By Eve M. Kahn
Victorian cast-iron façades were the first curtain walls, maximizing natural light and column-free interior space. When poorly maintained, they can become unstable sieves. Scott Henson, the head of a five-person preservation architecture firm in New York City, Scott Henson Architect, LLC, spent part of the past four years overseeing the disassembly and reconstruction of a ten-story sieve. The cast-iron 1890s front of 648 Broadway, in Manhattan’s trendy NoHo neighborhood, has been brought back from the brink of crumbling to watertight and structurally secure status.
The longtime owners originally hired Henson just to inspect the façade after a chunk of cast iron fell, but the assignment grew into a $1.2 million overhaul. Tenants can now gaze across NoHo’s higgledy-piggledy water towers through noise-blocking double-paned windows framed by metal rosettes, wreaths, dentils, balusters, and volutes. (Much of the intricate ornamentation is new, made by Robinson Iron in Alexander City, AL, and CCR Sheet Metal in Brooklyn, NY.)
Henson was drawn to the commission partly because so many innovative Belle Epoque buildings survive nearby, including Louis Sullivan’s leafy Bayard Building and McKim, Mead & White’s Romanesque-arched Cable Building. “The historic and current development of the NoHo district is built upon progressive architectural experimentation,” he says.
The original name of 648 Broadway was the Banner Building, after its millionaire developer, Peter Banner. A wholesale clothing merchant, he also put up commercial and residential structures, including luxury apartment blocks on Central Park West. For the first phase of 648 Broadway, he hired Cleverdon & Putzel, prolific architects of everything from Harlem row houses to a crematory in nearby Queens.
Tenants, mostly clothing manufacturers and sellers, filled Cleverdon & Putzel’s eight floors soon after the Banner Building opened around 1892. Six years later, Banner brought in Robert T. Lyons (the architect of several Banner apartment buildings) to add a two-story penthouse. Lyons echoed Cleverdon & Putzel’s arched windows and Classical vocabulary, and the top two floors serve as a lacy six-bay capital for the four-bay plainer base and shaft.
Banner was prominent enough that his daughter Rosalie married a Bloomingdale department store heir (and that couple’s son married a Rothschild baroness). But the developer apparently overextended himself. By 1906, 648 Broadway was embroiled in his bankruptcy proceedings. The current owner’s family acquired it in the 1940s, and its tenant roster has evolved over the decades from handbag makers to a jazz club to designers, theater and film professionals and other creative types. The building is now loftily called Bleecker+Bond (after the adjacent side streets).
Henson and the contracting team (Soho Restoration, Brooklyn, NY; subcontractor: MJE Contracting, Corona, NY) ended up removing unfortunate 20th-century accretions. Underneath a 1970s aluminum storefront, they found fluted pilasters, reliefs of lions’ heads and an 1890s advertising plaque for the Cornell brothers’ Manhattan iron foundry. Leaky window air conditioners had fostered decay in the wood sash and helped corrode the wrought-iron bolts that held together the cast iron. Lyons’ sheet-metal upper floors were severely deteriorated, pocked with dents and punctures.
The façade had to be literally taken apart. “Cast-iron construction is a complex assembly, a very heavy, unwieldy, brittle puzzle that demands meticulous care,” says Henson. Soho Restoration dismantled the façade and patched the salvageable iron with epoxy from Belzona of Glen Cove, NY. Robinson Iron and CCR fabricated and installed new elements. The fasteners are now stainless steel, and the joints are soldered.
J. Scott Howell, Robinson’s general manager, is a veteran of such replication projects, and reports that New York’s 19th-century foundries supplied an astonishing variety of compatible patterns that clients could mix and match. “Everybody wanted something a little special about their particular location,” he says.
Viles Contracting Corp. of Newark, NJ, used Cathedral Stone mortars to repair the eroded brownstone trim at the former Banner Building. JPadin of Newark installed Spanish cedar-framed, insulated-glass windows in double-hung and pivoting formats. New HVAC was woven throughout the ten floors, with mechanical equipment hoisted onto the roof, all while the offices remained occupied. Coal storage spaces on the ground floor, still full of container-loads of coal, were cleared out to adapt into a fire stair egress leading to a back alley.
Henson and project subcontractor Julio Mejia recently toured a reporter through the building, starting at its foundations on granite blocks and brick ziggurats. In a basement cavity, a brick vault arches over the adjacent subway tunnel. (A train rattled ominously through, just in time for the tour.) A petaled leaded-glass transom illuminates the lobby’s white marble walls. An ADA-compliant steel ramp, fitted snugly over a basement lateral beam, now leads to the ground floor’s deli. Floral and ribbon motifs recur there in the pressed-metal ceiling, exposed column capitals and penny round tile floors.
