New York City's Most Accessible Ruins | Hacker News Reader

New York City's Most Accessible Ruins

atlasobscura.com

80 pointsMz16 comments

> The site protected the Harbor using a pair of concrete batteries, each housing a pair of cannons which could fire 30 miles out to sea.

How accurate were the 1917-era cannons at 30 miles?

The first round was for range; the second for effect. If the second volley didn't hit, the third almost certainly would. A forward observer was required.

Cannon battles of WW2 http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/capitalsh...

Interesting to see this on HN as we dug out an entrance to a WW2 German bunker yesterday afternoon here in Jersey (the British island). Like urbex and WW2? Photos here: https://plus.google.com/photos/105983129534664287827/albums/...

Some videos also on our group's YouTube page, with a quick walk-through. We already have one of these restored and open to the public, and we were after parts and a bit of exploration.

As for the accuracy, WW2 guns were good enough. This Youtube video on mechanical fire-control computers is very interesting and I've seen it come up on HN before several times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

Lots of this equipment survives today. It was built to last and many people still collect it. We've also got about a dozen French and German cannon dumped from cliffs that we'll recover some day.

Great stuff, thanks for posting this.

What's being removed from the walls with the angle grinders? It looks like bits of rusty tube with little value...

How was the air in there?

Could be as simple as something to hang wooden seats or beds from. See for example the third photo in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1041171/Violent-stor...

I wonder more about why one would, upon entering such a bunker, start axle grinding ones such structures.

Little point in leaving stuff there I suppose. It will just rust away further over the next hundreds of years. Better to concentrate resources in a few of them.

Sorry, I posted this and went to sleep so missed the replies. We have one complete and open to the public. We were allowed to dig out the bunker entrance to explore & recover anything interesting, then it had to be sealed back up. The last time this was done was in the 70's, as it is beach-side in an environmentally protected area.

Is it normal to fire up an angle grinder and not wear eye protection where you live? In one of the pictures you can see spark bouncing off worker's face an inch below left eyeball.

The sparks are hot, but don't contain much mass, so I don't think they're as dangerous as they look. That said, as an official paranoid person, I always wear goggles.

Data/evidence to the contrary:

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance Systems (HASS/LASS) lists angle grinders at #3 in their top ten list of most dangerous tools, with an average of 5,400 injuries recorded. [1]

"Angle grinders are one of the most dangerous tools in any workplace. They are used for cutting, grinding and polishing work. ... Most angle grinder injuries are from metal particles lodging in the operator’s eye. However, the most serious injuries are from kick-back, where the disc is thrust back violently towards the operator." [2]

[1]: http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/reports/2002data.pdf

[2]: http://www.commerce.wa.gov.au/worksafe/angle-grinders

Interesting, but 1917-era is (late) WW1, not WW2.

Quite a difference, not because of the size of the ships (the WW1 Dreadnought at 45,000 tons was larger than many battleships at Pearl Harbor; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought has a nice plot of battleship size over time), but because they had radar.

I know nothing about this site in real life, but immediately recognized it from GTA IV.

If you're into urban exploration in and around NYC, this video is a great watch: https://vimeo.com/18280328

They visit a few interesting spots like the abandoned City Hall subway station, old sewers, tunnels, and the top of the Williamsburg Bridge

If you're not following their Twitter, you should https://twitter.com/atlasobscura

Smallpox hospital looks beautiful. They don't build like this anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com