Stripey

A photo from the other day. looking at the north face of 61 Broadway over the roofs of 65 and 71 Broadway. The street facades of 61 are white glazed brick, as you can see on the Trinity Place facade on the right, with the huge (roughly floor-high) green cornice. The lot-line walls are matte yellow brick, which was presumably cheaper.

There are well-defined lighter stripes at the main roof level, and the two floors directly below, as well as at the west edge, adjacent to the Trinity facade. The stripes are so regular in their geometry that they could easily be mistaken for an intentional patterning of the brick. What they are, of course, is replacement brick where there was damage, and the so-regular geometry exists because the damage follows the lines of the steel frame hidden behind that wall.

Looking at this evidence, I don’t know if steel repairs were required. Maybe. Maybe there was just some surface rust on the steel – enough to cause some rust jacking that damaged the brick, but not enough to weaken the beams to where repairs were needed – and the brick was removed and replaced. Maybe large-scale steel repairs took place. Maybe somewhere in-between. But those stripes, like any scars, give a hint of what once happened.