Two photos from the NYPL collection on the IRT subway construction, in this case from 1902, both titled “Broadway and 64 St.” Note that the first is labelled January 25, 1902, while the second does not have a date. It’s possible that they were taken on the same day, and the photographer was standing on the little bridge crossing the cut left-right in the second photo when they took the first photo.
A few pieces of this are easy to figure out: Broadway’s diagonal has it crossing Amsterdam (Ninth) Avenue just south of 65th Street, and we see the Ninth Avenue elevated ahead, so we’re looking uptown (north) up Broadway. The pipes crossing the open cut are water and sewer mains for 64th Street: the mains on the side streets, particularly back then, would be smaller than those on the avenues. As expected, the equipment and methods are crude. There appear to be pneumatic hammers in both photos (maybe the same one, moved) at the right end of the foreground pipe in the first photo and and center foreground in the second photo, but there are also hand shovels and wheelbarrows.
The big girder of the elevated structrue has been resuppported on a temporary tripod that extends down to the bottom of the cut. It’s hard to tell with theise low-res photos, but it looks like the tripod might be timber, whihc would nto be overwhelmingly reassuring to me if I were an el rider.
The most interesting temporary work is the pair of king-post truss bridges crossing the cut in the second photo. They’re made of heavy timber with some steel rods, and their purpose is quite clear: the temporary beams supporting the temporary street on either side of the cut are hung from the bridge bottom chords. Once you accept the idea of temporary streets made of wood over an excavation, a detail like this makes perfect sense.
You must be logged in to post a comment.