There are some great names in the architectural vocabulary. A cryptoporticus, for example, is more or less an underground part of a porch. One of the less-great names is a “sperm-candle column.”
Looking at the low-rise buildings in this picture, we have, starting on the left, 394 Broadway (off-white with deep masonry joints in the spandrel panel below the cornice), then 392 Broadway (tan with a largely featureless spandrel panel below the cornice), then the blue building (which is not part of this discussion), and then 388 Broadway (the pale yellow building with a set of extended dentils below the cornice). The facades of 394, 392 and 388 are similar, vaguely Italianate in style, and share an important feature in mid-1800s architecture in New York: the sperm-candle column. Those two-story engaged arcades on the facades of these buildings have columns that run from the second floor to the fourth floor, and from the fourth to the roof. Those are columns I’m talking about.
These are very much not classical (or, more precisely, neo-classical) facades because the proportions are wrong. There are rather strict rules about the width of a column relative to its height and those two-story columns are far too thin. The name comes from the mid-1800s use of candles made from spermaceti, a wax produced inside the bodies of sperm whales. Those candles were tall and thin, with proportions similar to these columns.
The proportions of classical columns came from the technology of construction two thousand years ago, specifically from low-rise unreinforced load-bearing masonry. Those proportions don’t necessarily make sense for different materials or different loads. The tall and thin sperm-candle column was first developed for us in cast-iron facades, and only later spread to facades like these, where the masonry piers between windows are carrying very little load. In short, this form is an early adaptation in the US of architectural form to modern structural concerns. The other trend is an early rush of technophilia, where old-fashioned masonry is used to imitate the new and exciting technology of cast-iron.
