A Fake Of A Fake

The picture above, courtesy of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, shows the Little Singer Building at 561 Broadway as it looked in 1973, when it was designated as a landmark. The building was constructed in 1903 as the Singer Building and picked up “Little” when the Singer company constructed the big tower a mile down Broadway at Liberty Street. Descriptions of the building often refer to the street facades as precursors to glass curtain walls. They are to some extent, as are the walls of a number of other buildings, but they are very much a product of their heavily-ornamented era. Ernest Flagg was not a modernist in the sense we use that word today.

(On a separate note, real estate in SoHo is a lot more valuable today than it was fifty years ago. The one-story building to Singer’s south has been replaced by the new headquarters for Scholastic Books.)

Here’s a picture I took recently, showing the facade close-up:

This is a curtain wall, in the sense that it is a non-structural wall supported by the building’s steel frame. You’re seeing steel (the green spandrel above the arch, for example), uncontrolled steel/wrought iron (the arch), terra cotta (the rectangular red quoins at the top abutting the tan stone of the neighboring building), and cast iron (the green quoins at the bottom). The quoins are veneer, held in place by a light steel frame. There are two bits of fakery here, both of which are, in context, wild.

First, start at the O in “Company” and go up two floors. The floor directly above the sign has a slender cast-iron column that is part of the curtain wall. The floor above that has a similar column hidden by a six steel bars made to look like a column. The bars are discrete pieces of metal but have a shared decorative capital above, turning them into an ersatz fluted column. Fluted columns like that are reasonably common in cast-iron facades of the 1860s.

Second, the quoins are based more on the cast-iron quoins used on the old iron facades than they are on the much-older masonry precedents. Here’s 442 Broadway from the LPC’s SoHo designation report:

Those beautiful quoins are cast iron, intended to imitate stone.

The fake column and the quoins are both imitations of similar elements in the nearby cast-iron facades, which is to say they’re imitations of an older style of imitation.