"97 Bridge Street, at the N.E. corner of York Street, showing also the Brooklyn Union Gas Co. tank on York Street." The frame building at the corner was recently demolished. Notice the architectural palimpsest on the building at the left. A palimpsest is traditionally a parchment made from animal hide that has been scraped "clean" again so that new text can be written on it. In many cases the ghost of the original text can be seen faintly behind the text words. In the case of architecture, a palimpsest is the partial remains or outline of a vanished building seen on existing buildings.

They were built over the first half of the 20th century. They dotted (some might say dominated) the landscape from Alphabet City to Harlem, Greenpoint to Elmhurst to Coney Island. Most were more than 200 feet in diameter and more than 200 feet tall. The ones on Maspeth Avenue in Greenpoint were more than 400 feet tall. They most often came in pairs. Sometimes you could catch a glimpse of them in movies filmed in New York. The natural gas tanks of New York City were the large storage facilities for local utility companies, including the massive Brooklyn Union Gas Company, Consolidated Edison, and a number of smaller companies. In the very late 19th and early 20th century these utility companies began building facilities all over the city, some in areas already densely populated, others on land surrounded by potato fields. Generally speaking each tank or "holder" was constructed of riveted steel plates that inside looked like five face-down cups or levels. The levels telescoped up as natural gas was pumped in by engine-driven compressors. The bottom of the tank was a shallow pool of water, which, is some cases, was used to float a small rowboat for internal inspections. The holders provided constant pressure in residential gas lines during high demand. In 1992 the entire Brooklyn Union Gas system used 906 million cubic feet of gas on its busiest day. The few holders that remained functioning at that time (all in Brooklyn or Queens) were able to hold less than one percent of that total. They had outlived their usefulness. Most of the holders in more densely populated neighborhoods had been dismantled in the previous decades, but a few remained. They were decommissioned and then deconstructed piece by piece. The final two tanks, the twin, red-and-white checkered, 400-foot-tall ones, in Greenpoint along the Newtown Creek, had quite a different send off. On the morning of July 8, 2001, a Sunday, at 7:00 A.M., with the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway closed down, the towers were imploded and in less than 10 seconds came crumbling down, with tens of thousands of New Yorkers watching.

"97 Bridge Street, at the N.E. corner of York Street, showing also the Brooklyn Union Gas Co. tank on York Street." The large natural gas tanks seen in this photograph, once dotted the streetscapes of the five boroughs. The most well known were in Elmhurst Queens, which were dismantled in 1996. A pair of tanks in Greenpoint met a more spectacular end in 2001 when they were imploded. It is unknown when the tank seen here was demolished, though considering the density and growth of this neighborhood (in comparison to Elmhurst or Greenpoint), it was likely gone long before the others.