Location and Purpose

From 1932, “The Kips Bay Station, with a capacity of 2,450,000 pounds of steam an hour, is the largest and most modern central station steam generating plant in the world.”

The station was a steam-generating plant, located on the East River at 36^th Street, decommissioned and demolished in the late 1980s and early 90s. It was not an electric plant: it generated high-temperature, high-pressure steam for distribution through an under-street network to buildings that bought it rather than creating their own steam. Obviously the steam was used for heating, but it was also used in absorption chillers to provide air-conditioning. You can still purchase steam from a utility in much of Manhattan and there are still buildings that do so.

The plant, like nearly all of Manhattan’s old (and mostly decommissioned) power plants, was located on the water for a reason. The plants were all originally built to burn coal for power. Those that survived in use through the 1960s were converted to oil, but before that the amount of fuel needed for a plant like this made coal delivery by barge the only practical solution. That crane in front of the smokestack was there for coal deliveries.

Two other comments. First, this plant was built in 1926 and even that late a utilitarian building still got a reasonably fancy architectural treatment…if you ignore the huge smokestack and huge crane. Second, because of the location and the westward angle of the photo, we’ve got the Empire State Building in the background on the left and the Chrysler Building in the background on the right.