A old close-up during some minor work on an old house in Manhattan.
We’re looking at a basement-level door that was once the secondary (tradesmen’s) entrance and now, thanks to the removal of the stoop at the other end of the facade, is the main door. The basement, being the basement, was faced in brownstone which has fallen apart, as brownstone tends to do. The rough gray scratch coat for new brown stucco is in place on either side of the door and will eventually cover all of the common brick up to the top elevation of the old veneer. (If you look at the far left, where the neighboring building projects out all the way to the lot line, instead of being set back as this building is, you can see the ghost of the veneer line.)
The contrast between the veneer brick that makes up most of the upper-floor facade and the common brick back up is stark. The pressed brick used for the veneer is uniform in size and regular in shape, allowing the use of very thin “buttered” joints. The common brick is exactly what you’d expect from a mass structural material: it’s sloppy and ugly. There is common brick behind the veneer brick, and the two don’t fit together well, which is why there are no headers from the veneer to its backup. The brick veneer in a building like this is held in place by the window lintels and sills.
The lintel over the basement door is several small steel beams (maybe I beams, maybe channels) bolted together, but the use of this modern material barely qualifies as steel construction. The lintel was supplied by an iron works but then laid up by the masons building the wall in the same way as if it were a stone lintel. It’s steel masquerading as stone for the purpose of building a wall.
