Symbol in NYC building becomes history mystery

A 3-foot-by-10-foot section of brick wall, painstakingly preserved from a 175-year-old building in lower Manhattan, is raising some interesting questions. The brickwork symbol is part of a tantalizing historical whodunit. The setting conjures both New York's mercantile past and its future, and those who may be involved include a prominent, deeply Christian businessman.

Could the design be a cryptic marker of mystical beliefs? A tradesman's signature? A bit of architectural shorthand? A creative way to patch a hole?

Speculation, some backed with scholarly authority, has generating enough gravity to pull in community leaders and persuade a developer to spend $13,000 to save the artifact from demolition.

It sat unheralded for years in a building on Pearl Street, at the edge of the financial district. Solomon, who works for a vintage-lumber dealer, spotted it several years ago while engaged in an effort to save the 1832 building.

Most of the building was demolished to make way for an apartment tower's parking garage, financed in part with tax-exempt bonds intended to spur redevelopment after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the facade and the brick symbol were saved.

City tax records show the building, a onetime warehouse, was built for William Colgate - the civic-minded, deeply Christian soap entrepreneur who founded what is now Colgate Palmolive Co. and helped establish the American Bible Society. A spokesman says Colgate Palmolive has no record that the company, then headquartered elsewhere in Manhattan, used the Pearl Street building. But Colgate prized it enough to make special note of it in his will, Solomon said.

To Solomon and some historians, Colgate's ties to the building suggest the brickwork pattern has religious resonance.