That’s the back (east) side of the Con Ed building on east 14th Street. (One of the many arguments between Boston and New York that will never be settled to anyone’s satisfaction: their utility company was long ago named Commonwealth Edison, after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ours was long ago named Consolidated Edison after the corporate machinations that went into its creation. “Comm Ed” versus “Con Ed” has us all on edge.) It looks like some fairly ordinary facade work is in progress on this old steel-framed skyscraper. Here’s a close-up:
The brick and stucco on the plain east-facing wall have been removed to give access to the corner column and adjacent spandrel beam ends. You get a good feel for the relative thinness of the stone veneer on the south (14th Street) facade.
During a recent talk about The Structure of Skyscrapers, I was asked a question that threw me for a second, until I realized that the problem was that the person asking the question and I were using the same phrase to mean two different things. Their question concerned the masonry walls that came before the curtain walls I was talking about, my confusion came because I was talking about masonry curtain walls. In current day use, “curtain wall” is often used as shorthand for glass and metal-panel facades. As someone with my head stuck, partially, in past practice, I use curtain wall to mean a non-structural wall supported by a building frame. (Of course, there’s a much older usage in fortifications, but so far no one has thought I meant that when I didn’t.)
An unrelated thought on the complexity of a lot of big buildings: Con Ed was built in two major campaigns with at least one minor one. The north half of the building, facing 15th Street and including the Irving Place (northwest) corner, was built in the 1910s. At that time two major institutions – Tammany Hall and the Academy of Music – were on the south half of the block. Here’s a 1910s map of the block:
Note that the Third Avenue block front on the right – the parking lot just left of the bus in my photo at the top – is a bunch of small nineteenth-century buildings, and that the elevated train is shown next to them. The two-story building at 142 East 15th Street was either a semi-temporary extension that Con Ed built or was the building they tore down to build the temporary extension. Tammany Hall moved north two blocks and the Academy of Music was eclipsed by other venues, and the south half of the block, excluding the Third Avenue front, was used for a 1920s expansion, including the facade I photographed. The temporary 15th Street building was eventually replaced by a full-height extension, which can be seen in my shot.
The 1920s south extension included the most well-known part of the building, the ornamental tower at the southwest corner of the block. Even though the building is a block east of Union Square, the tower (with its urns, obelisks, and clocks) is part of the square’s visual landscape, as seen in the 1930s:
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