I was far uptown and took a picture of a ghost cornice on an extant building:
That’s a facade with some real effort in the original architectural design. Nice terra-cotta detailing around the windows without fire-escapes, for example, as well as some nice ironwork in the fire-escapes themselves. I assumed1 that the stucco band at the very top of the wall is where there used to be a projecting cornice as the visual crown. Note the regularly-spaced indentations below, which I assumed were where decorative brackets used to be. The square spaces between the brackets still have their green terra cotta.
This is the corner of 183rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, and it was easy enough to find out that the building was originally named Harold Court, presumably after the developer, or one of his kids, or maybe some other relative. This was at least the second Harold Court in Manhattan: in 1904 there was an apartment house with that name on West 102nd Street, but this far-uptown neighborhood was not developed until after the IRT subway reached here in 1906. Anyway, here it is in the 1940 tax photo:
What is that? There’s the cornice and the brackets, like I had guessed, but with a huge Spanish-tile-and-crenelations fake mansard above. It’s not a floor that was removed – the building is described in the 1920s as being six stories, which it is without the top hat – and you can see on the wing on the far left that the mansard is literally just a story-high false front. The whole facade is a good example of “eclectic” so I can’t complain about clashing styles, but what’s the point of this? Is it the architectural equivalent of a pufferfish inflating to try to scare away predators?
It’s no huge surprise why it was removed: without a lot of maintenance, that free-standing wall with hundreds of potential places to trap water was doomed from the start. And, if I’m being honest, no great loss. It would be nice to get the cornice back, though.
- Dramatic foreshadowing: you know that means it turns out that I was wrong. ↩︎
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