A before and after photo of a recently completed facade stabilization and renovation project in the West Village. The rowhouse was constructed in 1846, is now in a landmarked district, and has an operating restaurant on the first floor and in the basement.
If you look closely at the south facade (the one facing Jane Street, on the right, without the restaurant front), you see that the masonry is laid in stretcher bond meaning there are no visible headers tying the outer masonry wythe to the inner wythe (i.e. all bricks are aligned horizontally on their long side for visual effect). This wall is made of only two wythes of masonry that were supposed to be interconnected with blind headers, while still supporting the building’s floors. This was a quite common construction technique of the era, but such masonry is known to fail because the masonry wythes tend to separate as the blind headers provide insufficient interlocking as the mortar deteriorates over 160 years. At this building, there was a staircase behind the central part of the south facade between the two ground floor doors, with a wall that was out-of-plumb for several inches. As a result, it was dangerously cracked and needed to be partly rebuilt, while the remainder of the wall on either side needed to be grouted and pinned in place.
In theory, that sounds like an easy enough task. In practice it required working around a restaurant that needed to stay in operation during the work, and marrying the two remaining parts of the existing walls that were stabilized-in-place and leaning outward to different degrees, to the newly rebuilt wall. To accomplish that, we designed shoring located inboard of the rebuilt section of the wall to pick up the floors, while clearing the restaurant spaces without blocking the sidewalk. Chris Rome from Thomas Fenniman Architects coordinated tirelessly with the team of Galicia Contracting of NJ to get the geometry of the rebuilt wall to match the irregularities to visual perfection. The complexity of this is hard to understand, try imagining two independent walls of lego bricks, almost in the same plane but not quite, and leaning at a different angles. Then try to build a new and straight lego wall in between to connect both. It cannot be done in lego as it is rigid and straight. However, if you do this with actual brick and mortar you are able to make up for small geometric differences in every direction by playing with the mortar joints in several directions. So that means you reconstruct a very out-of-plumb wall, with a properly tied-in, properly braced wall that is slightly skewed in every possible direction.
Aside from that impressive feat of craftsmanship, one of my favorite parts of the job was that all removed brick was salvaged and re-used after an intricate and customized brick cleaning process that involved scraping, chemical stripping and wire-brush touch-up cleaning.
When you look at the building in its context now, without knowing how it looked before, you’d be hard-pressed to notice it was just worked on. Which means that our work was a success.
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