Another cast-iron facade, this time on Murray Street. It’s a variation of the weird Neo-Grec style, with arches that still have some arch to them. The paint is heavy enough that it’s hard to see the bolt heads that confirm it’s iron but the long rust stain makes up for that. If you zoom in on the square plinths below the octagonal column bases, you can see the iron edge more clearly.
The reason I took this picture is that the columns below the arches end in mid-air, about three feet above the sidewalk. There are another set of columns below, of. course, but it’s quite easy to use the stylistic clues to distinguish between the upper columns (octagonal with flat sides) and the lower (square with paneled sides). The reason is quite simple: the exterior platform that used to be here has been removed. The upper columns mark the original location of the first floor, and the space below was part of a basement.
We are so used to cast-iron-front loft buildings being artists’ studios and high-end condos that it’s easy to forget they were built to be working industrial buildings. They were built for light manufacturing and as warehouses, nothing fancier. As such, most of them have some form of loading dock out front, facing the sidewalk. The heights of these platforms vary, but they are generally lower than modern loading docks because they were served by horse-drawn wagons rather than trucks. The platforms are also often in worse condition than the rest of the front facade from 150 years or so of wear and tear.
At some point, the loading dock was removed from this building and the first floor lowered to grade, leaving only the odd detail of the column transition to mark the past.
