I could have sworn I’d written about this building before, but I can’t find it, so here goes: when is adding a floor not adding a floor?
This is 935 Broadway/159 Fifth Avenue. The trapezoidal site is south across 22nd Street from the wide end of the Flatiron building (on the right, with the scaffolding): as Fifth and Broadway diverge heading south the blocks get wider. It’s a good example of the palazzo-style commercial building of the mid-1800s, in this case 1862. The exterior is reasonably intact – with one exception described below – but I assume there’s nothing much left of the old interiors. So, putting aside the fact that’s an accidental survivor and has a nice facade, there’s only one real point of interest to it: what’s going on with the sixth floor?
Visually, it’s a five-story facade, except that there’s a sixth tier of windows that literally interrupts the water-table and other ornament directly below the cornice. The wikipedia entry I linked to above states “The building originally had five stories and a sixth story was added in 1919…” with that description footnoted to a credible source: the Ladies’ Mile Historic District designation report of the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission. I’ve added floors to buildings, and it has always involved making the building taller. In this case, the proper verb might be “inserted”, as a low-height sixth floor was squeezed in between the roof and (I’d guess) a lowered ceiling at the fifth floor. A lot of mid-1800s buildings have cocklofts: unusable low-height attics between the sloped roof joists and the level top-floor ceiling joists. By lowering the ceiling, you can convert the cockloft into an awkward floor, which could then get windows by cutting a bunch of holes at the top of the facades.
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