A Double-Sided Ghost

Those are the east and west sides of a vacant lot on Fulton Street. Fulton has been a commercial street for a long, long time, but given building practices in New York in the early nineteenth century, that doesn’t actually rule out party walls between buildings. In this case, the building on the left somewhat resembles a late-nineteenth tenement even though it’s an early- or mid-century commercial building. Because the vacant lot is narrow – just a single, uncombined lot – we get ghosts of the missing building on both sides, something I rarely see.

The building to the west (the lower photo – click on it to enlarge it) is a bit newer and a story taller, and the outline of the missing building is clear as day. The effect of coal smoke on brick does a nice job of highlighting where the east side of the building used to be protected by the missing building and where it’s always been exposed. The light-colored vertical strip near the street is concrete block infill, and that’s almost certainly the location of a chimney on the missing building.

The building to the east (the upper photo) does not have a clearly defined edge. What it does have is (a) signs of joist pockets in horizontal rows on the west face of its west wall that are pretty close to the floor levels inside and (b) relatively recent ties to keep the west wall from moving west. Adding together these two pieces of information with the block infill on the other building and I get the following hypothesis: the missing building was demolished relatively recently (let’s say within the last thirty years), it was the same size as the building to the east, it shared a party wall with the building to the east, and it had a chimney on the west that the east wall of the building to the west was constructed around. If it was the same size and shared a wall with the building to the east, its original front facade was probably similar, although it could have been modified at many time in the last 150 years. I could look up the history of the site to see how close I am to being correct, but I prefer the mystery.