I also live in Washington Heights. The floors in my building aren’t at this level of complexity, but the ceiling of the cavernous lobby and the entire first floor hallway is covered in intricate applied plaster detailing, and the plaster walls are tooled to resemble blocks of cut stone, the pattern still visible under 90 years of paint. The outside has false half-timbering, fake little gable roofs up above the 6th floor windows, and a while ago I found by looking at a Sanborn Map (as no physical trace exists any longer on the building itself) that the building even has an elegent, pseudo-Tudor name: The Broadway Arms. I too can imagine, like the first poster, the original up-and-coming former-lower-east-sider tenants who rode the subway up here for the first time, coming in and chatting among the settees and tables the lobby surely must have had, and imagining how their lives were about to improve amongst the parks and wide streets and beautiful new buildings of the Heights.

Unfortunately, the corporate behemoth which owns the place does not completely share my appreciation for the shabby elegance of the building, as at least once a month I see a full set of original oak doors, original kitchen cabinets, and wooden moldings out in front of the building for the garbage men, from yet another apartment which has been “renovated” with the finest hollow-core doors and pressboard cabinets home depot has to offer. Happily for me, my apartment still has most of its original details, but I expect that whenever I do leave, they’ll outlive my tenancy by mere weeks.

I used to regularly visit someone on West 95th Street. I stood observantly in his lobby, waiting for the creaking elevator — the kind that has to stop moving before you push the call button, and where you pull open a door before getting in.

The spacious lobby was completely empty, moderately dirty, and lit by florescent light — one, bare, blue-white tube stuck up into each of the numerous recesses of the sloppily-and-thickly-painted, coffered ceiling.

I always felt slightly startled being there, because the entire space — floors, and walls — was paved in carefully fitted sheets of grey-veined white marble (now yellowing), cut into formal panels and stiles. To one side, a broad stairway in dirty, rusting, elegant wrought-iron, with marble treads, lead up to the second floor. And yes, in the entry way, a worn, black-and-white mosaic floor announced the building’s address. I could never quite reconcile the intended, opulent dignity of these artisanal elements with their modern-day irrelevance. I could not comprehend the building’s journey from polished stone, upholstered sofas, and potted palms to bare, almost-spiteful neglect.

Instead, I indulged in “a certain wistful nostalgia for the past, knowing it is one that we can never hope to live.” Until the elevator arrived, I pictured upright women in starched shirtwaists and busy men in Edwardian suits, walking carefully, and with some pride, through the lobby doors.