The Other Rear Window...

...and get your minds out of the gutter.

The view NW from my office is the previously-posted view of the new construction at the WTC site. The view due west (from the window closest to my desk) is the demolition of the Banker's Trust Trading Building / Deutschbank Building on Liberty Street.

The overview (click to engorge):

The tall building dead center and the similar one to the right are World Financial Center 1 and 2, on landfill west of the WTC site that was created with the excavation spoil from the WTC. The gothic building in front of WFC1 is 90 West Street, the building that was most heavily damaged on 9-11 that was repaired rather than demolished. The "construction" in front of 90 West is the demolition of Deutschbank. This was a 50-story building and is now down to about 6 stories.

The concrete is broken up, the steel is burned off, and the dumpsters full o' crap are hoisted down to the street. This building received some serious structural damaged on 9-11 - a chunk of steel falling from the south tower gouged Deutschbank's north face for about eight stories, cutting a dozen beams and destroying one column - but that was repaired by 12/01. The glass facade was pretty much shattered, and this allowed rain in, and the interior of the building turned into a huge mold farm. Since (a) no one really wanted the building, (b) Deutschbank was able to claim it as an insurance loss, and (c) it's in a prime spot for redevelopment, it's coming down.

The geniuses first hired to demo it managed to create an interior maze (the steel fireproofing is asbestos, so the whole building had to be abated) and cut the standpipes, leading to the deaths of two firefighters in the summer of 2007. The current demo contractor is being ever so careful.

How to Feel Superior

I spent the morning at a client's place. He plays with money for a living and is rich enough to afford a penthouse apartment in Chelsea (prob 1.5 to 2 million), to contemplate spending $100,000 or more on a basically meaningless alteration, to waste a few hours of my billable time, and to buy some expensive-looking art.

But at least my place isn't entirely decorated with Ikea furniture.

Rear Window

The view from one corner of our office. The left is our window jamb, the right is the building across the street. The big thing on the left with the blue tarps at the top is the "Freedom Tower," up to about 300' of its 1776' eventual height; the tall glass building is the replacement 7 WTC; the two cranes crossed in front of 7 WTC are working on the  WTC memorial; the bare area on the right with a single crane is where the new (fourth) train station is going and currently has the 18th C ship archeology. (Click on pic for extra-largey goodness.)

Technology Marches On

I recently had to explain to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission why my office was proposing using GFRC (fiber-reinforced thin-shell concrete) to replace damaged terra cotta ornament on a historic building. The short version is that the original system for some of the ornament was badly flawed, and rather than recreate the flaw 90 years after the fact, we prefer to fix it.

Something I didn't say, and shouldn't have to say to a bunch of preservationists, is that architectural terra cotta in its day was not a precious and highly-regarded material, but rather an inexpensive way to fake carved stone. This is exactly what GFRC is today. So our proposed replacement copied both the appearance and the rationale behind the original while improving structural performance, while a painstaking recreation of the original would have been false in terms of constructive logic and would have the same problems (inadequate handrail capacity at a balustrade, terra cotta exposed to leaks from a poorly-placed gutter) as the original. I'd like to believe the A/E/C community is capable of learning from mistakes and can improve a detail when it has failed.

Cul-cha

I was in Hartford today and walked past the Athenaeum. There were a whole bunch of these built in various cities in the late 19th century, as places to go hear people with opposing viewpoints engage in high-minded debate.

New York never had an Athenaeum, as far as I know. This is not surprising given New Yorkers' self-image. We need a Spartanaeum, a place to go watch people with opposing viewpoints beat the living shit out of each other.

Cultural Circumstances

Mrs. __B and I spent yesterday on a tour of house museums in Queens. One building, the Bowne House, was built circa 1660 and is either the oldest or second-oldest building in NYC. It is, of course, a farmhouse.

One of the strange consequences of living in an area colonized after the "age of exploration" (my god I loved my 5th-grade history class) is that the oldest remnants are farmhouses and a handful of house-sized churches. Nothing much bigger was built back then except a few mostly-earth forts; the longest settled areas are mostly city centers and have been rebuilt multiple times. The Bowne house survived because (a) Flushing wasn't heavily built up before 1900 and (b) the same family lived in in through nine generations from 1660 to 1945.

In longer-settled areas (say, anywhere in Europe) the oldest above-ground remnants are big: castles, forts, pagan temples, cathedrals. Anything smaller had been eroded by thousands of years of social friction.

Cautionary Tales

I took my 4-hour standing scaffold class last night, as required by NYC for anyone who works on scaffolding. (There's a 32-hour class to build scaffold, plus OSHA classes.) Part of the class was watching video of various idiots doing things that, hopefully, everyone in the room already knew they shouldn't be doing.

