That picture shows the north side wall of 109 Washington Street, which is one of the last remnants of Little Syria, the residential neighborhood at the foot of the lower west side. The neighborhood was doomed by commercial development, and was eaten away by big office buildings, the Battery garage, and the World Trade Center. …
The title of this post is recycled from a talk I gave 16 years ago, “Inadvertent Structural Action in Traditional Buildings; or Why Hasn’t That Fallen Down Yet?” That talk was about how buildings that were constructed without structural design are often stronger than we think they are. The picture above is not that, but …
That’s a view of the west side of Broadway at Thomas Street. There are a couple of nice old loft buildings on the left (the one with the fire escape has a pretty good cast-iron front), an old office building on the far left, a modern apartment house in the background that is somewhere on …
This missing building is pretty much in line with my previous examples, but there are some interesting details. First, given the width of the lot, I’d guess that there were two small buildings demolished to create that vacant lot. It’s a busy block and always has been: that’s the old Siegel-Cooper Store on the right …
First, if you’re not reading Tom Leslie’s blog, Architecture Farm, you should be. He has a knack for making architectural theory comprehensible even to engineers. Tom and I got to know each other through the Construction History Society of America and, despite the fact that we agree on all the major points, have twice participated …
