That’s the machine room for the very old elevator in an even older building. The building is an 1880s rowhouse on the Upper West Side converted to commercial use; the elevator was, I think, installed around 1910. Note “Up” and (faded) “Down” over the two things (switches, I think) at the top of the panel. …
I mentioned an odd number (16 feet, 8 inches) yesterday as a reasonably common width for a New York rowhouse. It’s worth a moment to explain why. The standard lot in the numbered grid portion of Manhattan – i.e., everything laid out after 1811 – is nominally 25 feet wide along the street and 100 …
Walk down a side-street on the Upper East Side, find a row of Old-Law Tenements… Number 405 is part of the row, but has had its facade ripped off and replaced as part of a modernization. Number 411 – the fourth building from the left, with the brown first floor – is probably closest to …
The Statue of Liberty contains a wrought-iron frame designed by Gustave Eiffel, one of the finest engineers of the nineteenth century. It sits on…a block. A fancy block, as it turns out, with a fairly complex structural design, and an architectural design by Richard Morris Hunt. But a block. Most people in the US (and …
The Manhattan Life Insurance Building at 66 Broadway is one of those early skyscraper that wasn’t something enough. It was the tallest building in the world for five years, taking the record from Chicago’s Masonic Temple and losing it to the Park Row Building, but somehow it’s barely remembered even among people who have some …
