That’s the north face of 254 Canal Street, an industrial loft building completed in 1857. Just about everything you’re seeing is cast iron and window; the interior floors are wood joist and the two back facades are brick.
Buildings like this really drive home the point – not original here, not original anywhere in the last fifty years, but worthy of repetition – that cast iron facades are part of an industrial technology. One of the reasons iron was economical for architectural use was that the forms could be reused. The reuse of forms led, of course, to the creation of many identical pieces of iron. That’s fine if you’re planning on creating a building like this, where each floor of the two street facade consists of many repetitions of the exact same elements. Daniel Badger and James Bogardus, the two men most famous for working in cast iron in New York, along with their peers, were not just businessmen. They were people who made their money producing and selling cast iron, one of the most heavily industrialized products of their era.
254 Canal is now doing okay, but had been mistreated in the past and as a result is missing some ornament. It’s a bit bare compared to the platonic ideal of cast-iron palazzos, the Haughwout Building four blocks away. Haughwout would be a beautiful building under any circumstances; the fact that its facades were prefabricated to save money over building in masonry makes it all the more remarkable:
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