Not Just Structure

The vast majority of these posts have focussed on structural details and failures, and most of the rest have been about architecture. There are other pieces of buildings, of course:

That’s the front of an abandoned boiler Mona came across during a site visit. A cast-iron front and doors, and full of pipe…these things tend to stay in place after they’ve been decommissioned because they are so heavy and take so much work to disassemble or cut apart that it’s easier to just pretend they don’t exist.

After I saw the text cast into the front, I spent a few minutes looking for a boiler manufacturer named Thewells & Newton before I realized it was The Wells & Newton Co. They appear to have been a decent-sized, local company that, among other work, provided equipment to the New York schools around the turn of the 20th century. This notice gives a nice history, including the Eldridge Street location memorialized in iron on this boiler.

I admit, I have a soft spot for manufacturers who advertise themselves as “engineers and contractors.”