The Thought That Counts

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street:

In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained:

Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything other than what it is now: a small service garage in a less-than-chic part of Manhattan. In 1940 it had a marquee and a knife sign, as if it were a theater; there’s some nice patterning in the brick, and some fancy frills at the tops of the first floor columns.

In order to be filed as a new building in 1931, there had to be an architect associated with the project. The building may have been designed by a general-practice architect or by a garage builder with an architect on staff. Either way, the designer, and the masons, put in the effort to make something interesting of an unimportant background building. I’m being unsubtle, even for me, but there’s a lesson in there.