Hi Folks,  Next question.  What is brownstone?  I don't think we have that
here, just slate, marble and granite.  Oh, and hard heads aplenty.  Ruth




At 10:28 AM -0400 9/30/03, Met History wrote:
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

--
Ruth Barton
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Dummerston, VT

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