East River Generating Station
701 East 14th Street | also 801 East 14th Street, 230 Avenue C | Stuyvesant Town
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1924
New York Edison plans a new East 14th Street power station
New York Edison Company engineer Thomas E. Murray draws up plans for a new steam station on East 14th Street to serve the utility's older 25-hertz distribution system. The company publicly announces the project in May 1925, and construction follows quickly, with the first generator installed by August 1926. Queen Marie of Romania switches on the plant's first turbine that November.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1925
Neighbors call New York Edison's planned East 14th Street power plant a 'super-nuisance'
Local residents and businesses opposed the new East River power station, calling it a 'super-nuisance' that would spew smoke, cinders, ashes and soot and keep the waterfront from being developed for recreation. New York Edison replied that it was the only utility in the world that washed its gases before they left the smokestacks, and said the air pollution came from boats and other buildings burning coal. A New York Times editorial conceded it was probably too late to stop the plant but urged tighter control of the waterfront.
“Construction of the power plant was opposed by local residents and businesses, who described the facility as a "super-nuisance…”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1926
Queen Marie of Romania puts New York Edison's East River power station into operation
The New York Edison Company built this power plant at the eastern end of 14th Street, and on November 23, 1926, Queen Marie of Romania officially placed it into operation. Today it is a cogeneration plant that produces both electricity and steam, and it supplies more than half the capacity of Manhattan's steam system.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1929
New York Edison marks new boilers that make a million pounds of steam an hour
New York Edison holds a luncheon inside one of the plant's giant boilers to celebrate finishing a third generator and three new boilers, the first at any power station able to produce a million pounds of steam per hour. The 160-megawatt generator, installed that October, lifts the plant's total output to 280 megawatts, more than double what it produced when it opened three years earlier. Nearly 100 guests attend the celebration inside the boiler itself.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1930
Edison engineers present the East River Station's design to the AIEE
Three New York Edison engineers presented a paper on the new station at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers' summer convention in Toronto in June 1930. They described a site about a quarter mile long and 200 feet wide, planned for an ultimate 1,240,000 kilowatts. Among the unusual features they listed were pulverized coal burned in completely water-cooled furnaces in what had been stoker territory, circulating-water pumps placed in a pit at the river end, and a double-winding generator that was also the largest in operation.
Source: archive.org
- 1957
Con Edison buys the Eagle Pencil Company's block south of the plant
In 1957 Con Edison bought the entire block south of the generating station from the Eagle Pencil Company, which leased the site back for a year while it built a new factory in Danbury, Connecticut. The block ran 676 feet between Avenues C and D. Con Edison later put three 5-million-gallon fuel-oil tanks there as part of a plan to cut air pollution by switching the plant from coal to oil, and the filled riverside ground meant the tanks needed more than 7,700 wooden piles.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1977
Con Edison begins a fuel-cell demonstration plant beside the station that never makes power
In 1977 the federal Energy Research and Development Administration picked Con Edison to run a two-year demonstration of a 4.8-megawatt fuel-cell plant. It was to rise just north of the generating station, at East 15th Street and the FDR Drive. The project slipped three years behind schedule and construction was suspended in 1984, and the unfinished demonstration plant was dismantled without ever producing any electricity.
“Construction of the fuel cell plant was suspended in 1984 after the project had fallen three years behind schedule.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2005
Con Edison finishes repowering the East River station with new turbines
Con Edison completes a multi-year overhaul of the station, replacing aging equipment with new combustion turbines as part of a citywide plan to modernize its power and steam systems. The project follows the 1999 closure of the utility's nearby Waterside Generating Station. Afterward the East River plant continues supplying electricity and roughly half of Manhattan's district steam.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2012
Hurricane Sandy's storm surge knocks the plant offline and darkens lower Manhattan
When Hurricane Sandy struck on October 29, 2012, the East River surged to nearly 14 feet, topping the 12-foot wall at the nearby 13th Street substation. Flooding forced the power station offline, and the outages left much of lower Manhattan without electricity.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- East River Generating StationWikipedia
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