Its ground floor is a playful reproduction of the tombs of Egypt. About the second story the architect must have become discouraged--or perhaps the owner's funds gave out--for the next dozen floors are treated in the severest "tenement house" manner; then, as his building terminates well up in the sky, a top floor or two are, for no ap
parent reason, elaborately adorned. Indeed, this desire for a brilliant finish pervades the neighborhood. The Johnson Building on Broad Street (to choose one out of the many) is sober and discreet in design for a dozen stories, but bursts at its top into a Byzantine colonnade. Why? one asks in wonder.
Another new-comer, corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, is a commonplace structure, with a fairly good cornice, on top of which--an afterthought, probably--a miniature State Capitol has been added, with dome and colonnade complete. The result recalls dear, absent-minded Miss Matty (in Mrs. Gaskell's charming story), when she put her best cap on top of an old one and sat smiling at her visitors from under the double headdress!
Nowhere in the world--not even in Moscow, that city of domes--can one see such a collection of pagodas, cupolas, kiosks, and turrets as grace the roofs of our office buildings! Architects evidently look upon such adornments as compensations! The more hideous the structure, the finer its dome! Having perpetrated a blot upon the city that cries to heaven in its enormity, the repentant owner adds a pagoda or two, much in the same spirit, doubtless, as prompts an Italian peasant to hang a votive heart on some friendly shrine when a crime lies heavy on his conscience.
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