The brownstone cornice comes in a variety of styles, but basically they're all pretty similar. Here's one on Madison Avenue.
Sometimes a row of houses will individually seem quite different, but if they all have the same cornice, then you'll know when first constructed they were identical.
These examples are on houses in the East 60s, because that's where I live. The same designs are all over town.
Metal cornices rust, get shabby, sometimes threaten to fall off, oftentimes are cheaper to pull off and be done with completely. When well maintained, however, they look terrific.
When they are pulled off, that can wreck your building - aesthetically, anyway.
Sometime out on your strolls, take notice of a project of mine from 1981, a townhouse at 178 East 72nd Street. As an architect on staff at Beyer•Blinder•Belle, I was charged with creating facade details to be made of stucco that would hint at what might have been originally executed in brownstone, but had been stripped away long before. I also specified the custom made mahogany windows and the 3" thick front door. At the time, there was a townhouse to the west that had also been stripped except for its sheet metal cornice; that design was duplicated for this project with the thought that it had matched what was in place originally.
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