Little And Big, Blurred

From the New York Public Library album of photos of the IRT subway construction, a 1901 photo unhelpfully titled “New York City subway construction”:

It appears someone left the cake out in the rain. Let me try to improve the appearance:

A little better, but still not great. The combination of the low-res scan and the deterioration is unfortunate, because I would love to be certain about where this is. The subway construction is under Broadway, and the elevated crossing at a diagonal leaves only possible location: Broadway crossing Columbus Avenue at 66th Street, with the Ninth Avenue el overhead. The line of the original IRT didn’t cross the Second and Third Avenue els, and it crossed the Sixth Avenue el at right angles at 42nd Street, and at nearly right angles at 53rd Street where the Sixth Avenue headed west to join the Ninth Avenue. I suspect we’re looking south, because the building to the northwest of the diagonal intersection is shown in a 1907 fire map as having a stone facade (like the one on the right) while the one at the southeast was a concrete-frame garage.

Anyway, we have a series of wood beams holding up, with chains something exposed by the beginning of the excavation. I’m not sure what that is, but the fact that it’s not a pipe of some kind (its cross-section is not round) makes me think it’s part of the streetcar system.

Above, at the el, we have a huge temporary steel frame, with a full-height knee-brace, to support a huge permanent steel frame where the column is being undermined by the excavation. The higher, narrower frame is the permanent el structure; the lower, wider frame is the one installed by the contractor to support the first. It looks like the temporary frame moved the load from the el maybe 15 feet to the west, away from the excavation. Note that the reason for the permanent frame is that the portion of the el structure to the left is a bridge over Broadway, where no columns could be used.