Archeology and Metrology

Back in the time of the making and showing of the film "Glory," when I went to work for the Grossman and Associates, Inc., once across the street from "Scheffel Hall" (which then had "Fat Tuesdays") on Third Ave., many problems occurred, nearby Stuyvesant Square. A huge superheated steam pipe explosion, in Gramercy Park, killed two ConEd workers, one I discovered I had done business with at the U-Haul on the west side of Manhattan, renting a toboggan and other equipment for winter archaeology in Bowdoin Park, NY, part of which was slated to become a sewerage treatment plant, with a former employer of both Joel W. Grossman and myself, Greenhouse Consultants (his name). Lori Berensen, imprisoned in Peru, (Grossman has his Ph.D. from Berkeley U., from work in Peru) and her family had lived in Gramercy Park. Dutchess County's only county park, former J. P. Morgan summer residence, was partly used for a sewerage treatment plant. In the middle of this, I had the required HAZMAT training, at Bellevue's former Nursing School, (summer NYC heat in a rubber suit) and then watched Gramercy Park evacuated, wrapped in plastic, and cleaned by people in Tyvek suits and respirators. One of the conditions of employment at the EPA sites, training and refresher courses also took place at the fire training center in nearby Elmsford, NY, which included climbing five stories in fire-fighting Scott air packs (no beards). On top of this, Grossman and Associates insisted on using a new technology, "close-range photogrammetry" a three dimensional still camera recording system just out from Rollei in Brunswick, Germany, which also went through a few changes as the Berlin Wall came down. It was provided by Prometric Technologies, Inc, now of Markham, Ontario Canada who were developing an interface to AutoCad for it with Schneider Instruments, Inc., I think on Long Island, NY. Rollei later developed its own graphical interface as desktop computers became graphical, becoming "windows". It developed out of a need to rapidly record air crashes, (used in auto crashes) anecdotally, one U-S one in Gander, Newfoundland, covered by a blizzard before it could be recorded. Nearby, while learning this, the Avianca jet crashed when it ran out of fuel after a language lapse in air traffic control. The medium format camera (it's also available in SLR 35 mm) with film cartridge "back" specifically developed to hold film against a certified measured glass plate with crosses on it (reseau) only held 12 shots, which provided some difficulties, as the camera, with a video camera attached to its viewfinder, powered by a motorcycle battery, in a case with a small B&W monitor, attached wires, and a weak "pan and tilt head," was often on a large photographer's tripod and held thereby almost horizontally over a cleaned archaeology plan (counterbalanced with a water jug). Or hand-held to photograph an excavated profile. Each 3D set-up required a minimum of three photos taken at "oblique" angles with one straight-on (a parabola best) and each of the photos had to be recorded on both a rough sketch (entered later on the tablet) and a recording of camera angle and tilt for each shot for later computations on a specialized recording sheet of paper, showing the tilt angles the picture was taken at. A known measured object, often a three-foot red and white half of a "stadia rod," was included in the photo, which also included other markers (like on crash test dummies in many measured car crash tests) or "targets" were included in the picture and when available, a menu board, north arrow, color chart, and sited in with an infrared transit, which reckons x,y,z distances and elevation in State Plane Coordinate system(s), which by the way, was set to a new datum, while we were doing this, from 1929 geography to 1984 geography. I also used this for them at Drew University, Madison, NJ and in Bear Mountain State Park, Montgomery, NY, though the recording of archaeology features was often mostly using an infrared transit also referred to in the survey trade as a "total station," which today with radio control, can do away with the "rodman". It would make for more accurate recording, as often the person scoping the mirror for recording, running the instrument, is removed from the object of interest, what and where the prism and rod are "pointing" to. After the photos are developed, into 8X10" ideally, the "reseau" were digitized on a large digitizing tablet with a magnified multi-button puck, each button for a different type of observation, then in German, as it was still in development. A number of photographs had to be first "registered" onto the large GTCO digitizing "tablet" (3' X 4' X 1" white slab, stated accurate to 1/1000") and into the computers database. From each measured target and measured rod and supplemental transit readings the "close-range photogrammetry" computations were processed. Then one would re-register perhaps (in between being asked to overlay historic maps to determine the location of the former historic landscape) the numbered 8X10" photos onto the tablet (held down with little tape dots at their corners) and in order to measure into 3 dimensions, draw a line in two or more of the photos, tracing for example a "window" (of which there were none and are not the subject of archaeology) outline in the three photos with the appropriate button. I drew a number of profiles and the strata in them and other features, many left out in interest of brevity in reports. Most graphics on the West Point Foundry were handled by me, including I aver, the finding of the R. P. Parrott gun platform used on-top of in-swamp "grillage" (think "Lincoln logs") in the Foundry Cove, where a testing of a "prototype" of what became known as the "Swamp Angel" used in the bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina, with incendiary probably. The cannon exploded, kept firing, and was part of an investigation later at the Franklin Institute. Prior to the excavation, a number of proton magnetometer surveys were also conducted and data recorded with transit and hand-held computers, was turned out in "3D" graphic diagrams, and anomalies excavated with a backhoe after the underbrush was cleared from the margins of Foundry Cove. The West Point Foundry itself "off limits". We used it though for orienteering, and almost lost a backhoe in an underground chamber collapse ("Margaret Brook" runs under it, once powering its industry, in aqueducts and impoundments "ponds" stretching away for miles) clearing a "line of sight" to one of its few surviving standing brick walls, the rest of it, except for the former central office circa 1865, a "sea of brick". Part of the West Point Foundry "core" is currently being excavated by Michigan Technological University, ("Michigan Tech Students Continue Research At The West Point Foundry" in "Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter" Vol. 33 Fall 2004 Number 4, Dept. of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan 49931-1295) in field schools. The property became part of Scenic Hudson's holdings a group that began by stopping a proposed damming of the Hudson River just above West Point, and the digging of power turbine shafts through nearby Storm King Mountain, a NY State Park. The remediation involved earth-damming the marsh, draining the water, digging out the soil, mixing it with concrete, hauling it out on the historic railbed (used to stretch to the middle of the Hudson River) to somewhere and replacing the marsh with a new one. That was/is the EPA's Marathon Battery remediation plan of the West Point Foundry Cove, connected to the Constitution Marsh by a broken dike (once connected to Constitution Island by it) where nearby a "Great Chain" was stretched across the Hudson River to stop the advance of the British Navy whose aim was to "divide and conquer" the Colonies.