Seeing as how we’re north of 1100 blog posts (as of March 2019), it’s probably too late for a Frequently Asked Questions post, but here it is anyway. This is the blog of Old Structures Engineering. Most of the posts are written by me (Don Friedman) but not all. Topics include pretty much anything touching …
As seen from a scaffold at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street, the extreme slenderness of the new super-talls really does set them apart from older skyscrapers.
A fireplace in a circa 1900 mansion. The floors are terra cotta tile arches supported on steel beams. The fill layer that runs over the arches has been temporarily removed during the current construction, leaving the tops of the beams standing proud above the terra cotta surface. The beams are supported by brick bearing walls. …
The New York General Post Office used to be located at the south end of City Hall Park, when most of the business district of the city was south of there. Around 1900, when Penn Station was planned as the first direct rail connection between Manhattan and the west, plans were made to move the …
I have occasionally talked about the tools we use in our work, but it’s been a while and I felt the need to discuss our latest piece of office equipment. It’s a meter-long stick. More specifically, a selfie stick. So it’s a bluetooth-enabled stick. When I first started doing field work, way back in the …
Those are two very fancy and basically identical carriage houses on East 77th Street. They’re on the tony block between Madison and Park Avenues, but that wasn’t such a nice address in 1898 when they were completed: Park Avenue was at that time still Fourth Avenue, with a railroad cut (with some sections of tunnel) …
The Original Tenants Did Not Care About Architecture Read More »
