Trippy

I was minding my own business in Noho when this building forced me to look at it: Completed in 1883, it was not actually the Mercantile Exchange, which was about a mile away, but apparently was back-office and sales space for the exchange. Physically, it’s a building with a cast-iron front facade, brick side and rear walls and (probably) wood-joist floors, just like most cast-iron-front commercial buildings in lower Manhattan, but the ornament on the facade is maybe unique. Since the building is in the Noho Historic Distric, we have a professional’s description: “Six bays; slender, cast-iron columns at ground level; three non-historic flagpoles; engaged colonnettes simulating bamboo poles and wider center columns with floral decorations on upper stories; piers with floral and foliate motifs; top-story fenestration capped by filigree arches; applied letters set off by foliation on spandrels above the fourth and second stories reading “The New York Mercantile Exchange…” Can’t argue with…