Ghost Dissection

From a few years ago, a vacant lot and the 1902 Cluett Building on West 19th Street:

The building on the far right is the Siegel Cooper Store, about five years older than Cluett. Ordinarily I’d assume that Cluett, a loft building, has a steel frame, but its architect was Robert Maynicke, who hung on to bearing walls and cast-iron columns longer than just about anyone else working in large commercial buildings. Given the building’s size – eleven stories, 75-foot frontage, and a through-the-block depth of a bit under 200 feet, it is probably steel-frame, but with Maynicke you never know.

Anyway, as late as the early 1890s this was a block of rowhouses, with public and commercial buildings at the east end of the block, facing Fifth Avenue (on the right):

The green arrows mark the east and west houses that were demolished for Cluett; 30 and 32 West are the currently vacant lot. Here’s the site in 1903, with the Siegel Cooper behemoth on the west end of the block, and Cluett sandwiched between the remaining houses.

What’s striking about the ghost of 30 West imprinted on the side of Cluett is that most of the ghost surface is inboard of the general plane of the wall. The portion of Cluett wall adjacent to the street lot line is in the same plane as the wall above. The next few feet are set in, then out (where the sign and the man dressed in black are) to the general plane, then in, then out, then in, then out, then in, and then we’re at the back wall of the house. The part right at the sidewalk is readily explained: the front facade of the house was set back to create an areaway with room for a stoop. That’s standard NY rowhouse design and visible in the older map. The front and rear projecting piers make sense for fireplace locations, but that’s where logic starts to break down. What’s the center pier? Why is the wall inset like that? The first question will likely remain a mystery. The second maybe is amenable to logic…

Typically, rows of houses were built with fireplace chimneys at every party wall, serving one house. So each house would, for example, have its fireplaces on the east wall. In that example, if you tear down one house and look at the east wall of the newly-cleared site, you’d see a chimney breast projecting form the plane of the face of the party wall, with the face of the party wall itself projecting past the property line. That chimney would be meaningless, because it served the house you just demolished. If you were to look at the west side of the cleared site, you’d just see the face of the party wall projecting past the property line. The chimney breast is typically just a single wythe of brick thick from its face to the flue. Two other common facts: (1) when people built large new buildings on the site of old houses, they typically (but not always) incorporated the old party walls into their new side-lot-line curtain walls and (2) the new wall could not project past the lot line because it wasn’t a party wall.

So my proposed sequence of events: in 1901, four houses were torn down for the 19th Street side of the Cluett site. The houses in the row had their chimneys on their west walls. So the demo exposed the chimneys of the former 28 West 19th at the party wall shared by the still-standing 30 West. But those chimneys were fragile, one-wythe brick and were now without function. During the construction of Cluett in 1902, the exposed faces of the chimney breasts were removed and the flue space inside infilled with new brick that was keyed into the new curtain wall being built east of the party wall. Some time later, 30 and 32 West were demolished, including the old party wall abutting Cluett, leaving (1) the set-in areas where the party wall had been on the Cluett side of the property line and (2) the projecting piers where the old chimneys had been filled in. Sometime after the demo – maybe immediately after, maybe decades later – the ghost area was stuccoed, blurring everything.

It’s an educated guess and it’s as accurate as anything other guess, so I’m done for now.