author
Benjamin Franklin Cresson
1873–1923
Best known for detailed early-20th-century engineering reports, this American civil engineer wrote with the close-up precision of someone working inside major infrastructure projects. His surviving books capture a moment when rail terminals and harbor plans were reshaping the Northeast.
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About the author
Born in Philadelphia in 1873, Benjamin Franklin Cresson Jr. was an American civil engineer whose published work now survives mainly through technical books and reports. Records available online identify him as Benjamin Franklin Cresson Jr., with a birth year of 1873 and a death date of January 25, 1923, in Montclair, New Jersey.
Cresson is credited as the author of The New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad: The Terminal Station—West, published in 1910 in the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers. That work presents him as a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and shows his close involvement with one of the era's biggest railroad construction efforts.
He also served as supervising engineer for Report on a Proposed Marine Terminal and Industrial City on New York Bay at Bayonne, N.J. (1916), prepared for the New Jersey State Board of Commerce and Navigation. The picture that emerges is of a practical engineer-author whose writing focused on large public works, transportation, and harbor development rather than literary fame.