Engineers designing bridges for US railroads in the late nineteenth century had a lot of work, as roughly 100,000 miles of new track were built between 1880 and 1900. If you include work performed by US engineers and builders elsewhere, the number is considerably higher. The 1889 Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge, above, is an interesting case: …
I keep harping on the green aspects of building repair and reuse, but it’s always good to see the same idea in a different form. “Lean design: 10 things to do now” by Natasha Watson and published by the Institution of Structural Engineers in the UK is mostly about new construction, but the first two items …
This post began with the picture above, a striking 1880s railroad trestle over a ravine, just downstream of a dam. The text on the photo itself identifies as “Bridge near Encarnacion” but doesn’t say where that is and a Spanish name in the western hemisphere doesn’t narrow the field down much. The Library of Congress …
That rather sober office building is the 1872 Drexel Building at the southeast corner of Wall and Broad Streets, as seen around 1905. When completed, its six stories made it one of the larger buildings on Wall Street, which was a deliberate statement by its owner and main tenant, Drexel, Morgan & Co. Having the …
The New York buildings above are both long gone, as is the bridge. That’s the 1902 second Tombs on the left* and the 1894 Criminal Courts Building** on the right; the bridge between them was to allow prisoners to be transported to and from court without going into the street. The arch is purely decorative: …
