Sixth Avenue at Tenth Street: the polychrome brick tower with its working clock, the stair turret, the garden through the fence, then the Gothic reading room under timber trusses, stained glass in the pointed windows, green lamps on the tables, the stacks.
The Jefferson Market Courthouse rose at Sixth Avenue and West 10th Street between 1874 and 1877, designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers in red brick and limestone. An 1880s poll of architects voted it the fifth most beautiful building in the United States. After the courts left, preservationist Margot Gayle led a Village campaign to save it and restart its four faced clock. Architect Giorgio Cavaglieri converted it into a New York Public Library branch in 1967.
Source · Village Preservation ↗
Victorian Gothic in red brick banded with limestone, the clock tower with its steep pyramid roof and four faces, the round stair turret, pointed arches everywhere, the timber trussed reading room, the garden on the old prison site. Mood: village gothic, a bright morning. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.