If I Knew Then What I Know Now

I was on East Houston Street a few years ago and took a picture of some old work:

See the new (unpainted) brick between the BENSON sign and the white-painted brick that’s mostly hidden by the new building? That’s a repair I worked on in 1993. If you look at the ground floor, you can see that the wall projects out a but where BENSON is painted. The portion of wall to the right, to the north, was badly cracked, and the repair was straightforward enough: remove the outer wythe of brick and damaged bricks in the next wythe, and rebuild with new solid brick. This photo was taken 30 years after construction and the new brick looks fine.

It’s interesting to look at a report I wrote in 1993 and compare it to what I would say today. It mostly looks okay – sigh of relief – but in my description of the building I mention that the facade is relatively new, and I wasn’t sure if that was simply new brick as a veneer over the old facade, or a new facade. Here’s current day street view:

The building that houses Writing on the Wall, and has writing on its wall, is the one I worked on. Note that it’s set back a few feet from the buildings to the west, on the left. Here’s a street view from 1940:

It’s the building with Garfein’s Caterers we’re looking for and Hey! it’s one of a row of identical tenements. So at some time between 1940 and 1993, the front few feet of the building were chopped off and a new front facade was built. That makes the damage we repaired much clearer: that vertical strip was maybe 7 or 8 feet back from the original front, which is where you’d expect to see a chimney flue in a tenement. The brick we took out was probably old infill from when the buildings to the east were demolished, and the side wall of this building was exposed. The whole wall was exposed for a while: I don’t know when the demo happened, but here’s the site to the east circa 1980:

In 1989, the gas station was demolished and the big new building was constructed. It covers most of the side wall, but not the front, where we worked.

One last thought: the new front facade and the demolition next door may well be related. Old tenements are fairly fragile, and a lot of vibration from next door during demo could easily have caused enough damage to encourage someone to just give up on the front of the building.

Back to the title of the post: in 1993, I couldn’t research buildings on the internet. I could have spent a day at the municipal archives to look up the 1940s tax photo, but there was no way build that time into the project fee. My reports now are based on a wider base of information because that information is now readily available.