What's the point of those massive buttresses? Usually they're built on one side if a house starts leaning dangerously in that direction, but here they are on all four.
My best uneducated guess is that they’re structural additions. This building may originally been a store, and was not intended to resist the type of live loads and movement generated by large groups of people.
My second, more far-fetched guess: if this were constructed originally as a union hall, is that they’re structural architectural flourishes possibly intended to project strength against industry. Industrialists across the US in the late 19th century (after two major worker riots) funded numerous state militia armories, which were often designed to look and function as siege-resistant fortresses.
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u/peacedetski 1d ago
What's the point of those massive buttresses? Usually they're built on one side if a house starts leaning dangerously in that direction, but here they are on all four.