Sometimes it’s easier to see things when you’re unfamiliar with the terrain. I felt like there were a lot of plain lessons about the way cities work visible in downtown Detroit, not necessarily because those issues only exist there but because I don’t know the individual buildings and streets, so I could focus easily on …
As I was heading to dinner Detroit last Tuesday, I happen to pass an interesting building. My first thought was that it was the entrance to a demolished theater. It’s a little hard to tell from my photo, but that building is surrounded by a large empty lot. A lot of old theaters have “neck” buildings, …
I recently came across the picture above and the ones below, which do a good job showing the state of Fort Ticonderoga circa 1902. (Actually, came across them again, as I used one here six years ago.) There is a complete fort at the site today, and that is the structure we are currently working …
That weird structure is the Parachute Jump at Coney Island, an amusement ride that opened at the 1939-1940 Worlds Fair and was moved to Coney from Flushing afterwards. (I wrote it about it: here.) In 1978, when the HAER survey of it was made, it had been abandoned for ten years and Coney Island itself …
Thanks to great work – and, I expect, enormous effort – on the part of APTI in general and Janet Bascom specifically, The Structures of Skyscrapers is now available on Amazon. If you read this blog and would like to see me make longer and better-organized arguments, without typos, this is the book for you. …
