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Jared Ebersole

The Public Spaces New York Got by Letting Developers Build Bigger

The Public Spaces New York Got by Letting Developers Build Bigger

New York's privately owned public spaces were born from a zoning bargain: developers got extra floor area, and the city got plazas, arcades, atriums, and a lot of uneven results.

Park Avenue Is Called Park Avenue Because It Covered a Railroad

Park Avenue Is Called Park Avenue Because It Covered a Railroad

Park Avenue's name comes from a vanished linear park built over railroad tracks, a strip of greenery later narrowed for traffic.

Why SoHo Has So Many Glass Sidewalks and So Few Trees

Why SoHo Has So Many Glass Sidewalks and So Few Trees

SoHo's missing street trees are tied to one of its most beautiful industrial leftovers: hollow sidewalks filled with glass vault lights.

Why Subway Grates Blast Hot Air Onto New York Sidewalks

Why Subway Grates Blast Hot Air Onto New York Sidewalks

Those sidewalk grates are not just vents. They are part of the subway's breathing system, driven by trains acting like pistons inside the tunnels.

Why New York's 5G Towers Have to Be So Visible

Why New York's 5G Towers Have to Be So Visible

New York's Link5G poles can look awkward on the sidewalk, but their visibility comes from a real network problem: high-capacity wireless needs dense street-level infrastructure.

200 West Street: How Goldman Sachs Cools Its Headquarters With Ice

200 West Street: How Goldman Sachs Cools Its Headquarters With Ice

Inside Goldman Sachs' 200 West Street headquarters, cooling is not just air conditioning. It is an ice-storage strategy built around New York's energy grid.

The Oculus Was Designed Around a Single Morning

The Oculus Was Designed Around a Single Morning

Santiago Calatrava's Oculus is a transit hub, a shopping concourse, and a memorial machine aligned to light on September 11.

How SoHo's Short Cast-Iron Buildings Helped Invent the Glass Tower

How SoHo's Short Cast-Iron Buildings Helped Invent the Glass Tower

SoHo's cast-iron buildings are low by New York standards, but their prefabricated facades helped prove ideas that later made glass skyscrapers possible.

The Queens-Midtown Tunnel Was a Fight Against Rock, Pressure, and Robert Moses

The Queens-Midtown Tunnel Was a Fight Against Rock, Pressure, and Robert Moses

The Queens-Midtown Tunnel looks like an ordinary drive under the East River, but building it meant defeating bad geology, political pressure, and one of the most difficult digs in New York.

The SoHo Store That Taught New York to Build Up

The SoHo Store That Taught New York to Build Up

The E.V. Haughwout Building looks like a cast-iron SoHo landmark, but its real importance is the passenger elevator that changed the economics of height.

United Nations Secretariat Building: The Tower Cooled by the East River

United Nations Secretariat Building: The Tower Cooled by the East River

The United Nations Secretariat looks like a simple glass slab, but its cooling system depends on the East River and on a legal status unlike almost any other site in New York.

The Hudson Yards Tower That Had to Swallow a Subway Building

The Hudson Yards Tower That Had to Swallow a Subway Building

55 Hudson Yards looks like a clean office tower, but its base wraps around subway ventilation and station infrastructure built before the tower rose.