That’s discussion elsewhere about immigrants here, not discussion here about immigrants somewhere else. I’m at the 8th International Congress on Construction History this week, where I hope to learn a lot about past design and construction practice. I have certainly learned much at the previous congresses I’ve attended.
I’ll be presenting on immigrant engineers in New York, with “engineer” defined quite broadly to capture some famous and worthy candidates. That topic combines a couple of different threads: New York’s status as a center of immigration to the US, and the sheer quantity of construction that has taken place here. The first has been consistently true for a long time: I have a graph showing the city’s population and the percentage of the city’s population that was born outside of the US, and since 1850 the percentage has never dipped below 18 percent.
The second is a little harder to quantify, but it includes, among other things, nine bridges and tunnels that have claim to some “longest” record, roughly a million extant buildings, and nine different record holders for the tallest building in the world. The people I’m talking about were involved with a number of those records.
The people I’m talking about are also those who were to some degree successful, and a few were enormously successful. It’s important to remember that when they started they were as raw as any of us ever were, regardless of how famous they are now. I think that two portraits illustrate this nicely. First, Gustav Lindenthal in 1909, after the Queensborough Bridge was complete and the Hell Gate Bridge (the thumbnail above) was about to start:
Second, Lindenthal in 1880, as a 30-year-old a year away from starting his own bridge-design practice:
The first portrait shows a successful man known as the Dean of American Bridge Builders. The second shows an unfamous and ambitious young man.
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