Buildings Without Windows 4

In this case, a building without real windows.

This building, on Joralemon Street near Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, is reasonably famous as a fake rowhouse. It is, in fact, a piece of the subway system, serving as a ventilator for the IRT subway’s Joralemon tunnel (carrying the Lexington Avenue subway under the East River from the Battery to Brooklyn Heights) and also as an emergency exit (never, as far as I know, used as such) from the tunnel. It’s an 1847 house, converted by the IRT company in 1907. I suspect the conversion, rather than replacement with a purpose-built ventilator was because Brooklyn Heights has always been a quiet residential neighborhood and considerably more wealthy than the city as a whole.

If you look closely, the illusion that it’s still a house is not very strong. The black glass in the windows gives no hint of an interior, and that weird sloped cover over the old basement areaway doesn’t look like any house I can remember. Before the black glass they just kept the shutters closed to hide the fact that there weren’t real windows:

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a lot better than any number of possible alternatives.