaning” metal panel facade that doesn’t really self-clean.
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