That’s 65 Phila Street in Saratoga Springs, an 1851 wood-frame house that had fallen on hard times. People at the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation have been trying for a very long time to get the building repaired and re-occupied – the best way to ensure an old building’s continued life is to be sure it has a continued use – and it is now nearing completion of structural repairs. The Foundation bought the house in 2021 with the plan of taking responsibility for the repairs, and my understanding is that it will be for sale once all the work is done. My involvement has been quite small ..read more

From 1911, Cass Gilbert’s sketches of his father (top) and himself (bottom): http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ade.2a02719 From the Woolworth Building lobby as completed in late 1912, the grotesque* of Gilbert holding a model of his building: Given that the grotesque is wearing glasses bit not a laurel wreath, a sketch much like the one on the lower right was used as the basis for that grotesque’s head. The grotesques were designed by a caricature artist named Tom Johnson, but I can easily see Gilbert wanting to have his hand in for the representation of himself. The grotesques are all supposed to b ..read more

This October 1952 photo by Angelo Rizzuto is titled “Aerial view of Manhattan” but it most obviously shows the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Like a lot of Rizzuto’s photos, it catches the East River waterfront and adjacent areas in the process of changing, even if it was not clear then how far the changes would go. It also appears to have been taken from a high floor in the Woolworth Buiding. Some of the changes are obvious. The piers along the Manhattan side were almost deserted due to the fall-off in industry and the abandonment of coastal steamers for passenger transpiration. They’d most ..read more

I don’t have an exact date for this photo, but the Temple Bar Building, the three-turreted skyscraper in the center, was constructed 1899 to 1901, so 1900 to 1910 is my guess. (As for how difficult discussing timelines can be, the New York Times article on the building I discuss below states that the photo is from 1895. Can’t be.) The view is looking west down Fulton Street from Hoyt Street, towards downtown Brooklyn. To modern eyes, accustomed to big buildings, the elevated train over Fulton is in some ways the most prominent sight; to whomever wrote the caption, it wasn’t even worth mention ..read more

This map was sponsored by the “Committee of ‘92” and created by Rand McNally as a guide to the city for attendees of the Eleventh International Christian Endeavor Convention in 1892. About 40 percent of the index on the right is transportation related – railroads and ship lines – and the rest is public buildings of various types, including touristy points of interest. There’s a list of hotels on the left, correlated with the states of the attendees, and a comprehensive set of instructiona on getting to Madison Square Garden, where the convention was held. All quite ordinary. The peculiarities ..read more

The title of this 1958 photo by Angelo Rizzuto https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/70400.70474 is “Aerial view of street, possibly Park Avenue, with raised medians separating traffic in each direction, high-rise buildings lining both sides of the street.” That’s definitely Park Avenue looking north from approximately 89th Street: the slope down in the distance starts at 94th Street and the railroad tracks – the approach to Grand Central – emerge from underground at 96th Street. One the tracks are above ground, Park Avenue becomes a significantly less attractive place to live, and the low-rise tenement ..read more

There is absolutely nothing unique about a masonry flat arch serving as a window head, but it’s relatively rare on steel-frame buildings like this 1920s apartment house on the Upper East Side. There are two tip-offs that it’s a real arch and not just a cleverly-hidden lintel: first, the lack of any damage that could come from rust-jacking and, second, the brick joints visible on the underside of the arch, showing that there’s no steel shelf there. We don’t see this detail more often because it’s more expensive than providing loose steel-angle lintels in the masonry and because it requires a s ..read more

This 1952 photo by Angelo Rizzuto is titled “Bdwy winding all thru T-Sq.” and it definitely shows Broadway and Times Square, although I have some quibbles about “winding.” https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca. This view is looking north and a little bit west, probably taken from a window on a high floor of 1450 Broadway, which is at 41st Street. The somewhat gawky and ornate white building on the left is the old New York Times Building which, despite the “Times” signs on the tower, was entirely rental space since the newspaper moved out to a bigger building on 43rd Street in the 1910s. The be-cl ..read more

I like “Why we need a ‘structure first’ approach to existing buildings” by Penny Gowler, which is perhaps not surprising since I’m a structural engineer. I’m going to argue here that Ms. Gowler’s article and my position are just slightly more nuanced than that. Architectural design of new buildings does not start tabula rasa. There are constraints: the site geometry, the local weather, zoning and building codes, and so on. Within those constraints,, however, architects have some freedom to place functions where they want and arrange the future use based on their design concept. This freedom i ..read more

Another great photo from Angel Rizzuto, from August 1952. He was almost certainly looking from the Empire State Building; this is a view north past midtown, Central Park and the Upper East Side, and with Harlem and the Bronx in the distance. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca. The east side of the park is Fifth Avenue, which emerges at the center bottom of the photo on 42nd Street, with 500 Fifth Avenue on the left. When I was a kid, that building had a big “500” painted on the rooftop bulkhead housing its water tank. That sign is now long gone, and it’s not visible in the photo, so it had a s ..read more