The demolition revealed two colorful, well-preserved advertisements that had adorned the brick side of the adjacent building for nearly a century.
Note the lively dot-dash-dot pattern of Flemish bond masonry: short brick ends (headers) alternating with longer brick sides (stretchers).
Haines Lunderg Waehler, a Manhattan architectural and engineering firm, designed the structure with clapboard and brick sides and a slate roof.
Specially prized are murals that appear suddenly when the demolition of one building re-exposes the brick side wall of a neighbor.
Ever since Houston was widened for subway work, the street has been plagued by empty space: blank brick side walls, gas stations, parking lots.
Work on the Metropolitan Railway began in 1860 by cut-and-cover methods that is, by making trenches along the streets, giving them brick sides, providing girders or a brick arch for the roof, and then restoring the roadway on top.
For Rockefeller, Johnson tore down an existing four-story building, keeping only its brick side walls and eventually painting them white to provide a suitable background for art: "The brick gives you the scale of the wall".
It has only two Gravesian elements on the outside, a new entrance for school groups set into the red brick side of the former Y.W.C.A. building, and a new public entrance in the rear of the main museum building, facing the garden and parking area.
Where McAslan's show-stopping canopy is less strong is in the moments when it encounters the rest of the world; it sits clunkily against the brick side of the old station and seems uncomfortable with the Great Northern hotel, a grade II-listed building that is half-engulfed by the curvaceous skirt of the new roof.
