That’s a view of the west side of Broadway at Thomas Street. There are a couple of nice old loft buildings on the left (the one with the fire escape has a pretty good cast-iron front), an old office building on the far left, a modern apartment house in the background that is somewhere on the border between nondescript and hideous, and another loft building on the far right. I expect that everything in this photo will still be there in fifty years with one exception, which is the two-story building dead center. It’s empty, and demolition seems to have started. For what it’s worth, that used to be a McDonalds.
If you look at the side wall of the loft building with the fire-escape, you can see the roof line of the building that used to be there. Apparently it was a twin of the building on the far right. There are many reasons why a landlord might want to demolish a building in Manhattan, mostly economic, but the stranger question is why anyone would build a two-story building like this.
The answer is in the name: this is a “taxpayer.” The primary purpose of the retail rent in a building like this is to keep the property owner from losing money. Its existence buys time until the lot can be redeveloped with a larger building, which is the ultimate goal of a lot of landowners in Manhattan. Nearly all taxpayers are retail space, most are one or two stories tall. They are generally lightly-built because they are always intended to be temporary. In short, they are throw-aways. Most people in the design and construction community don’t usually think of. buildings that way, but this class of structure exists.
