This 1930 cover image depicts a group of four barge-mounted derricks using 100-ft-long booms to carefully place an assembly of pipes in a trench at the bottom of the Harlem River, which separates the northern tip of Manhattan Island in New York City from Bronx County.
The complex maneuver of lifting heavy prefabricated modules out of New York City’s East River to build a university laboratory took careful planning and the work of one particular heavy-lift floating crane with a complicated past.
