A Front Wall With Nothing Behind It

The five questions

The same five questions, asked of every front

What it was built to do	The street front of a commercial block, carrying its own weight and the ends of the floor joists behind it.
What happens there now	A skin. It carries itself and nothing else, tied back at every floor to a frame that has no connection to the building it came from.
What you can still read off it	The junction. Look where the old wall meets the new work at the top and at both ends, because that joint is where the whole arrangement is admitted.
Where you can stand to see it	Straight across the street, then from each end of the block at an angle, which is the only way to see the depth.
What has gone for good	The plan. Every room, every stair, every floor level, and with them any way of knowing how the building actually worked.

Spotting one from the street

Four signs, in the order they become visible:

1. The parapet stops. The old wall reaches its original height and something set back and plainly newer continues above it.
2. The ends are raw. At the corners the old wall is butted against new work with a joint, often a strip of dark sealant, instead of a bond.
3. The window depth is wrong. New glazing sits far back in old openings because it is fixed to the new frame, not the old wall.
4. The tie plates. In raking light you can sometimes see a regular grid of small circular patches across the face where stainless ties were driven through and the holes made good.

Any two of those and you are looking at a retained front.

Why anybody does it

Because a planning condition or a preservation ordinance requires the street to keep its appearance, and because a new building behind is cheaper and more lettable than a restoration.

It is a compromise and it is usually described as though it were not. This paper's position is that the practice is neither a rescue nor a fraud: it saves the street and loses the building, and those are two different things that get talked about as one.

What is actually lost

The plan. Which is where nearly all the information was.

A building's front tells you what it wanted to look like. Its plan tells you what it was for, how many people worked in it, where they came in, how goods moved, where the light had to reach. A retained front keeps the first and destroys the second, and the first is the less interesting of the two.

That is why this entry sits at step three rather than step two. What is kept is the advertisement, not the building.

Practical

• Public sidewalk, any hour. The angle from each end of the block is what makes it readable.
• Raking light, so early or late, and the ties only show in it.
• Do not go into the site. Retained fronts are usually still under construction behind and the hoarding means what it says.