In late afternoon summer sunlight, our Indiana limestone buildings shimmer in a thousand colors. Nonetheless, I don’t feel our architects have historically done with color all that they could, at least on building exteriors. When I am in London, I love to feast my eyes on Sir Alfred Gilbert’s polychromatic sculpture on Selfridges department store. We have nothing like that in New York. We must content ourselves with some outstanding examples of polychromatic terra-cotta ornamentation, of which, for me, one of the most beguiling examples is also one of the earliest.

The Thomson Meter Building rose at York and Bridge streets in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, in 1908-10. John Thomson, one of New York’s fascinating inventors and entrepreneurs, built this factory to make his patented, widely used water meters. The building has significance far out of proportion to its unprepossessing (though lately increasingly popular) location next door to the Farragut housing project near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

This was among the first buildings in New York in two areas. It was one of our first reinforced-concrete factory buildings, and it was one of our first buildings to utilize polychromatic glazed terra-cotta ornamentation.

Architect Louis Jallade, who grew up in New York before attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, designed the building with the American agents of Francois Hennebique, an engineer who first in Brussels, then in Paris, developed a comprehensive method of producing reinforced-concrete buildings. Jallade wasn’t shy about letting the concrete show, and in that way his building seems to foreshadow the modernist ideal of exposed structure.

While the historian of engineering may find that to be the building’s greatest interest, most of us marvel rather at the outstanding ornamentation. The building is formed of great concrete arcades on three full exposures. The arcades frame large expanses of transparent glazing that made such buildings known as “daylight factories.” Beneath each window is a horizontal band of handsomely patterned tapestry brickwork. This all leads the eye ineluctably upward, to the spandrels of the arcades and the frieze under the cornice. Here is a profusion of the most vividly colored polychromatic glazed terra-cotta.

A frieze of intricate leaf patterns links spandrel shields or medallions of classical design. Before this building New York boasted but few examples of polychromatic glazed terra-cotta. One such was Cass Gilbert’s Broadway-Chambers Building, which still stands, while another was Stanford White’s Madison Square Presbyterian Church, sadly demolished. Later we would see such terra-cotta in art deco buildings like Ely Jacques Kahn’s Two Park Avenue. We do not, by the way, know what company produced the terra-cotta for the Thomson Meter Building.

Thomson’s company left the building in 1927,when it was sold to the Eskimo Pie Corporation, which had, in 1920, marketed the very first chocolate-covered ice cream bars. Eskimo Pie used the building as its New York plant until 1966. The building is so beautiful it’s hard to think it won’t find adaptive reuse as its surrounding neighborhoods of Vinegar Hill and DUMBO continue to flourish.