893 East 38th Street, Brooklyn and 8718 Eliot Avenue, Queens

These two properties, in two different boroughs, with no apparent connection, illustrate how this kind of brickface siding is just one component of a machine-produced palette of renovation choices. These options, as the original dealer might have called them, have a time and a place, and a position within the economic hierarchy of city real estate. The repetition of the tri-fold bay window, the stippled glass detailing in the identical oval cutouts in the two front doors and the matching desert tones of the faux rocks combine to make jarringly similar visual presentations. The chrome hand-rail on the Brooklyn home and the twin-striped aluminum awning on the Queens property are other recognizable elements of this lower-middle class late 1970s and early 1980s typology.