A large probe exposing a corner column on a 1910s building, from a few summers ago: To be clear: I was standing on scaffolding looking in towards the building. The diagonal thing on the far right is a scaffold brace back to the building. My feet were a bit below a building floor level, but you can't see the beams framing that floor as they are just below the bottom of the view.

December 28, 1911, "Woolworth Bldg." by Irving Underhill: Looks like there might have been a dusting of snow shortly before he snapped the shutter. The limits of blog technology don't permit me to post the full picture in its glory - that's a scaled down version above. So here are some close-ups… First, the moment frames at the base of the tower:

From a small 1940s or 50s apartment house, a probe exposing the loose lintel over a window: The window is at the bottom right, with a pair of 2x4s shoring the lintel at the extreme bottom right corner. The form of the lintel is a pair of channels, within the back-up wythes, toed toward one another to form a rough box; the outboard channel has a shelf angle welded to it to carry the veneer brick.

It's cold with clear skies at the end of day. Which facade material do you want to reflect the colors of the setting sun? Glass Red brick Smooth-finished granite Off-white glazed terra cotta. Hint: The heavily-frosted cake right of center is the West Street Building, 90 West Street.

Bucky Barnes, as Captain America, uses a weird-looking sculpture to bounce his shield past some A.I.M. mad scientists, or possibly beekeepers: Joie de Vivre, a steel sculpture in Zuccotti Park at Broadway and Cedar Street:

This Wurts Brothers photo, "Parks - Bryant Park" is both misleadingly labelled and mysterious. While it's true that the foreground of the photo, and where the photographer was standing, are Bryant Park, the focus seems to me to be the rear facade of the New York Public Library. The mystery is the date, listed on the NYPL website as "1887 - 1964 (Approximate)." Since the library was completed in 1911, I think we can safely rule out 1887 to 1911, leaving 1912 to 1964.

But otherwise, yeah.

Central Park on Monday, in a fog: It seems like a good picture for New Year’s Eve.

Irving Underhill, April 4, 1912, "Woolworth Bldg. iron work": This photo was taken about a month and a half after the photo I put up two weeks ago, and things were moving quickly. The frame was going up, the typical-floor terra cotta facade was going up, and the windows (the scaffold six floors down from the top of the terra cotta construction) were being installed.

This is an unexpectedly slender cast-iron column: The plastic tarps are in a monitor-style skylight above the main roof. The beam on the far left, and the beam at the top of the column are in the plane of the roof. It may look like the column isn't supporting much, but it has a fair share of the skylight weight as well as roof load from off-camera to the left.

From early last week, an inspection on a roof in the rain. On the other hand, a nice view of Central Park, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park South.

Mary Jane Watson and Felicia Hardy go for a bite to eat: A view up Sixth Avenue from Waverly Place: Note the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library in the background.

The New York Public Library gives the date of this photos as "1890 (Questionable)" but that seems roughly correct. It's a view of the foot of Fifth Avenue, where it ends at Washington Square. It's snowing, and there's a reasonable amount of fresh snow on the tree branches, but the sidewalks were cleared long enough ago that there are piles of snow in the gutters. I'm thinking this was the second snowfall in two or three days.

No snow today, but supposedly a decent amount tomorrow. Meanwhile, the 1880s give us two views of Central Park in the winter:

Some holiday cheer: In case you're wondering about the painting, here's the back of the card: We've met Wills's Cigarettes before: publishing a construction photo of the Singer Building as "Famous Invention No. 36: Steel-Frame Building" and a construction photo of (probably) the Flatiron Building as "Engineering Wonders No. 22: Building a 'Skyscraper,' U.S.A." It's good to see that their apparently compulsive need to create lists of things to put on trading cards included art from their own country.

A while back I discussed my feedback-cycle theory of movies and skyscraper design influencing one another. The origin of that theory is Fritz Lang's statement, some hundred years ago, that seeing Manhattan for the first time is what gave him the inspiration for Metropolis. Whatever you may think of the movie, it's hard to deny that it is, in part, a celebration of the visual effect of a dense city of tall buildings, and as such has inspired people who design skyscrapers.

I previously discussed the proposed New York City Existing Building Code, and it's time for an update. When I wrote the previous blog post, in September, we were waiting for the proposed legislation to make it to debate and voting by the City Council, so everything was theoretical and in the future. The news - the reason for today's post - is that the bill, …

As I was walking around, I got a good view of 30 Hudson Yards and its observation deck, The Edge: No comment:

Tony Stark conducts some business while walking: Street view of Broad Street, looking south from Wall Street: The New York Stock Exchange, on the right with the roman temple front, will put up huge banners for important events among the listed companies; the big event in the comic is Doctor Doom taking over the entire world. C'est la vie. Broad Street bends south of Exchange Place - if you could see past the curve, our office is two blocks further down on the right.

One of my favorite jokes: In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. Recycling seems like a clean idea. Instead of throwing things away to rot in a landfill or, worse, not rot in a landfill but simply stay there forever, you reuse the material to cut down on pollution. In reality, the process begins with collecting an enormous amount of garbage.

I've written before about the caisson foundations at the Woolworth Building but here comes the New York Public Library with a fantastic Irving Underhill photo from May 1, 1911: We're looking south with Broadway on the left. The tallest building, partially lost in the haze, is Singer. I believe this photo was taken from a window or the roof at Underhill's studio, which was at the corner of Park Place and Broadway.

This post may not seem like it's about the built environment, but it is. I'll get there eventually, just with a detour. Baba Yaga is a woman with a considerable presence in Slavic, mostly Russian folk tales. I've never been clear on whether she's a witch or even human; she can definitely be terrifying but also sometimes helpful. (Like a lot of folklore characters, she's neither all good nor all bad.) Her most memorable feature is not actually about her, it's about her house.

More than five years ago, I wrote about the see-saw history of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge: built in 1939 with the slender profile that having only plate-girder stiffeners can give you, modified in 1943 with the addition of big stiffening trusses as a reaction to the collapse of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and then back to a slim profile in 2003 with the removal of trusses and the addition of wind fairings based on modern dynamic analysis.

During a rooftop site visit in midtown a couple of years ago, I turned around and there it was: the old General Electric Building. It's sometimes overlooked - it's only 50 stories tall and slender - but it's one the great examples of the romantic-corporate version of Art Deco. Chrysler is psycho-corporate Deco, and Rockefeller Center and the Empire State are simply corporate Deco.

For various reasons, I went to two different elementary schools, even though we lived in the same apartment from when I was 4 until I left for college. The second school, from 4th to 6th grade, was PS24. Here's a picture I took three years ago when I happened to be in the neighborhood: The school I went to is on the right.