STREETSCAPES

Can Nearly Half a Building Add Up to a Landmark?

Office for Metropolitan History

THE UNKINDEST CUT

A panorama of downtown Brooklyn, above, in 1904, with the Smith, Gray & Company clock tower at Fulton and Nevins Streets. Below, the stub of the clock tower today, and a detail of column capitals on the building.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: February 20, 2005

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AN anyone hope to designate half a landmark? And the 1893 Smith, Gray & Company building, at Fulton and Nevins Streets, would be even less than half - only 7 floors remain of the 17-story 1890's tower. Yet a coalition of preservationists has a list of 28 buildings in downtown Brooklyn it deems worthy of designation, and the Smith, Gray building is included.

While many of the other buildings have lost their ground-floor facades to retail alterations, only the Smith, Gray building has lost its top.

Smith, Gray & Company was established in the mid-19th century, and by the 1880's had a prosperous men's clothing store. In 1888, the firm put up a new eight-story store designed by the architect Peter J. Lauritzen on the odd-shaped lot at the intersection of Fulton and Nevins Streets and Flatbush Avenue. What set the store apart from other retail operations in the area was its pair of towers, the taller 210 feet high, with a large clock illuminated at night.

In 1892 the store caught fire, and the clock tower fell down to Fulton Street, demolishing the elevated station there. The Brooklyn Eagle described the tower as "the standard of time" for the neighborhood. But Smith, Gray rebuilt in 1893, one part a three-story building at the angled corner that was planned to go up to 10 floors. Accompanying it within a few years was a new 17-story, 225-foot-high tower facing Nevins Street, with an 18-foot-wide clock.

The Eagle called the location "the most conspicuous" corner in Brooklyn and praised the new Smith, Gray building as "a lasting monument to the enterprise and pluck" of the company, which had rehired Lauritzen as the architect.

Early photographs show a trim, delicate early-Renaissance-style campanile of light orange brick cross-banded with darker masonry. The lateral bands of contrasting color offered, for New York, a Sienese flavoring. Early maps and photographs suggest there was a lesser 10-story tower (of which only a stub survives) at what is now a separate building at 10 Nevins Street.

The retail clothing business required other qualities besides enterprise and pluck. In 1894, someone pretending to be an official of the Young Men's Christian Association told the store he was planning to submit a big order to outfit missionaries, and he requested samples, including walking canes and patent leather shoes. He asked that the bill be sent to the Y.M.C.A.

Something about a missionary in patent leather aroused skepticism from the manager on duty, and the man, Edward H. Beckert, was arrested by the police when the clothes were delivered. The Eagle said that Beckert, the head usher at Trinity Church, at Clinton and Montague Streets, had ordered more than $1 million in goods from 30 stores. He said in his defense that he had wanted to impress a woman - and he was acquitted on the grounds of insanity.

Smith, Gray is hardly known today, but an 1898 advertisement in The New York Times gives some impression of its humorous merchandising technique: "Big Bargains! Torrents of 'em. Fancy half-hose always associated with half-dollars, chokes down its pride to 21 cents."

The laughter stopped in 1914 when the firm went into bankruptcy. By the 1940's the tower was still standing, but Fulton Street had been taken over by lesser stores. A billiard parlor was on the second floor of the three-story building, which had never been enlarged. Sometime later - but not within recent memory - the Smith, Gray tower was cut down to its present seven stories. The now-vacant tower appears to house only elevator and stair equipment.

In 2003, the Brooklyn Heights Association and the Preservation Committee of the Municipal Art Society became concerned about historic buildings in downtown Brooklyn and began advocating the designation of many buildings in the area. The list includes the fascinating Abraham & Straus complex at Fulton and Livingston Streets, which ranges from Second Empire to Romanesque to Art Deco; the clapboard house at 233 Duffield Street; and the boxlike Board of Transportation Building at 370 Jay Street, described by the group as "one of New York's earliest examples of a Modern-style office building."

Since then, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated two early telephone-company buildings - the Art Deco structure at 101 Willoughby Street, built in 1931, and the Beaux-Arts 81 Willoughby Street of 1898 - and proposed designation for a few other buildings. (It is also considering another Smith, Gray & Company building, a pleasant cast-iron structure at 103 Broadway, near Bedford Avenue, in Williamsburg.)

For this viewer, though, none of them match the evocative power of the 1893 Smith, Gray building. In the retail chaos of this section of Fulton Street, it looks like a hurt puppy that has strayed onto a six-lane highway - you just want to go out and rescue it.

Meredith Hamilton, a governor of the Brooklyn Heights Association, says that the Smith, Gray tower, even in its much reduced state, is "worthy of landmarking," in part because of its prominent corner site. The Landmarks Preservation Commission initially rejected the building, but the commission's chairman, Robert Tierney, says it is taking a second look.

Partly intact buildings are a problem for traditional advocates of historic preservation. Proposals are often given a semi-academic air, usually dependent on architectural style, design and physical integrity. Official preservation of a fragment like the Smith, Gray building is hard to justify. At what point do we start regulating nice passages of brickwork, or a surviving cornice bracket?

Indeed, the three-story section of the building is forgettable. It is the remnant of the tower - and perhaps the imagined tower - that pull at the mind. It is, like the Roman Colosseum in Lord Byron's play "Manfred, "a noble wreck in ruinous perfection."

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com