The title of the 1890 photo above is “Four trains passing Little Falls.” That’s a town on the Mohawk River in upstate New York, about halfway between Utica and Amsterdam. The location tells us that this is the main line of the New York Central Railroad, but doesn’t answer the basic question of why would …
That odd round building in the photo above was the first time I encountered a structure that was a designed mix of wrought-iron and masonry. It’s the Gasholder House in Troy, New York. I was introduced to it when I was a student, not in an engineering class, but by a history professor, Tom Carroll. …
Binghamton, New York, is one of the few decent-sized cities in the state that’s off the path of the traditional transportation spine: New York-Albany-Buffalo. That inverted L path (north from NYC to Albany, west to Buffalo) was created by nature (the Hudson River is the first leg, the Mohawk River and its valley through the …
The picture above shows the Valkyrie III, the UK challenger in the 1895 America’s Cup races, in dry dock at the Erie Basin in Brooklyn, on August 24, 1895. And that sentence is a summary of a lot of information. First, the America’s Cup: it’s race between sailing yachts, conducted at irregular intervals since 1851. …
I got sucked into a discussion about Oriel Chambers (photo above by Matěj Baťha), an 1864 office building in Liverpool with very open facades, starting here: First, obviously, Oriel Chambers is a fantastic building. Nothing I say here should be construed to mean that I think anything else. The word “skyscraper” is quite subjective, and …
