The cornice was the stone lip that ran across the top of the building. Limestone or terra cotta or pressed tin. Carved with scrolls and flowers and faces that nobody on the street could see. The cornice was the building's crown. The architect put his best work at the top where nobody looked and everybody should have. The cornice said this building has a forehead. This building has a thought above its eyes.

The cornice collected pigeons. The ledge was wide enough for a row of birds and the birds sat there like an audience watching the street. The pigeons owned the cornice. The building owned the rent rolls and the pigeons owned the sky line. They nested in the carvings and they filled the scrollwork with straw and droppings and the scrollwork disappeared under a century of pigeon civilization. The cornice was the city's oldest public housing.

The cornice fell. That was the danger. A hundred years of rain and frost and the mortar cracked and a piece of stone the size of a suitcase came down six stories and hit the sidewalk like a bomb. The city started inspecting cornices. They wrapped them in netting. They bolted steel straps around them. They held the ornament to the building with the same urgency you hold a tooth that is loose. The cornice was beautiful and the cornice was trying to kill you and both things were true.

You had to look up. That was the trick. Everybody walked the street looking straight or looking down and the cornice was up there doing its work for nobody. The faces carved in the stone. The lion heads. The wreaths. The dentil molding that looked like teeth. An entire vocabulary of decoration aimed at the sky and ignored by the sidewalk. The cornice was the artist who plays for an empty room. The work is the same whether anybody listens.

They shaved the cornices. Liability. They took the ornament off and left a flat parapet. A clean edge. No scrolls. No faces. No pigeons. The building lost its crown and gained a haircut. The skyline went from opera to accounting. And the faces that watched the street for a hundred years went into a dumpster and the street did not notice because the street never looked up.

See also: Iron Railing, Brownstone