Everyone seems to love covered bridges, but profile photos of them tend to be very boring: you’re looking at a plank wall. For most bridges, that’s one of the best angles. In any case, that’s the Bunker Hill Bridge over Lyle Creek, in Catawba County, North Carolina. And the inside view shows why I’m writing …
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. …
One of the sources I’m mining for both images and topics is the alphabetic index to the HABS and HAER collection. I looked at it today and “fink trusses” jumped out at me, so here’s a fink truss roof in the machine shop of the New Haven Railroad, in New Haven. It was constructed in …
The picture above shows the International Bridge between Fort Erie, Ontario, and Buffalo, New York. It’s a wrought-iron Pratt through-truss bridge constructed in 1873 and still in use for its original purpose of carrying trains. The bridge is in three sections: a series of truss spans across the main channel of the Niagara River, a …
Just down the block from that Federal style house I was taking about are some fancier-than-usual tenements. (Also, in the background, you’ve got a nice view of downtown about half a mile away, but that’s incidental to my point.) I want to talk about the one on the left, on the corner of the block. …
