The frieze was the band of decoration between the windows and the roof. A strip of carved stone or molded terra cotta that ran across the face of the building like a sentence written in flowers and leaves and faces. The frieze was the building saying something about itself to the street. Every building had something to say in 1890. The frieze was how it said it.

The frieze had faces. Carved heads with beards and crowns and expressions that the sculptor gave them a hundred years ago. Lions and eagles and women with laurel wreaths. The faces on the frieze watched the street the way the street watched the building. You walked down Orchard Street and the faces looked down and the faces never changed and the street changed every decade. The frieze was the building's memory of the neighborhood it was built for.

The frieze cost money. A plain building with no frieze was a building that could not afford one. A building with a frieze was a building whose owner wanted the street to know he had money. The frieze was the building's necktie. You could tell the wealth of a block by looking up at the friezes. The Lower East Side had plain buildings because the tenement landlord did not care what the building said to the street. The landlord cared what the building charged for the stairs.

The frieze crumbled. Terra cotta is fired clay and fired clay cracks when the water gets in and freezes. A piece of the frieze fell off a building on Second Avenue in 1972 and landed on the sidewalk and nobody was hit and the landlord covered the frieze with a sheet of plywood and the plywood stayed for twenty years. The plywood was the building's band-aid. The frieze underneath kept crumbling behind the plywood and nobody knew because nobody looked.

They stripped the frieze. Renovation meant removing the ornament because ornament was expensive to maintain and the building code said falling terra cotta was a liability. The building lost its sentence. The smooth wall says nothing. A building that says nothing to the street is a building that has given up on the conversation. The frieze was the building's first word. The smooth wall is the building's silence.

See also: Cornice, Balustrade