Sometimes I’m just struck by a building and want to figure out why it looks the way it does. The pictures above are a semi-close-up and a close-up of an apartment house on West 12th Street in Greenwich Village. It pretty obviously used to be something else, and the brickwork in the flat aches of the wide ground-floor openings grabbed my attention. Actually, it was the contrast between the beauty of those arches and the lousy repointing job on the solider courses above the steel lintels on the other windows that grabbed my attention.
The narrow windows at the ground floor and all of the windows at the upper floors have a very twentieth-century feel to them, with steel supporting flat-topped windows. The soldier courses are a form of ornament: they emphasize the window heads but make it clear that those heads are not flat arches. Meanwhile, there are relatively few buildings in the city with such well-made brick flat arches.
The NYC Department of Records has digitized photographs that were taken of every single building in the city in 1940 and put them online. (Yay!) Looking up this building, its past becomes a little more clear: here. Don’t be fooled by “built: 1920”: 1920 is used in a lot of city records to mean “we don’t know, but early 20C” just as “1900” is used to mean “we don’t know but late 19C.” The loss of the big “GARAGE” knife sign is unfortunate but inevitable after the conversion to apartments. If you zoom in, you can see, blurrily, that the window openings in the masonry haven’t changed in the last 78 years.
The other easy source of information, the 1969 designation report for the Greenwich Village Historic District, gives a bit more info. “This structure dates back to 1910-11, but was completely rebuilt in 1923 after a disastrous fire. It serves the neighborhood as a garage and is a good example of the commercial style of the Nineteen-twenties. It has steel window sash and is crowned by a brick parapet with brick pinnacles carried above it at each end.” Here’s my semi-educated guess: the “complete rebuilding” did not include the first floor street facade but did include the upper floors. That’s why the window heads are so different. Here are a couple of more or less contemporary garages for comparison: Charles Street and 11th Street.
Finally, I understand that lights and security cameras and other such accessories are needed. There is no reason to mount them to the face of the flat arch, marring its appearance, other than indifference to the impression that the building exterior makes.
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