The back of No. 12 is five stories of jagged bricks, exposed beams and a sad blue tarp, shredded as if by desperate animals, hanging halfheartedly across a few yards of the open building.
It took just a few hours this month for a government-dispatched demolition crew to turn the place into a jagged pile of bricks.
Under a patchy blue sky, a lone worker, perched at least four stories high in a metal basket, pounded the remaining red-bricked jagged piece of wall with a sledgehammer, chipping it away brick-by-brick.
The brick wall looked jagged and scarred; people walked up to touch it.
A jagged cityscape of steel and brick and glass, with its own bright nightless burn and, beyond it, the fretful, historied amplitude of Kentucky, that netherworld.
Brutalism, as Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out with some distaste, had its roots in expressionism, the jagged, often counter-intuitive, mostly brick idiom that flourished in the Netherlands, Germany and the Baltic states from 1910 to 1930.
Only the jagged broken teeth of the Roman brick and flint walls remained above ground.
He gestures to the turned bricks, which make a jagged ruffle around the house's edges.
This was a wedge-shaped construction of white-painted common brick focused on a dramatic, jagged metal cross by the sculptor Benno Schotz.
Marco Pasanella engagingly pointed out the jagged white line that ran the length of the brick wall inside his wine shop, Pasanella & Son Vintners, in the South Street Seaport.
