That’s the top of a tenement at Norfolk and Rivington Streets, in the heart of the Lower East Side. Once again, I was just trying to grab a good shot but the picture seems to have got all artsy despite me.
What’s visible: some pretty veneer brick (color aided by the setting sun) with bands of ornamental stone (probably limestone) and some very pretty brick-only ornament. The masons who laid that up knew what they were doing. The cornice is metal and in need of some paint but otherwise surviving reasonably well. The windows are modern insulated replacements for the original wood windows, which probably had muntins subdividing the upper and lower sashes. And sometime around 35 years ago, the building was wired for cable TV through the ridiculous expedient of draping coax down the facades from the parapet.
What’s not visible: the rest of the wall behind the veneer wythe is common brick. There are no visible headers in the field of the wall, so it is likely that the veneer is tied back by the window lintel and sill stones and nothing else. The cornice is sheet tin over a frame of 2x4s (or smaller pieces of wood), and some of the metal sheets have either slipped off their nails or the lightweight frame has broken a bit. (For example, see the movement at the right side of the projecting section of parapet.) The Rivington Street facade – the one were facing – is a bearing wall, based on the geometry of the lot, so the wood joists that support the interior floors are resting on this wall.
The difference between the second and third paragraphs above is why we wrote City of Brick and Steel. Descriptions of buildings tend to focus on their architectural features. That’s fine: people are interested in that topic and certainly the issues of how people interact with their built environment and what makes a building worthy of historic preservation are both tightly linked to their appearance. But our experience is that people in general are unfamiliar with how their buildings are put together. There are a fair number of nineteenth-century buildings in New York that have veneer as poorly fastened to the body of the walls as the veneer here; the veneer appears to be in good condition here, but at some buildings it starts to peel off. This is dangerous to pedestrians, but it is not a structural problem that threatens the buildings and so is easily repaired. There’s no way to explain that based on a description that the wall is “patterned brick.”
