The Downside of Going Topless

The picture above shows two photos of the same building in Chelsea, where we finished a repair project about a year ago. The left side is a tax photo from the 1940s; the right photo was taken after we were done with our work. The viaduct in the back is the Highline. This 1902 building was initially built for industrial use, was later used by the Salvation Army, and is now a small residential coop. Somewhere along the way, after the 1940s and decades before we arrived, someone decided to remove the sheet metal cornice.

Removing cornices, aka going topless, can be seen all over NYC (as seen on the adjacent building to the right in the photos) and was often done in a misguided attempt to save repair costs as sheet metal began to fail after multiple decades of use. The argument against repair or replacement was that such work was expensive, and that a cornice was perceived as merely decorative. At Old Structures, we try to save cornices when possible because repair is often the long-term cost-effective option because a cornice is much more than just a piece of decorative trim.

In this case, the cornice was long gone when the current building caretakers arrived, and the parapet wall where the cornice once attached to had been stuccoed over. And it was leaking – a lot. After some investigation we found that the floors and roof of this building were made of an early concrete-arched floor system, supported on steel beams pocketed in the masonry walls. Those steel beams were severely corroding, ripping the parapet apart, causing the large leaks right below roof level, exactly in the area where the old cornice would have protected the masonry from getting soaked.

Indeed, the often forgotten purpose of cornices was to keep water away from the top of masonry walls to prevent exactly this type of damage. Our solution was in this case was to rebuild the parapet and to reinforce and waterproof the steel. That fixes the waterproofing issue for as long as the parapet is well maintained, but still doesn’t bring back the way more elegant look of the original facade.