A very old survivor in east midtown:
We’ve got a very slender cast-iron column not quite1 in the middle of the storefront, what appears to be a rectangular iron column at the left edge of the first floor (next to the door to the apartments), and two probable cast-iron columns covered in stucco between the apartment door and the storefront and at the far right.
What holds up the masonry front facade over the first-floor openings? There’s a reasonable two-course brick jack-arch over the narrow door, and two ridiculous one-wythe barely-curved brick arches over the two longer spans at the storefront. The short arch might be real, but the other two are obviously not. A closer look:
There are big cast-iron plates directly above the openings, with little flanges turned up at their ends. They might be (a) simple plates, (b) the bottom flanges of inverted-T beams, or (c) cast-iron arches with wrought-iron ties. I could believe it’s a simple plate at the narrow door opening, but find that very unlikely at the wider storefront openings. But: it’s difficult to build a brick arch around the web of an invert T, so maybe we see a real jack arch at the door opening because that’s just a plate and we see those ridiculous fake arches at the storefront because those are inverted Ts?
- Why not exactly in the middle? No one alive today will ever know. ↩︎
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