Book Review: The High Girders
There’s a kind of book I think of as “novelists’ history.” Accurate about facts as far as the sources allow,
Journal
Our work with old buildings has us studying a lot of different topics in addition to structural engineering – for example, architecture, history, and historic preservation – and we like sharing stories about what we’ve found.
What The What?
Someone thought this was a good design for the title page of what is actually a quite boring catalog from
It Looked Familiar: Nice Name
Gwen Stacy – AKA Spider-Gwen, AKA The Ghost Spider – sits on a building sign: The top of the Hotel
Not Always Downscale
A random find at the NYPL, the cast-iron facade of the Ridley Building, by the Jackson Iron Works: I love
Problem Geometry
How, exactly, do you connect the top of a wood-framed spire? There are eight diagonal timbers – defining the corners
Little And Big, Blurred
From the New York Public Library album of photos of the IRT subway construction, a 1901 photo unhelpfully titled “New
Boot Scrapers, Part 2: Preventing Ad Hoc
In Chelsea, some fancy cast iron: How do you get the mud, and probably horse manure, off the soles of
The Less Things Change…
From Max Hubacher, May 19, 1961, “Pennsylvania Station, New York”: Obviously Hubacher was more interested in people than in architecture,
Where It Comes From
I’ve written about the Whitehall Building and its extension enough that there’s not much to say about it for this
It Sounded Familiar: The OED Has Let Me Down
Elektra, as Daredevil, ponders the etymology of “Hell’s Kitchen” while beating up a number of goons: Amusingly, the answers she
A Well-Built Mystery
From the NYPL collection of photos of the construction of the original IRT subway, ” Broadway & 62nd Street” from
A Snapshot In Time And Space
Max Hubacher, January 28, 1943, “The Long Island R.R. station in Brooklyn during a snow storm”: That’s the old Atlantic
More Contextual Analysis
Friend of the blog and friend of OSE Nancy Rankin sent this photo, taken out her office window: So we’re
Non-Negligible
Yesterday’s storm was far from the worst New York has ever seen, but it was a good reminder of how
A Threat Under Your Feet
Something I’ve mentioned in passing a few times, but have not discussed in any depth, is the prevalence of nineteenth-century
Passing By
We’re due for another big storm tonight and tomorrow, so let’s go with a photo of some blue sky from
It Looked Familiar: Bad Practice
From a 1940 Batman comic, Robin battles with gangsters on a construction site: Starting at the upper left panel and
It’s Catching
One of the ways in which wood damage can be different from damage to other materials is that the damage
A New Series, Scraped
This is the first of what I can guaranty will be an irregularly-published series on the bootscrapers of New York.
Logistics
From the NYPL’s “Album of photographs depicting the construction of the Broadway line, New York City Subway” we have, from