Technological Weaknesses

Here’s a picture of Platt Street in lower Manhattan in 1907, looking very much as it did in 1850:

Platt runs two blocks from William Street to Pearl Street, with its east end three blocks short of the East River, and that was also true for most, maybe all, of the nineteenth century. In other words, not a major street, and lined with very old loft buildings. It’s a block north of the area that burned in the 1835 fire and well north of the 1845 fire, so these buildings might be 1820s or 30s. Maybe their most prominent features are the iron fire shutters on every window, meant to stop building-to-building fire spread of the kind that made 1835 and 1845 so bad.

The idea was quite simple: when there was a large fire nearby, you’d close the shutters and thereby prevent flaming cinders from entering your building and setting fire to it. Since this was a common way that fire spread building to building, it made sense. It also, as far as I can tell, didn’t work very well. Roofs were flammable, so the shutters couldn’t stop spread, only reduce it, and, more importantly, someone had to actively close them when there was a fire. All technologies have their weaknesses.

This has been a long-winded introduction to a simple statement about this blog: I’m not going to be addressing link rot (including missing pictures) in any systematic fashion. We’ve got two kinds of link rot here: the ordinary kind and our own special brand. The ordinary kind happens because I linked to an outside webpage that no longer exists, or changed its URL, and so the link now goes nowhere. Missing pictures (this post was triggered by the missing pictures in a 2021 post linked to in yesterday’s post) are mostly the result of us changing the server for our website last year. This website, thanks to the blog, has some 3600 pages and over 15,000 images. Some got lost in the moving process. I only have so much time to devote to the blog – my day job is being an engineer at OSE – and I’d rather spend it in writing new posts than fixing old ones.