Following on the post: The Vortex and the Palimpsest: Seeing the City through Time and Space, here we look at the facades and sides of individual buildings and what, if anything, they reveal about history.
The palimpsest is not a new way of looking at cities. Around the built environment, it most often describes the markings left on the side of a building from a past neighbor, usually cornices, gables, and/or chimneys, sometimes called “ghosts.” They are informative artifacts of the past; a kind of brick-and-mortar DNA of the built environment.
Here are examples of ghosts around the city:
A gable roofline on White Street (above) west of Broadway is from an early 19th or even late 18th century structure. The featured image is a similar ghost on a pre-law tenement on Market Street..
A Midtown building (above) shows the roof line of a former neighbor, likely a brownstone. The exposed wall is reinforced with tie rods securing the floor joists to the wall where the home once braced the building.
My very post in 2010 was this “ghost” of the Broadway Central Hotel (1870) on Broadway in NoHo (below), which left the incised mark.
The hotel collapsed in 1974; an NYU Law School dorm, Hayden Hall, stands on the site today.
But the palimpsest idea is an effective tool for decoding much more of the city; a building’s facade, a blockfront, and larger “super-block super-structures” can be read as palimpsests. The rest of this post will look at the building-as-palimpsest.
Building-as-Palimpsest
The facade can also be “read” like a palimpsest: Were floors added? A doorway moved? Does the building retain its fenestration? Was it stripped of original details? Did styles accrete?
Dormer windows were likely removed and a floor added (above), as told by the different shade of brick on this East Broadway building in Chinatown.
The dimensions and location of this building on 21st Street off Fifth Avenue help identify this as what’s left a row of brownstones.
The 1820s Georgian home on Market Street (above) has an eclectic doorway combining Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival elements from the 1830s, with an bracketed Italianate cornice from the 1850s. Adding floors was a common renovation to New York buildings.
The asymmetrical facade, and slightly different shade of brick, of this Bleecker Street home in Greenwich Village (above) shows where an alley or horse walk once ed to a back house or stable.
Most Manhattan homes were built as row houses by speculative developers, and was likely the case here on Bleecker Street (above). The brickwork shows how the middle home was extended up.
This Federal-style home (above) on Cliff Street in the Financial District had a floor added and windows blinded.
The mis-matched lintels and window sizes of this 43rd Street building near Grand Central (above) shows how a tenement (with shared plumbing facilities) was converted to individual units with separate bathrooms. Can we still call it a tenement?
Another common alteration was to remove a stoop and give a new entrance to a building.
This ca. 1810 home looks like its first floor was re-modeled for commercial use long ago.
Additional floors were added to commercial buildings as well.
The Goelet Building on Broadway at 20th Street (above) was completed in 1886 as a commercial loft building in a very fashionable part of town, and extended upwards in 1905.
The Bennett Building on Nassau Street, built for James Gordon Bennett Jr, owner of The New York Herald, was originally built as 6-story cast iron office building with a mansard roof in the early 1870s, and extended another four stories in the early 1890s for another owner. A prominent mid-level “cornice” reveals the addition.
Sometimes buildings lost square footage. Below is what’s left of Ridley’s cast iron department store (1886), it was truncated when Allen Street was widened in 1932.
The different Renaissance Revival and Art Deco sides of the building reveal an intriguing history.
These are some of the things to look for when decoding a building. Next we’ll look at the blockfront and the city,