Subtle Design and Not

Two buildings on a single block, separated by about 110 years and a huge difference in design philosophy…

First up, how do you turn the corner from a busy avenue to a quiet side street?

The one-story red-brick building on the far left is a modern replacement for an old commercial building on the corner, facing Third Avenue in Brooklyn, and the rear yard for that lot, which took up a part of the side street roughly where the ungraffitied, unpainted part of the side wall is. Then, coming closer to where I was standing, we have five tenements in a row. The one furthest west, furthest from me, is built out to the street lot line, while the four identical buildings to the east are each set back behind an areaway and small stoop. This makes sense to me, architecturally: a tenement on a busy avenue is not as nice as one on a side street, and don’t need the pretension of genteel living that the stoops provide. Here’s a 1916 map showing these buildings at 93 to 101 15^th Street:

The buildings marked in yellow were entirely wood frame; those in red had masonry exterior walls. There’s a small wood-frame building in the map at 105 15^th Street, and that’s the lot on the far right in my photo above. Here’s a better look at that building:

What we’re seeing is the modern building that replaced the old wood one, with a stair at the center of its front facade and apartment balconies on each side of the stair. I don’t know what happened during design – there may have been some zoning issue that made it make sense to put the stair on a facade rather than in the middle of the plan – but I can say with complete conviction that I think putting fake windows on the blank wall of the stair is a terrible mistake. The modern design of this facade already stands out in sharp contrast to its older neighbors; the fake windows make it look cartoonish.