Under the Cover

On a regular basis, I walk past the building at 111 Cedar Street/112 Trinity Place/108 Liberty Street, which no one ever thinks about unless they’re looking for Burger King. Here’s streetview of the Liberty Steet facade:

According to the Certificate of Occupancy, the top two floors are vacant and the windowless third floor is back-of-house space for the restaurant. So, today, the building and Burger King are one and the same.

Here’s the photo I took that got me thinking about the past of the building:

Note the two cast-iron columns, at the far right side of the first floor and between the door and the storefront covered by the roll-down shutter. The first hint that this has to be an old building is that no one has built such a small building in lower Manhattan in a very long time; the second hint is the presence of those columns. But we have to go way back…I remember that Burger King from 30 years ago; the 1980s tax photo shows it there as well. (On a side note, a 45-year-old or maybe older fast food restaurant is impressive in its own way.) Here’s the 1940 tax photo:

We’re looking at the light-colored building to the immediate left of the Liberty Cafe. (The cafe is at 110 Liberty Street and we’re looking at 108 Liberty, remember?) That’s a fairly ordinary old loft building. If you think I’m kidding about which building, look at the top floor and look at the top floor of the streetview. From this angle, we can’t really see the storefronts, but look the spacing: two relatively wide storefronts flanking a narrow one. That matches the spacing of the two cast iron columns in my photo and the two columns sheathed in stainless steel sheet metal, on either side of the brown sign in the window. I feel safe in saying that the sheet metal covers another pair of cast iron columns.

The Liberty Cafe building looks to be twin of the building we’re looking at. If you look closely at my photo, you’ll see that the column on the right is centered on the lot line, rathr than being fully within the left-right (east-west) confines of the facade. So the wall between 108 and 110 Liberty was a party wall, and one storefront column reflected that. Perhaps that’s why it’s not covered in sheet metal.