The Scalped Cornice

Scalped cornices bother me. Although ornamentation has long since fallen from grace among modernist dogmatists, in my view it enriches the lives of passersby. In the 19th century and into the early 20th, builders of even the cheapest tenement housing felt compelled to oblige the public realm with ornamentation on their buildings.

As James Howard Kunstler and Andres Duany have pointed out repeatedly, Modernism essentially erased the bar. Today, developers of modest housing feel no compunction about putting a façade up as cheaply as possible--which usually means we get a box with windows. Likewise, building owners feel little incentive to replace a cornice in need of repair--they just scalp it (perhaps not realizing that a cornice may protect the structure against expensive weather damage).

Christopher Gray, whose "Streetscapes" column in the New York Times has long been a favorite of mine, did an excellent edition on scalped cornices a few years ago:

. . . there still are hundreds of "scalped" buildings left in the older parts of New York City -- a painful display of architectural mutilation.

A few owners have replaced these often crucial, crowning elements -- especially on important buildings. But no strategy has yet emerged for wide-ranging replacement, since concern for aesthetics generally collapses under the costs of a typical project.

Earlier this year, his column revisited the subject, with some modest good news:

many buildings scalped of their cornices in the mid-20th century have been recrowned in the last decade.

There are at least a dozen examples, some restorations, others totally new works, but all demonstrating widely varying ideas.

In 1994, The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the The Cornices (and Buildings) of Harlem as one of its "11 Most Endangered Places."

I'm going to document some of the more grating examples of scalped cornices I come across in my next post.