The William Matheson Building doesn’t look like a skyscraper to most people today. It’s ten stories tall and the brick curtain wall carried on its steel frame is heavier than a modern curtain wall. Looking at it through the eyes of an average person in 1897, when it was completed, is a different story. In …
I first learned about the growth of the Tribune Buiding on Park Row reading Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen’s book The Skyward Trend of Thought. The fact that the book’s subtitle is “The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper” tells you that it’s a polemic rather than a more straightforward history, which is fine. A lot …
Here’s the best contrast I could find to the heavy bridge at Pearl, Illinois, I talked about recently. That’s the 1889 Smith Avenue High Bridge across the Mississippi River between St. Paul and West St. Paul, Minnesota. That 1905 picture does not give a good sense of the bridge overall – it had 28 spans …
Looking north on Broadway from Dey Street in 1900 is not so very different than the same view today. Most of the buildings are different (the big red-brick building on the left is the Western Union Building, long since replaced by the old AT&T headquarters, but St. Paul’s Chapel is still there, with its colonnade …
Some items that turn up during building investigation are more structural than others. It turns out that mirrored balls go back long before the 1970s, which is when I thought they were invented. Who knew?
