If you walk around the city enough, you become familiar with a series of buildings – or objects that are seemingly buildings – that have no windows. There are several different types, and it’s worth a few minutes to understand the differences between them. In some cases it’s obvious what is inside, in some cases it’s not; they are all functioning pieces of infrastructure and therefore, for the most part, off limits to most people.
Today, a couple of pictures that I shot some time ago. First: the Cliff Street Substation on the pedestrianized remnant of Cliff Street north of Fulton Street:
Second, the Greenwich Substation at West 13th Street and Greenwich Avenue:
As the name suggests, they are basically electric plants, containing equipment to convert high-voltage AC current, which is good for transmitting over long distances, to medium-voltage DC current, which is what the subway trains run on. (Note that the subway electricity is only “medium voltage” on the scale of power transmission, and is very high voltage indeed when we’re discussing fragile objects like people’s bodies.) These Art Deco substations were built in the 1930s as part of the Independent (i.e., city-owned) system, for the Eighth Avenue line, which runs under Greenwich Avenue and under Fulton Street.
We worked on a midtown substation years ago – a facade project with Jablonski Building Conservation – so I got see a bit of how they are built. Basically, what you see on the street is a big masonry-clad steel-framed box, and inside of it is a separate structure that holds all the important equipment. Disconnecting the exterior from the interior is safer than using a normal building and it also frees the exterior for architectural expression, which I think you get to see at Greenwich Avenue. Cliff Street has some nice brickwork and that great signage, but it’s pretty much a box…with a twin uptown.
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