The Times has a nice gallery up based on the city’s 1980s series of tax photos. Every single building, every single lot, available at the city archive web site. Seen above, my elementary school some 5 years after I had graduated.
Open stairwells are problematic in terms of fire spread and are wasteful of space but they are oh so beautiful.
The picture above is a storefront on the Upper West Side. The building in question was constructed in 1899 and is seven stories tall, which make it quite likely that the structure consists of masonry bearing walls and wood-joist floors. The remarkable thing about the picture is that the big riveted built-up plate girder supporting …
The Battery Park City master plan created a pleasant park around the South Cove, an indentation in the landfill shoreline that, unlike the North Cove, is too small to be a harbor. It’s technically the north end of Wagner Park (named after Robert Wagner) and is a little over twenty years old. Much of the …
I recently discussed the wind-bracing of slender wings on high-rise office buildings. Given that these wings were difficult to build, made parts of the buildings sort of funny-looking, and were more expensive than solid blocks of buildings, why do they exist? Why were they built at all? The picture above is (again) the view out …
