An Original Or An Imitation Of An Imitation

The Leonard Street facade of 249 Church Street:

For this discussion, ignore the stone ground-floor storefront, which was a 1920s alteration of this 1867 loft building, probably replacing cast iron columns and lintels. The rest of the facade is, per the Landmarks designation report, Italianate/Second Empire. I’ll take their word for that stylistic categorization. What it is to me is notably plain compared to most masonry facades of the era. So much so that, given its plainness and location in Tribeca, I thought for a moment it was a clunkier-than-usual cast-iron facade.

It can be difficult to tell the difference between an ornate iron facade and a masonry one. The story goes that when Margot Gayle was first educating people in New York about cast iron in the 1970s, she’d throw magnets at buildings to prove to skeptics that they were painted iron rather than stone. One of the ways in which cast iron can be seen is to look for rust staining, particularly at joints and screw-heads. So I am used to looking for reddish-brown stains on mid-1800s loft buildings…which this facade has:

Those stains don’t exactly fit the pattern for rust stain, but they’re not far off. The deciding factor for me – when I was standing on the corner waiting for a meeting to start, before I had the chance to look up the building in the designation report – were the cracks in stones, such as the one directly over the window second from the left, bottom row. That curving crack is typical of stone, not iron.

A funny thing happened with loft architecture in New York in the 1860s. Cast-iron facades began as slavish imitations of the masonry they were displacing, but developed in a different direction. They became simpler – part of the rationale for using iron was the speed of erection, which certainly was helped by removing some of the ornament – and more two-dimensional. There’s a style called Neo-Grec that (a) was popular in cast iron, (b) has nothing to do with anything Greek, and (c) has notably simplified ornament. This facade is not that, but it resembles it in some ways. If you got rid of the chamfered edges and half-round molding in the window surrounds…

So, did the designer of this building like the simpler designs of iron facades? Did he consciously imitate the iron that was an imitation of masonry? Or was this simply a less-ornate, and therefore less expensive, facade?