Part of a facade on the Upper East Side. Because I took a lousy picture, you can’t see that the window and door have identical terra-cotta flat-arch heads. The bands of ashlar are actually terra cotta and the base (from the sidewalk up to the windowsill) is terra cotta.
Peculiarity number one: terra cotta was used for trim at a location where people can touch it. Even the Woolworth Building, with its very large and insanely complicated terra cotta, has stone at the first floor where people might put their hands on the wall. Terra cotta is durable against the weather and is string in compression, but it’s otherwise quite fragile, so designers and builders tried to isolate it from the destructive nature of passers-by. That care may not have been necessary, as the ground-level terra cotta here all looks quite good.
Peculiarity number two: the sides of the terra cotta at the door are abrupt and stuccoed. That could be repair to impact damage from clumsy people (item one) but it leads me to believe that this door used to be a window, and the masonry from the sill down was removed. The thing about classically-derived moldings and other ornament, and the styles that they are part of, is that they don’t simply end. They terminate with an ornamental flourish. Given the care with which the masonry in this wall was detailed, I cannot believe that the terra cotta base molding and water-table would simply stop like that.
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