One video helpfully included pictures of two men's groins after their their testicles had been severed by improperly-fastened safety harnesses.

Here's one worn properly, from an equipment catalog:

D'oh.

Place

I'm an outer-boroughs New Yorker, which is different from being a Manhattanite. (It's like distinguishing between male and female turtles. Outsiders can't tell the difference, but it's important to the turtles.) I grew up in Queens (although no one from Queens thinks of themselves as being from Queens - the old town and developer names are still religiously used, so, accurately, I am from Flushing and a close friend is from...wait for it...Ozone Park) and now live in Brooklyn. One of the ways you can tell if someone is from the outer boroughs is how they refer to Manhattan. It's "the city," as in, "I'm going to meet a friend in the city." This makes sense in a suburban-urban-relationship way, but keep in mind that Brooklyn and Queens each has a population well over two million and would be damned big cities on their own.

Looking just at the Americans who've posted comments here, we've got people from Yonkers, L.A., Milwaukee, and Boston. Among the long, long list of stupidities I was guilty of in my teens and early twenties was arguing with people about where was the best place to live. The short answer that I couldn't see then: where you're happy. Any other answer leads to Yakov Smirnov telling Cleveland jokes and any life path that ends in a shithole like Branson...oops.

The Weather

NYC has just set a record for the wettest March since records have been kept (back to the mid-nineteenth century). This is annoying in general but has a particularly annoying side effect in my field: wet masonry fails at a higher rate than dry masonry. There have been a series of minor to mid-level wall collapses and similar events.


It's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, clay-product rain a gonna fall.

The Brooklyn Bridge and Destiny

The Brooklyn Bridge, as has been discussed by people far more scholarly than me and by people with teredo issues has been a cultural icon since it was built. On a personal level I can say that I would probably have drifted into structural engineering even if I had never seen it, but having read about it far more than I should have when I was 16, it was probably inevitable that I would attend Washington Roebling's alma mater.

The question comes up: why is it famous now? It was not the first record-setting long-span suspension bridge (although it did break the existing record by 50%, which is an achievement in any era), it hasn't had the longest span since 1903, and the hypertrophied NYC self-promotion machine has not made the newer and far bigger Verazanno Narrow Bridge famous as anything other than a pain in the ass for people in Staten Island and Brooklyn.

The answer, in my opinion, is a combination of two factors. First, the bridge is beautiful in its structure. There is a small amount of applied ornament - most obviously, the cornices and gothic arches of the towers - but most people who see it in person fixate on the appearance of the cables. Structures that are beautiful in themselves are rare, and this one is in a location that makes it incredibly prominent.

The standard view from the side used for bridges doesn't usually show the Brooklyn Bridge very well as it emphasizes the heavy masonry towers (click on the picture twice for full-size):

A modern high-res photo gives a better idea of the visual effect of the vertical suspender cables and the diagonal brace cables, even with the Manhattan Bridge standing in the background making rabbit ears over the Brooklyn's head (click on the picture twice for full-size):

It's pictures from the walkway that really give the full effect:

The second reason is less visceral but more obscure. The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883 at a critical moment in engineering history. The State of Liberty - the first tall steel frame in the United States - wouldn't be completed until 1886. The first steel-skeleton skyscrapers would be completed in New York and Chicago in 1890. The Brooklyn Bridge was the last large suspension bridge with masonry towers that visually (and in structural analysis) provide a rigid anchor for the flexible cables and deck. We know now, looking back, that this was the both the last of the old-style bridges, with six years devoted to masonry work before the steel superstructure began, and the one of the first demonstrations of the possibilities of steel construction.

But, hey, I just like it.

Architectural Colonialism 1

The city of Greater New York was created in 1898 when the cities of New York (and its existing absorbed suburbia in the Bronx) and Brooklyn, various towns in (the west half of the old) Queens County, and the farmland and villages of Richmond County merged. Even though Manhattan had less than half the total population, it was running the show, and local autonomy mostly disappeared never to return.

Brooklyn's city hall was renamed "Borough Hall" in a preliminary act of New York superiority. The real offense came later. The nineteenth-century city hall buildings were too small for modern bureaucracy and office buildings were built, first in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn.

Manhattan's Municipal Building, completed in 1915:

Brooklyn's Municipal Building, completed in 1924:

M to B: You get one just like ours, only smaller!

One Wall Street

I fell off this building in 1988 while conducting a facade survey. Safety harnesses are wonderful things.