There is a house on Frankford Avenue in Fishtown that most people walk past without stopping. It sits at the end of a row, set slightly back from its neighbors, and its facade is different from every other house on the block. While the neighboring row homes are plain red brick — the standard Philadelphia face — this one is clad in cast iron.
The ironfront, as this building type is called, was a short-lived but spectacular chapter in American commercial and residential architecture. In Philadelphia, a handful of them survive, mostly on commercial streets in Fishtown, Northern Liberties, and Old City. They are among the rarest and most striking buildings in the city, and most people have never noticed them.
What Is a Cast Iron Facade?
Cast iron facades were manufactured and installed primarily between 1850 and 1890, when foundry technology made it possible to produce elaborate architectural ornament — columns, arches, pilasters, decorative panels — quickly and cheaply. A building owner could select a facade from a catalog, have it cast in sections at a local foundry, and bolt it to the front of an existing brick building.
The advantages were significant. Cast iron was faster to install than carved stone, cheaper than hand-crafted masonry ornament, and fireproof — or so it was thought. (The 1871 Chicago fire and others demonstrated that while cast iron doesn’t burn, it warps under heat and collapses.) It also allowed for large windows, since the thin iron columns could carry loads that would require thick brick piers.
The style favored in Philadelphia’s ironfront buildings was broadly Italianate — arched windows, decorative cornices, pilasters with ornate capitals. Some buildings combined cast iron facades with standard brick construction at the rear and sides, creating a thin theatrical face presented to the street.
The Fishtown Example
The building on Frankford Avenue is a former commercial-residential hybrid: a shopfront on the ground floor, two floors of living space above. The ironfront dates from approximately 1875, based on architectural details and historical records from the Philadelphia Historic Preservation Office.
The ground floor has been modified multiple times — the original storefront opening is now partially filled with a more recent infill — but the upper two floors retain their original cast iron facade. The columns are slender and ornate, with composite capitals that mix Corinthian acanthus leaves with local touches. The window hoods are cast with a continuous rope-molding detail.
Look closely at the surface and you can see the seams where individual cast sections were bolted together, and in places where the paint has chipped, the dark gray of the original iron beneath. The facade has been painted white, then gray, then a deep green that has weathered to something close to bronze. It has the patina of something genuinely old in a city full of things that are genuinely old.
Why So Few Survived
Cast iron facades did not age gracefully. Iron rusts, and once rust infiltrates the joints between sections, the facade begins to fail from inside. Repainting — essential maintenance — was frequently deferred. When building owners faced the choice between expensive restoration and replacing the facade with a more modern material, most chose the latter. Aluminum storefronts replaced iron facades across the country from the 1940s onward.
Philadelphia’s preservationists began documenting ironfront buildings systematically in the 1970s, as they recognized how few remained. The Philadelphia Historic Preservation Corporation (now the Preservation Alliance) identified dozens of significant examples, and some were added to the local or national historic registers. But many others were lost, victims of deferred maintenance, owner indifference, and the general urban disinvestment of the period.
The ones that survive are, in most cases, there because someone cared enough to maintain them — or because the building happened to be in a neighborhood where preservation was valued. Fishtown’s ironfront buildings survived partly because Fishtown itself survived: too far from Center City for easy redevelopment in the mid-century, too working-class to attract speculative demolition, and then, by the 1990s, discovered by artists and young residents who valued exactly the kind of industrial-era character that the ironfront represents.
Reading the Facade
If you want to find Philadelphia’s surviving ironfronts, the best strategy is to walk the commercial corridors of Fishtown and Northern Liberties slowly and look up. The facades are usually painted — sometimes multiple times — and the ironwork may be obscured by signage or infill. But the giveaways are there: the slender columns that couldn’t be brick, the continuous cast ornament along the cornice line, the regularity of the window spacing that suggests manufacture rather than masonry craft.
On Frankford Avenue, between Girard and Norris, there are at least four ironfront buildings within a five-block stretch. On Second Street in Northern Liberties, two more. Each one is a small archive of a moment when industrial technology briefly made elaborate architectural ornament available to ordinary commercial buildings on ordinary streets.
They are worth stopping for. They are worth looking at closely. They are, in their quiet way, among the most interesting buildings in the city.