A Ghost With A Solid Limb

A vacant lot not far from our office. The ghost of the four-stories-plus-basement building that was once there has a bit of everything: the upper floors were stripped of plaster and the brick painted white for that non-authentic oldey-timey look, the stair from the first floor to the second (the first floor is the one about at the elevation of the sidewalk bridge next door) goes up and then the stairs above wrap further back, there’s a chimney extension built in to the relatively old building next door, and the old party wall is tied to the building next door by pieces of channel connected to tie rods. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Here’s a closer view of the building on the right side of the vacant lot, which is probably in the same ballpark on age as the missing building:

Starting from the right at the first floor level, there’s the commercial storefront with a Japanese restaurant, then the door to the upper floors, then the stone pier that supports the lintel over the door and has the address (“76”), then we’re at the end of the building, then there’s a cast-iron column supporting nothing. Above the column supporting nothing is a free-standing wall, apparently pinned to the existing building. If you look closely, you can see the line where the brick from the missing building butts up against the existing building brick, but the two are not toothed together. The difference between a cast-iron storefront column and a stone pier is enough to suggest that these building were built at different times.

My guess is that whoever demolished the missing building thought that this was a party wall and so left the freestanding wall. It’ll be interesting to see what ends up on this lot.