3. Decode the Blockfront

Beyond “reading” the facade elevation (or side) of a building as a palimpsest (previous post), how does one “read” a blockfront like a palimpsest? In language, syntax describes how word order gives rise to meaning; words make sense in context. While buildings aren’t words and blockfronts aren’t sentences, New York City has its own “streetwall syntax” where the patterns and distributions of buildings tell the story of the city’s growth and development.

Three key aspects of a building are the heuristic strands of information that separately, and braided together across the palimpsest, tell a clear and compelling story of how the city formed: architectural style, architectural technology, and a building’s original purpose/use. Each informs a part of history, and together tell a greater story of the wants and needs of power, and really the super-positioning of power: property owners and their revolving door of clientele. 

Styles inform buildings and neighborhoods 

As discussed in previous posts, architectural styles, while historically rich, wonderful and fascinating, are unreliable for decoding a greater history of the city for the simple fact that architectural anachronisms exist in the streetscape. Additionally, while it’s generally true, and logical, that the earlier the style the more limited its geographic range, outliers were not uncommon enough to say much definite about history. It was, nonetheless, far easier to predict that a developer would build a bigger building on a site, than predict the style they might have dressed it in.

That said, the blockfront is the city’s wallpaper, and the streetwall holds the energy of the city.  As a cultural parallel, trends in clothing were another way we outwardly dressed and expressed ourselves. Evolving fashion styles and trends in architecture can be aligned; hoop skirts go with Italianate brownstones and cast-iron storefronts, while the flapper dress goes with Art Deco, and the pill-box hat goes with the Modern. The difference is fashion goes in the closet, storage unit, or museum, while a Manhattan block can be like a confused cocktail party with dress codes spanning centuries.

Technologies inform business districts

Patterns across Manhattan’s packed built environment are most clearly evident in building sizes as the city moved uptown. And just as cornice heights slope up from City Hall, in the microcosm of a Manhattan block one can often accurately predict the ages of buildings, oldest to youngest, by ordering them smallest to tallest.

The three neighboring buildings on Broadway in NoHo (above) were built about 20-30 years apart and reflect the uptown sequence of business districts in brick (the South Street Seaport), cast iron (SoHo), and steel frame loft buildings (Madison Square). No trend in architecture is clearer than the advancing heights of business districts as the city moved uptown.

Like styles, however, architectural technologies also have their limitations in drawing meaning from the palimpsest. It’s true that brick and brownstone buildings were often homes, cast-iron buildings were often retail shops and stores, and steel frame buildings were often for manufacturing. These permutations are well represented throughout the Broadway-Fifth Avenue corridor where generations of New Yorkers lived uptown in brownstone homes and shopped downtown in cast-iron stores, and steel frame loft buildings were almost invariably for manufacturing or wholesale.

But brownstone, and brownstone-clad brick, was used in commercial buildings and churches before the façade material swept the housing market. And cast iron was used for commercial loft buildings in SoHo and Tribeca more than anywhere else; the Bennett Building is a cast iron office building. As for steel frame buildings, Lord & Taylor’s Fifth Avenue and 19^th Street location occupied the building type most often associated with manufacturing and industry (below). Its generous ceiling heights distinguish it from the manufacturing loft buildings further down the Avenue. Notice as well the mansard roof of Arnold Constable & Co. extending from Broadway, and the transformations of the brownstone homes. 

A process was underway that needs to be pointed out. I can’t expound on the subject much more, it’s not my focus of research, but there was a given in the history of manufacturing and production in the cityscape. Retailers often combined aspects of wholesale and manufacturing under one roof; early department stores and specialty shops often made clothing, or completed assembly processes upstairs, for items sold downstairs. The absolute trend, however, was the decoupling of retail from wholesale, and wholesale from manufacturing, as the city moved uptown through business cycles. Garment manufacturing and communications survived and thrived and expanded into uptown spaces, while heavier industries like furniture making, metal work, and cattle markets left for other places. It’s not that cattle pens and I-beams can’t be stored on the 8th floor of a building, its just a question of whether it’s worth it to do so.

But when it comes to the “city” that moved uptown, and the second wave of built environment, the original purpose and use of a building, most often evidenced by its entrance and first floor, is the main arbiter of sense and meaning in the cityscape. The fate of buildings and neighborhoods through time, and how their original use changed like hermit crabs might change shells, are more chapters to an already rich and complex story.

Building Use tells the history of New York City on the Island of Manhattan

While the different combinations of buildings tell the story of a neighborhood, it’s the different combinations of buildings across a dozen different Manhattan neighborhoods that tell the story of the whole city. The post City Hall: Epicenter, described how the Lower East Side, Financial District and Tribeca developed as the needs of business into sectors of labor, financing and storage. Those neighborhoods are relatively easy to decode and decipher; it makes it even easier that they all share a common underlying residential history as well.

Between City Hall and Central Park, however, the built environment history was more nuanced, class-based, and inordinately complex. Rather than two, there were three layers of more attenuated, faster moving histories. The palimpsest stretches as a column between 3rd and 8th Avenues, which served as guard rails and riverbanks, defining a space that included certain building types, like shops, theaters, clubs, hotels, apartment buildings and French flats, and excluded others, like tenements and power plants, or until later, warehouses and factories.  

At the 35,000 foot level, the precise location of a home, store, hotel, office or factory building, whether on the same block or around the corner, is not as important as the class-based compositions frozen in a miles-long architectural shmeer across a dozen Manhattan neighborhoods, the incompatible modalities of life passing over and absorbing one another.  

Below are three “sample” blocks, ascending from downtown to uptown in SoHo, Madison Square, and Times Square, about a mile or so apart. In each block can be seen the developmental algorithm: live, play and work, through ever-larger capacities of residential, cultural, and commercial business buildings.

1. SoHo (Broadway, west side between Prince and Houston)

The following series of images show the evolution of the west side of Broadway between Prince and Houston Streets, where Broadway levels out after climbing up from Canal. We’ll start on the block above, where St. Thomas Episcopal Church once stood at the crest of the hill, where the Cable Building stands today on the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston Street.

The image below is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper of John Jacob Astor’s funeral in 1848 and the activity around the passing of one of the city’s most formidable developers. The block had some of the city’s finest, stone-fronted Greek Revival homes of the 1830s. Astor’s was furthest to the right in the image. The pinnacled tower of St. Thomas is visible through the tree!