Following on the post: The Vortex and the Palimpsest: Seeing the City through Time and Space, this post explores the concept of the palimpsest as a way of decoding the city. As a reminder, palimpsests are materials like vellum and papyrus that were recycled by ancient scribes and whose surfaces now reflect the accumulation of multiple past histories.
The palimpsest is not a new way of looking at cities. It’s often been used to describe the markings left on the side of a building from a past neighbor, most often a cornice, gable, and/or chimney. Sometimes called “ghosts,” they are informative artifacts of the past, and a kind of brick-and-mortar DNA of the built environment.
A building on White Street (above) in Chinatown retains the roofline of its earlier, much older neighbor. A pre-law tenement (for its flat side) on Market Street (below), shows a similar “ghost,” along with ad-hoc lot-line windows.
A commercial business building in Midtown (above) shows the roofline of the former adjacent building, perhaps a brownstone. The exposed wall was reinforced with tie-rods to secure the floor joists to the wall where the home once acted to brace the building. Below is a Midtown “ghost-in-waiting”.
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 tragically collapsed in 1974 killing four. 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
Just like a “ghost” on the side of a building, the facade (or elevation) can also be “read” like a palimpsest: Were floors added? A doorway moved? Does it retain its fenestration (window arrangements)? Was it stripped of original details? Did styles accrete on the building? Did it get a complete overhaul?
The different shade of brick on this East Broadway building in Chinatown (above) shows a floor was added later. While the first (ground) floor was radically altered, the new addition was giving matching lintels.
The 1820s home on Market Street under the Manhattan Bridge (above, right) retains its eclectic doorway combining Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival elements (all from the 1830s and earlier), with an Italianate cornice (from the 1850s or later). Adding floors was the most common renovation done to buildings in New York.
The width, height and location of this building on 21st Street near Fifth Avenue in the Madison Square neighborhood (below, left), reveal its original purpose as a brownstone home, and given a cast iron face-lift after the area had “fallen to commerce” in the late 19th Century.
The asymmetrical fenestration and slightly different shade of brick of this Bleecker Street home in Greenwich Village (above) shows where an alley or horse walk leading to a back house or stable was bricked-up.
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?
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.
I hope to add to the gallery of buildings whose facades changed over time and today can be “read” like a palimpsest. The next posts will look at blockfronnts.