8 Thomas Street

J. Morgan Slade
1875-76

This building is a rare New York example of Venetian Gothic, a Victorian style popularized by the British architecture critic John Ruskin. Built as a store for the David S. Brown Company, a soap manufacturer, the red brick building has a cast-iron storefront, stone arcades with banded voussoirs and Ionic columns, an iron cornice and a gable roof with an oculus window. Over the last several decades, the building has been surrounded by intense development, a result of the fact that the rest of this block is unprotected by the NYC Landmarks Law. 8 Thomas Street is a designated New York City Individual Landmark, and listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places.

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