Ornamental Cornices: Manhattan's Sheet-Metal Masterpieces

A landmark publication that invites New Yorkers to look up—and marvel at some of the city’s greatest unsung architectural treasures, its sheet-metal cornices

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the facades of many, if not most, residential and commercial buildings in America’s cities were crowned with sheet-metal cornices. These offered certain practical advantages over stone or brick cornices—for example, they were lighter and safer to install—but the easy workability of s...