Passed  by a nice little apartment house on West 80th, Amsterdam to Broadway
this morning, right across from the holistic pet bathing operation, and the
gay bookstore above the washing place, "My Beautiful Laundrette".

Building is a sweet pair of Flemish-gabled buildings, designed by George B.
Pelham (son of an English maritime architect) in 1895: brownstone basement and
quoining and parapets, orange-iron spot brick field, surrounding double
vertical bays of windows rising floors 2-5.  Bays are trapezoidal projections in
galvanized iron which now looks, of course, like a destroyer after strafing at
Pearl Harbor.  Noticed an architect on the street there six months ago, talking
about building to general contractor, and asked him if he was going to screw
up this inventive little work of sidestreet architecture.  He said "of course
not" as if he meant it.  For such modest works of architecture, that is rarely
the case.

Although he gave them new "bronze" windows, he was otherwise true to his
word, and they have repointed the brick with rusty red mortar, refrained from
ripping off the slightly leaning Flemish parapets and replacing them with an ugly
scar, and is patching and repainting the projecting galvanized bays.  Workers
from Mexico/Colombia/Krypton are working on the bays with some attention,
painting without giant drips, and even patching the galvanized.

The edges of each bay are trimmed in bead-and-reel, but this style is
apparently not available in off the shelf galvanized; workers are using runs of
egg-and-dart.

You can hardly tell the difference.

Best,  Christopher