The once-delightful, now decayed 1892 terra cotta house under the Queensboro Bridge

A painter depicts the moody early 20t... The colonial-dressed grotesques on an...

The once-delightful, now decayed 1892 terra cotta house under the Queensboro Bridge

It’s a startling sight amid a mostly desolate, formerly industrial patch of the Long Island City riverfront in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge.

At 42-10 Vernon Boulevard on a lawn leading to the East River sits a fairy-tale brick and terra cotta relic: a two-story confection of stepped gables, chimneys styled with spirals, round red roof tiles, and panels carved with floral motifs and grotesque faces.

Considering the boarded-up windows and barbed-wire fence the building crumbles behind, you might disregard this unusual remnant as a hopeless wreck.

But before you do, get to know the story behind the isolation and deterioration of this eccentric holdout—a former jewel of an office headquarters colloquially known today as the Terra Cotta House.

The story of the Terra Cotta House aligns with the story of terra cotta’s popularity in New York City. Amid a Gilded Age construction boom in the 1870s and 1880s, this clay that could be shaped into ornamental forms and then fired in a kiln became an in-demand building material.

Terra cotta was versatile, cheaper than stone, and fireproof. To meet the demand for it, a company called the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works opened a manufacturing complex in the rapidly industrializing, recently incorporated municipality of Long Island City.

“Established in 1886, the company was the only major terra cotta manufacturer in New York City, and, when completed, its facilities were the largest in the country for architectural terra cotta,” noted the Historic Districts Council.

The terra cotta wasn’t totally native to Queens, alas. The clay came from New Jersey, though the molding and carving and firing in kilns was done by skilled artisans in the facility.

The original complex burned down three months later. But the company rebuilt quickly, moving its growing manufacturing operation to a new site on the East River waterfront, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report published in 1982.

“Situated in what was then rural Long Island City, Queens, the great complex had crucial river access to the skyscraper explosion going on across the way in Manhattan,” a 1987 New York Times article reported.

In 1892, the leaders of the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works decided to construct a new office headquarters on the site of its manufacturing plant. The two-story building—today’s Terra Cotta House—was to be a showpiece for the company. (Fourth photo, with the Queensboro Bridge still under construction)

“Placed at the easternmost end of a nearly two-acre site with a frontage of over 200 feet on the East River, the headquarters building stood against a backdrop of the company’s entire manufacturing, warehouse, and shipping operation,” stated the LPC report.

With its fanciful headquarters and manufacturing operation at one site, the company made its mark of Gotham’s cityscape. It produced terra cotta ornamentation for Carnegie Hall, the Ansonia Hotel, the Montauk Club in Park Slope, and scores of other buildings, according to the New York Times.

“By 1915, the company was the fourth largest employer in Long Island City,” noted the LPC report. The 1920s saw a boom—and then bankruptcy in 1928. A new company formed and took over the space, but by the 1940s, the manufacturing site was empty.

The Terra Cotta House was still in use as a construction company office until 1968, after which it was sold to Citibank. In 1976, the manufacturing operation was bulldozed.

“Today only the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Works building survives as a symbol of the material and industry which transformed the construction profession in the late 19th century,” wrote the LPC.

That was in 1982, the year the building was landmarked. In the ensuing 42 years, the Terra Cotta House seems to have remained in a state of decay, its back to the buildings across the East River in Manhattan it may have helped build a century ago.