Today it's a great place to people-watch in an al fresco café, have your caricature drawn, watch street performers and feast on the Gothic and Rococo architecture of the buildings with colorful historical murals on their facades.
The Mayflower is one of the dowager madams of Washington, whose curving facade, murals and extensive gold leaf suit a city of grandiose ambition.
To their credit, though, the architects reserved the western facade for murals where SITE will commission periodic art installations, timed to coincide with its biennials.
On the grounds of the National Autonomous University is the Central Library, which features a facade-covering mosaic (1952) by Juan O'Gorman, and the Rectoria building, with colourful murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and others.
He created a Modernist structure, raised on stilts, with a curved facade adorned with a mural depicting Mexico's multiracial culture.
The facade rose to a great mural, perhaps 10 feet high and 80 feet long, of multicolored figures in costume representing the history of vaudeville, the work of the Paris-trained classicist William de Leftwich Dodge.
It's there in the McCarren facade, in Aaron Wexler's flanking mural of flowers peeking through a growth of urban weeds, and in Lara Kohl's installation that pairs a shadow projection of a threatening King Kong with a recording of a soprano singing the national anthem.
Colorful murals on the facade — a Hindu-like deity with a monkey's tail; winged angels at the Annunciation — testified to vodun's absorption of other faiths.
Eighteen elaborate mosaics and murals cover the facade of Dabls's century-old row house and the surrounding buildings.
[New York Post] A graffiti artist will soon finish his love letter to Brooklyn, a huge mural gracing the dour facade of a parking garage on Hoyt Street.
