A bit north of the Cliff Street Substation, and a bit south of the Greenwich Substation is a building with a small handful of small windows but a lot of big louvers, at Canal and Washington Streets:
There’s no real architectural link between this and the substations, although the brick is similar. The designer here didn’t fully commit to the modern (or moderne) aesthetic, so there are details like that little row of corbeled arches supporting nothing much. The overall peculiar shape of the building is better suited to modernism than it is to historicist styles.
If you’re on the street looking at it, wondering what it is, you can turn your head to the left, where there’s a similar building at the far end of the pier that starts at West Street, a short block away. And then there are two more in Jersey City on the other side of the Hudson River, one at the end of a pier and one a short distance inland. All four are vent shafts to force air through the Holland Tunnel, and are critical to the tunnel’s operation. Because of the width of the Hudson this close to its mouth at the harbor, Holland was the longest underwater tunnel in the world when completed, and a relatively early underwater tunnel meant to be used exclusively by motor vehicles. Without a good forced-air ventilation system, the build-up of carbon monoxide from car and truck engines would make the tunnel unusable. I believe that two of the towers supply fresh air and two exhaust used air, but I can’t remember which are which.
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