A Moment Of Transition Captured

Kami was on site and saw some interesting buildings across the street:

Every place has a feel to it based on the local architecture and things like signage, street paving, and street furniture. These four small apartment houses don’t feel very much like the Bronx to me – something about the narrow side-courts at the street facades and the chamfered corners…

Anyway, they are small (4 or 8 unit) apartment houses built in the early 1900s, and so are technically New Law tenements. Most of the improvements of the New Law over Old Law are internal: much better stairs and bathrooms, for example. But the increase in required side and rear yard sizes meant that relatively few New Law tenements were built on single lots, as these four were. Given that they were obviously built together, it’s surprising that the developer didn’t build a single building on a combined 100 foot by 100 foot lot, to get the benefits of layout efficiency. My guess is that they were built very shortly after 1901, when the New Law went into effect, and the designers were experimenting.

A note about finishing the top of a wall. Only the building at the far right has retained its tin cornice, although the two in the middle still have the fascia below where their cornices used to be. And the brownish rust on the second from the left makes it reasonable certain this is tin: among ordinary building materials, only tin and ferrous metals rust with that appearance, and the economics of it says this is tin, not sheet iron or steel. The stucco that replaced the tin fascia on the far left building looks terrible.