Thursday, June 20, 2024 – A DAILY JOURNAL OF NEW YORK BUILDINGS & ENGINEERING

By admin

OLD STRUCTURES 
ENGINEERING 
CLOSE-BY
DON FRIEDMAN

THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2024
ISSUE # 1257

OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING

JOURNAL

Our work with old buildings has us studying a lot of different topics in addition to structural engineering – for example, architecture, history, and historic preservation – and we like sharing stories about what we’ve found.
OLD STRUCTURES ENGINEERING

From Angelo Rizzuto, a view of the Brooklyn Bridge from June 1954. It was not taken from Woolworth, as the angle is slightly wrong.

The bridge was in a transition period, with one major renovation just completed and another about to start. Between 1950 and 1954, the bridge underwent it’s most extreme changes: the BMT elevated and trolley tracks were removed, the roadway expanded from two lanes each way (one shared with the trolleys) to three by using the elevated lanes for cars, the mid-width trusses that separated the elevated lanes from the traffic removed, and the formerly low outer trusses raised to the height of the inner trusses. This picture was taken a month after the end of that work, with the pedestrian walkway (center of the deck) reopened. The big space at the end of the bridge isn’t a plaza, it’s where the elevated station had been.

Note how close the bridge deck is to the neighboring buildings on both sides. That wouldn’t last: the next project was the – in my opinion, incredibly ill-advised – construction of ramps to connect the bridge to the highway along the East River. Because of the change in elevation, the buildings abutting the bridge on both sides, including the domed World Building on the right, were demolished so the ramps could double back on themselves in plan. This simultaneously encouraged people to drive into and through lower Manhattan and deprived the bridge of part of its original context.

Finally, note that little triangular island, with a subway entrance, at the end of the bridge. While not in the direct path of traffic, thanks to the ghost of the elevated station, it shows that traffic engineers were not yet in control.

AT THE MET, TAKE A BREAK FROM THE HEAT

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion

CREDIT 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.

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