Important To Someone

From an old warehouse building that no one thought about much until the neighborhood around it turned from the industrial Lower West Side into SoHo:

This space is now an apartment that few can afford, and the renovation going on when I took that picture was covering up most of the structure. But the wood columns remained exposed and I keep looking at that molding 8 or 10 inches down from the girder. Someone felt that the upper-floor columns in a warehouse, unlikely to be visited by anyone who spent much of their time thinking about architectural aesthetics, needed this faint echo of a classical order that marks the base of where an ornamental column capital would start.