An interesting article in the NYTimes from a few weeks back describes the origins and unintended consequences of New York City Local Laws 10 and 11, which exemplify the sort of unseen influences that shape a building--and the city--long after the architect has left the scene.

URBAN TACTICS; Going Topless

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS (NYT)

FEW people are as tireless as Thom Bess, a retired chief court reporter by profession and a preservationist by avocation, in promoting the cornices of Harlem.
In his pearl Cadillac, he has taken Brooke Astor on a tour of the stately Stanford White townhouses of Strivers Row, on West 138th Street, where, he recalls, Ms. Astor commented airily: ''Well, I could live here.'' (To which Mr. Bess responded, ''We all could, if we could afford it.'')


And he never tires of pointing out the one Strivers Row townhouse, as conspicuous as a missing tooth in a pretty smile, whose owner stripped off the cornice, adorned with a flower pattern, in a misguided attempt, Mr. Bess says, to make the building safer for firefighters if a fire were to break out.

Most New Yorkers are too jaded and too hurried to look up at the often stunning architecture that surrounds them. But to some, like Mr. Bess, who do, every building with a top denuded of pressed tin, copper, cast-iron, stone, terra-cotta or even wood cornices and ornamentation stands out like a disfigured part of the urban landscape.

Many of those naked tops are the unintended consequence of Local Law 10, passed less than a year after Grace Gold, a Barnard student, was struck and killed by a falling piece of masonry at 115th Street and Broadway 25 years ago last month, and of its even more stringent successor, Local Law 11, passed in 1998.

The law, which requires that exterior walls and projecting ornamentation be inspected for safety by an engineer every five years, applies to the 12,000 city buildings -- 60 percent of them in Manhattan -- that are taller than six stories. Preservationists say the laws have contributed to the attitude that old buildings are inherently dangerous and should be stripped of decoration as a preventive measure rather than take a chance that a piece of masonry or cornice will fall off. As a result, ornamentation may be removed independently of the facade-inspection law, as was the case with the building on Strivers Row.

The neighborhoods most affected are often long-neglected jewels like Harlem and Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where the architecture is beautiful but ill-maintained, and where building owners are more likely to comply with safety requirements by taking the cheapest route instead of the most aesthetically pleasing one.

It is hard to miss the evidence of destruction wrought in the name of safety. Lintels have been shaved off windows, leaving behind a flattened shadow of the former ornament. Apartment buildings have been capped by ribbons of ''ghosting,'' layers of bare brick or stucco parging where massive overhanging cornices once hung like beetled brows. Such ghostings can be seen along Columbus Avenue in Manhattan Valley. Buildings have been scalped on nearly every block of Lenox Avenue in Harlem.

''Local Law 10 plays a big role,'' said Charles Wittman, owner of Architectural Fiberglass on Long Island, who estimates that his company has manufactured more than 10 miles of replacement fiberglass cornices for buildings throughout the city, including many city-sponsored gut rehabilitations. Often the damage is in the structural steel, and to get there, the facade ornaments have to be hammered or blasted off.

Few critics would dispute that the facade-inspection law stemmed from the noblest of motives: to make the city safer for pedestrians. But preservationists argue that removing ornamentation can be a superficial fix that may not address underlying problems of water seeping into the facade and may even worsen them.

The old cornices, critics note, were designed to deflect rain like an umbrella. Once they have been removed, the brick facade is directly exposed to the elements and may actually wick moisture away from the surface, where it freezes and thaws, destabilizing the brick.

Covering the exposed wall with ribbons of stucco can lead to water absorption and be just a temporary fix. ''In many cases we have found they are Band-Aids,'' said Alan Epstein, president of Epstein Engineering. He said his firm discouraged stripping cornices for both aesthetic and waterproofing reasons.

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council and a critic of the consequences of the law, said, ''You've got a choice; either you are responsible for the repair and maintenance of the cornice, or you could just take it off. Of course it was easier to just take it off. Listening to the people responsible for promulgating these rules, they would have you believe there are dozens of people killed every day because of cornices falling off of buildings.''

CRITICS of the law cite evidence that many more injuries have been associated with construction errors involving falling cranes, flying beams and scaffolding accidents than with crumbling facades. And whether the facade-inspection law has made the city safer is hard to determine. The city has no central system to track falling building debris, said Jennifer Givens, a spokeswoman for the Buildings Department. Out of the 12,000 buildings over six stories, about 1,100, or 1 out of 11, were found to have unsafe conditions during the most recent five-year inspection cycle, which ends next January.

A few people have tried to mitigate the architectural damage. Mr. Bess has been so concerned about the stripping of facades in Harlem that in 1994 he persuaded the National Trust for Historic Preservation to put ''The Cornices (and Buildings) of Harlem'' on its list of 11 Most Endangered Places of that year, along with Cape Cod, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin and the oldest surviving McDonald's.

Franny Eberhart, an Upper East Side preservationist and former executive director of the Historic Districts Council, helped document missing cornices on buildings in Fort Greene and on the Upper West Side in 1996 and 1997, hoping -- in vain, as it turned out -- that the city would support a tax-incentive program making it easier for building owners to replace them. Her survey found that 68 of 825 buildings in the Fort Greene historic district were missing cornices, and 24 of those had been shaved off after 1978, when the area was declared a landmark. It found missing cornices on 84 buildings on the Upper West Side from roughly 69th to 95th Streets.

Once cornices and other ornamentation have been removed, the economic incentive to replace them is slight. ''It doesn't really add to the rent,'' said Robert Quinlan, a developer and a fan of cornices who has renovated several 19th-century buildings in Chelsea and on the Upper West Side.

Restoring a cornice, he said, costs about $250 per linear foot, or $5,000 for a 20-foot building and much more for an apartment building. Facade restoration, he said, is a long-term investment, one not likely to be realized until the building is resold.

One encouraging sign for those who value the aesthetics of old buildings is that the real estate boom has made landlords appreciate the value of old ornamentation, leading to less stripping and more restoration.

''I see less of it in general,'' said Mr. Wittman, the fiberglass manufacturer, ''and I see people calling us not because they have to. They're just doing it as a matter of course, where they recognize the residual value of their ornamentation.''