Around 1850 cast-iron architecture was coming to its climax everywhere. James Bogardus (1800-74), a manufacturer of iron grinding machinery, not an architect or engineer, began to erect in Center Street in New York in 1848 a four-storeyed urban structure for his own use as a factory with an exterior consisting only of cast-iron piers and lintels. This was one of the earliest[170] and most highly publicized of the cast-iron fronts which Bogardus and various other ironmasters in New York and elsewhere made ubiquitous in the principal American cities before and after the Civil War. But his earliest completed iron front was that of the five-storey chemist shop of John Milhau at 183 Broadway erected within the year 1848. An extant work by Bogardus, the range of four-storey stores built for Edward H. Laing at the north-west corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York, was begun in 1849 and finished within two months, well before his own building was completed. These early cast-iron fronts are very logical and expressive in the way the attenuated Grecian Doric columns and flat entablatures are used to form an external frame; but the Laing stores have lost most of the applied ornament that appealed so much to mid-century taste (Plate 67B). Later façades are richer and heavier, generally with Renaissance or Baroque arcading, as has just been noted. For the Harper’s Building in New York built in 1854, which incorporated the first American rolled-iron beams, the architect John B. Corlies provided a design of ornate Late Renaissance character. Curiously enough, in executing this building Bogardus used for the upper four storeys the same castings as in the Sun Building that he had erected in 1850-1 in Baltimore to the designs of R. G. Hatfield (1815-79). To the typical cast-iron fronts of New York,[171] of which the most extensive and one of the simplest was that of the old Stewart Department Store on Broadway begun in 1859 by John W. Kellum (1807-71), vacated several years ago by Wanamakers and burned during demolition in 1956, one may well prefer the delicacy of a Glasgow example, the Jamaica Street Warehouse[172] of 1855-6, or a remote Far Western department store like the Z.C.M.I. of 1868 in Salt Lake City, rivalling amid the Rocky Mountains those of Paris. Neither of these is the work of architects. Great Britain and Europe saw few all-iron façades. This was in large part because the danger of their collapse when exposed to the extreme heat of urban conflagrations, a danger made real to Americans only by the fires of the seventies in Boston and Chicago, was appreciated very early. Yet it was not in America but in Britain that the greatest masterpieces of iron construction of the fifties were built. The succeeding turn of the tide against the visible use of iron also had its origins in Britain, not in America where the material had early become so tediously ubiquitous.