A Small Alteration

Next door to the construction of the new 74 Trinity Place is a nice old skyscraper at 2 Rector Street. The building has a white brick and terra cotta facade and is reasonably pretty. Interestingly, it’s not a designated New York landmark, but the facade is protected by the Trust for Architectural Easements; this form of protection is rare in the city because we have a strong landmarks law here.

My picture above only shows the bottom of the building, but that’s the part I want to talk about. The building has three street facades: on Trinity Place, Greenwich Street, and Rector Street. All three streets are narrow by modern standards, but Rector is the narrowest. At some point in the twentieth century, the driving lanes of Rector were widened as much as possible, leaving very narrow sidewalks. This led to the first alteration I want to mention: the creation of an arcade within the Rector Street portion of the ground floor by removing pieces of the facade to allow free movement through the southernmost bay of the space. You can see the arcade in the picture above (click to enlarge) on the far left. Because Rector Street is a slight hill here – Greenwich Street is pretty much the original shoreline, so this is the original slope down to the Hudson River – the arcade has a series of steps set into it, while the adjacent sidewalk simply slopes. The elevators are in the third bay from the south end of the building, so the creation of the arcade squeezed the lobby into the second bay. It’s recently been renovated, to improve the appearance of the long, narrow space.

The Rector Street facade and the first few bays on the Greenwich and Trinity facades originally had single large openings, probably with doors to lead to the lobby, although I’ve not seen a clear enough picture to be sure about that. The other bays on the Greenwich and Trinity facades what double openings with a decorative column between. If you look at the picture above, you can see the flat-headed openings on the bays to the left, which had originally had only one flat-headed opening each. And on the bays to the right you can see two small terra cotta arches in each bay, joining to head down to the top of the modern flat-headed storefront where the windows and terra cotta columns used to be. If you look at this photo from the New York Public Library, you can sort of make out the configuration of the first-floor facade.

Obviously the storefronts would look better with the decorative columns restored. Arches ending in nothing look silly. On the other hand, this is a steel-frame building, so those arches were always fake to begin with; perhaps the alteration is true to the nature of the building by being untrue to the nature of aches. More importantly, the Sixth Avenue Elevated ran up Trinity Place and the Ninth Avenue Elevated ran up Greenwich Street, so the only portion of the first floor facade that was really visible when the budding was constructed was the Rector Street side. Maybe this shouldn’t influence me, but I don’t feel very protective of the parts of the building that were largely hidden from view for the first thirty years of its existence.