New York City Maintains a Fake Apartment Building in Brooklyn, Here's What It's Used For
Posted by DerekMead on Monday, Dec 26, 2011
With miles of steam pipes and tens of thousands of passengers sucking down oxygen daily, New York City’s subways can make for a hot, stale, sauna-like environment, especially in the summer months. Keeping passengers from cooking are scores of tunnel vents that allow fresh air into the subway system. Most are of the grate-type set into sidewalks that are ubiquitous in Manhattan. For the city’s larger tunnels, the vents are more grandiose, such as the quasi-Brutalist Battery Tunnel vent on Governor’s Island.
BLDGBLOG editor Geoff Manaugh tracked down a building-sized exhaust of another flavor: a fake brownstone (pictured above, with black windows) in Brooklyn Heights that serves as both a ventilation shaft and escape route. He shot photos and dug up the building’s background for an awesome post on the subject of vent-building design in the city, writing:
In any case, Nicola and I walked over to see the house for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the disguised-entrance-to-the-underworld is undoubtedly one of the coolest building programs imaginable, and would make an amazing premise for an intensive design studio; but also because the surface vent structures through which underground currents of air are controlled have always fascinated me.
It’s an interesting case study looking at how the design and architecture of vent systems connect underground networks with the surface, and definitely worth a read.
Lead photo via BLDGBLOG
Filed under:
About the author
Writer, photographer, record collector and all around science nerd with a zoology background. Follow me @drderekmead.
