That’s a nice old commercial building on Thomas Street, with its west flank exposed by past demolition and the fact that the new apartment house next door is set back from the building line. You can see the old joist pockets in the west face of the wall, lined up in rows where the floors used to be and sloppily filled in. That said, this doesn’t appear to be an old party wall for two reasons.
First, those short pieces of channel that are outboard of the wall face, looking like confetti randomly stuck on the lines of the old joists, are a common way to fasten an otherwise loose wall to interior structure. The channels are fastened to bolts or threaded rods that extend inwards and are bolted to the floor joists; the channel orientation doesn’t really matter since their purpose is to catch masonry from moving outwards. You will sometimes see this kind of attachment when the joists of the extant building are not solidly fastened to a party wall and the neighboring building is demolished, but most often it’s to fasten a free-standing wall to the remaining building.
The second reason I think that is not a party wall is harder to see but more conclusive: the front edge of the wall doesn’t line up with the front facade. If you click on the picture to expand it, you can see that the vertical edge of that wall ends short of the front facade by about four inches, and the sloped upper edge sure looks like it’s the side of a mansard roof that does not exist.
When I say I’ve seen a building ghost, I usually mean that I’m seeing marks – like joist pockets, of the imprint of a stair on plaster – where a building used to be. In this case, we appear to be seeing one remaining wall of the demolished building, tied to the remaining neighbor to keep it stable. The demolished building is, for all intents, just as gone as if that wall had been demolished too, since we can’t get a sense of what it looked like from nothing more than one side wall. But that last wall shambles on into the future.
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