New York City s Hidden Old-Growth Forests
Tree-Ring Scientists Are Salvaging Centuries of Climate and Historical Data From Demolished Structures
Tree-ring scientists from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are extracting climate and historical information from timbers salvaged out of old New York City buildings. Here, joists are carted away from the 2018 demolition of a circa 1890s warehouse in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.
(Alan Solomon)
In the popular imagination, New York City is a mass of soaring steel-frame skyscrapers. But many of the city’s 1 million buildings are not that modern. Behind their brick-and-mortar facades, its numerous 19th- and early 20th-century warehouses, commercial buildings and row homes are framed with massive wooden joists and beams. These structures probably harbor at least 14 million cubic meters of timber, the volume equivalent of about 74,000 subway cars. Their main sources: old-growth forests that long predated New Y
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