The entrance to a garage in a late-1980s, maybe early 1990s apartment house is dead center in that photo. I can’t stop staring at the “flat arch” above the opening. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make the stone veneer (which is most likely in front of concrete block back-up) look like this is a real flat arch. The problem is that it can’t be real.
The light gray stone is not in the same plane as the reddish brick above, but rather projects out a couple of feet. You can see the edge where the stone plane returns to the general wall plane being to the left of the garage entrance, by the tree and the rear of the dark blue car. That means that (a) the “arch” is supporting very little load and (b) if it were actually an arch it would fail because there’s nothing on the left side to carry the horizontal thrust from the arch action. Besides that obvious impossibility, there’s also the fact that the garage entrance is fairly wide – something like 13 or 14 feet – which is a long span for a flat arch.
A lot of the residential architecture of Battery Park City looks like a modern version of the Upper West Side. That’s not an accident, but rather the result of the design guidelines put in place in the 1980s when the landfill was being developed. The problem is that the architectural styles of the 1890s to 1920s buildings that make up most of the memorable designs of the UWS were based on solid masonry walls. Imitating their outward forms in thin veneer is certainly possible. But imitation of the appearance of one technology using a different technology tends to not work. It’s cargo-cult design that leads to impossible flat arches. Part of the problem is that we lack a proper architectural vocabulary for this situation. The details of flat arches were developed centuries ago, while the use of thin stone veneer is a post-World-War-II phenomenon.
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