Freddie Mercury: building

Showing posts with label building. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

New York in colour pictures, 1940s

A corner on west Canal-St., 1942

Chinese store windows, New-York, 1942

Collecting the salvage on Lower East Side, 1942

Corner of Pearl St., 1942

Crowd gathers during Salvage collection in Lower East Side, 1942

The Flatiron Building, or Fuller Building, as it was originally called, is located at 175 Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan, New York City and is considered to be a groundbreaking skyscraper. Upon completion in 1902 it was one of the tallest buildings in the city and the only skyscraper north of 14th Street. The building sits on a triangular island block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway and East 22nd Street, with 23rd Street grazing the triangle's northern (uptown) peak. It anchors the south (downtown) end of Madison Square, and the north (uptown) end of the Ladies' Mile Historic District.

Flatiron Building, c1903

Flatiron Building by Alfred Stieglitz (1903)

Flatiron Building by Edward Steichen (1904)

Friday, June 24, 2011

The Gooderham Building in the 1890s

The red-brick Gooderham Building is historic landmark of Toronto, Ontario, Canada located at 49 Wellington Street East. The Gooderham Building is the focal point of one of Toronto's most iconic vistas: looking west down Front Street towards the building's prominent rounded corner, framed on the sides by the heritage commercial blocks along Front Street, and with the skyscrapers of the Financial District towering in the background.

Monday, June 13, 2011

High Line in the past

The High Line is a 1-mile (1.6 km) New York City park built on a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) section of the former elevated freight railroad spur called the West Side Line, which runs along the lower west side of Manhattan; it has been redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway. The High Line Park currently runs from Gansevoort Street, one block below West 12th Street, in the Meatpacking District, up to 30th Street, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to the West Side Yard, near the Javits Convention Center.

New York City in Black & White during the mid-1930s

34th Street

Under the elevated train

Bread Store, 259 Bleecker Street, Manhattan

Brooklyn to Manhattan

Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan

Chernobyl before 1986

The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which spread over much of Western Russia and Europe. It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima I nuclear incident, which is considered far less serious and has caused no direct deaths). The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles, crippling the Soviet economy.

The disaster began during a systems test on 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the town of Pripyat. There was a sudden power output surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, a more extreme spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite. The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive smoke fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. According to official post-Soviet data, about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.