Five Things People Get Wrong

1. That old brick means old building

Brick is reused, and it was reused constantly.

A demolition in this state produced tens of thousands of usable bricks and there was an established trade in cleaning and reselling them. So a wall of visibly old brick may be twenty years old, and a building of a hundred and forty may have been repointed so thoroughly that it reads as new.

Date the openings and the bond, not the brick. Bond patterns changed with structural practice and are much harder to fake than a surface.

2. That a plaque is evidence

A plaque tells you what somebody decided to commemorate, and when.

It is real evidence about the commemoration. It is weak evidence about the building, because plaques are frequently placed decades later, frequently on the successor building rather than the original site, and occasionally on the wrong side of the street.

Treat a plaque as a lead. The city's own records are a source; a brass plate is a claim.

3. That a retained front is a saved building

It is a saved street. Those are different things and the difference is most of what a building was.

A front wall with nothing behind it sets this out at length. The short version: the front tells you what a building wanted to look like, the plan tells you what it did, and a retained front keeps the first and destroys the second.

4. That an empty lot has nothing on it

An empty lot in a dense block is often the most legible site available, because the demolished building left its whole section printed on the party wall next door.

Floor levels, roof pitch, chimney breasts, sometimes fireplaces. That is a measured drawing, in mortar, at full size, free, from the sidewalk.

A vacant lot is not an absence. It is a section.

5. That the oldest thing is the most interesting

It is usually the most photographed and rarely the most informative.

The buildings that repay attention are the ones that changed, because change leaves evidence and continuity does not. A building that has done one thing since 1890 gives you one fact. A building that has been a stable, a garage, a warehouse and a gym gives you four, and the four are all still visible if you know where the fills are.

This is also why our first step has the fewest entries and our middle steps have the most.

And one thing people get right

That the buildings are worth looking at.

We have never met anybody in this city who thought otherwise, which is unusual and is probably the best argument for a paper like this one existing at all.