The facade was completed in 1902 without the statues, "and today the piles of uncarved stone are an accepted part of the facade," Mr. Heckscher wrote.
He had designed the facade, he wrote, so that the floors appeared to be in groups of four or five, and he had added heavy horizontal forms.
In "Facade," she wrote, she was exploring "the effect on rhythm, and on speed, of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances".
The three-sided facade, he wrote, "has not the aspect of an enclosing wall, so much as of a huge screen".
"These storefronts have the city's history etched in their facades," they write.
"That granite and limestone is all a facade!" Ms. Anders wrote in an e-mail message.
Another reminder is the circular sign on the facade with Studebaker written on it.
On the facade, someone has written "proud to be black" and spray-painted "Abba Lives" in red.
"Your agency began a renovation of this highly visible building more than six years ago, which resulted in the placement of scaffolding on its Adams, Willoughby and Pearl Street facades," Mr. Golden wrote in August to William J. Diamond, commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.
Simon Inglis, writing in 1996, described it as an "imposing red-brick facade, with its mock neo-classical arched, square and pedimented windows, exudes prestige and power".
Behind the avuncular, slightly befuddled facade viewers knew, he writes, was a man consumed by ambition and driven to succeed at any cost.
