The Thought That Counts

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street: In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained: Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything other than what it is now: a small service garage in a less-than-chic part of Manhattan. In 1940 it had a marquee and a knife sign, as if it were a theater; there’s some nice patterning in the brick, and some fancy frills at the tops of the first floor columns. In order to be filed as a new building in 1931, there had to be an architect associated with the project. The building may have been designed by a general-practice architect or by a garage builder with an architect on staff. Either way,…