On the shaft for the venerable Otis freight elevator, Eastlake florals and stripes are incised on each floor’s door latches. Iron asters and scrollwork trail down the back stair’s railing. Construction debris from the 1890s still lurk in a strange windowless half-floor between the Cleverdon & Putzel base and Lyons’ addition.
Henson has developed a kind of sub-specialty in such dusty crannies and daring vintage architectural materials around New York City. In recent years he has secured the envelopes of everything from Flemish Revival stepped parapets to Colonial Revival limestone corner quoins, copper mansards, Beaux-Arts gilded domes, 1930s skylights, 1960s concrete balconies and 1980s curtain walls. Clients keep coming in with unique building conditions compromised by weather, time and gravity, or building components in some unexplained state of duress. “Those are the kinds of challenges I love,” he says, “and that are important to me for my work as a preservation architect.” TB
THE ARCHITECT’S NEWSPAPER
A cast-iron structure is restored with traditional and contemporary materials and construction techniques.
Jack Kucy
Scott Henson Architect with Gilsanz Murray Steficek
Local Law 11/98 is a New York City statute mandating that any building of more than six stories must have its facade inspected once every five years. Scott Henson of Scott Henson Architect was undertaking just such an inspection on the historic 1892 Cleverdon & Putzel–designed Banner Building in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood when he discovered something rather disturbing. The structure’s cast iron face—both its decorative elements, many of which had fallen off over the years, as well as its structural supports and bracing—was severely corroded. The condition was even worse on the top two floors, an 1898 addition that featured sheet metal decorative elements, which had deteriorated to the point that, in places, a person could press their fingers through them. Making matters even shabbier, the sandstone pilasters that framed the facade’s cast iron bands had worn down to a faded memory and the original single-paned wood windows had decayed beyond repair.
The building owner and the project team, which included structural engineering firm Gilsanz Murray Steficek and historical research firm Office for Metropolitan History, agreed that the only way to proceed was to restore the facade by making every effort to adhere to its original materials and traditional means of construction.
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
The restoration team relied on a combination of traditional and contemporary materials and construction techniques. The cast iron and sheet metal facade was removed, repaired or re-fabricated, and replaced with new structural connections.
|
One of the chief causes of the facade’s decline, aside from time itself, was severe water leakage, which had caused the original structural imbeds connecting the cast iron and sheet metal elements to the masonry backing wall to rust to a critical state. The team removed all of the metal elements and inspected them carefully. This analysis revealed that about 80 percent of the cast iron could be reconditioned and replaced on the building. This involved stripping the elements of the ten or so layers of paint that had been applied over the years and patching the odd non-fatal crack with Belzona Supermetal epoxy. Those elements that were beyond repair, or missing, were recast by Robinson Iron in Alabama using samples of the original facade to create new molds. The sheet metal was in worse shape. Approximately half the elements, including egg and dart frieze, scroll moldings, rosettes, and medallion reliefs, needed to be re-fabricated, a job tackled by CCR Sheet Metal in Brooklyn.
J. Scott Howell |
|
 |
|
|
Once all of the elements had been reproduced or repaired, they were painted patina green (the owner’s preference) and returned to the site, ready for installation. The team designed new structural supports for this purpose: structural stainless-steel bolts that pass all the way through the masonry backing wall and connect to plates on either side, holding the wall in compression. The sheet metal was attached and soldered together, and the cast iron was attached and caulked, making the whole assembly watertight and ready for another 100-plus years of life. The team also hired an artisan who was able to discern the original decorative character of the sandstone pilasters and re-create them with a sandstone patching material from Cathedral Stone.
Replacing the 54 windows required a similarly close historical analysis of the existing conditions. The windows included pulley double-hung varieties and single pivoting sashes with transoms. J. Padin in New Jersey re-fabricated them based on the original historical profiles and materials. Here, however, 21st-century technology was also employed to improve the building’s insulation with high-performance glazing.
As a final touch, the team also replaced the 1970s storefront. With little documentation available, Henson based a new design on what remained at street level as well as on clues implied by the fenestration above. The result is something of a rarity in Manhattan: a vintage cast iron building that retains its historic character from top to toe.
Aaron Seward
Historic Brick Wall Scheduled for Demolition Saved by Jahn M30
The Cathedral Stone Newsletter, July 2006
The condominium complex at 241 Eldridge Street was constructed in 1904 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Architect Scott Henson was hired by the condominium board to perform a full exterior analysis of the building. The analysis revealed a number of necessary repairs, including brick, window, and terra cotta replacement and repairs, mortar joint cutting and re pointing, as well as the replacement of the roof membrane and cornice. During removal of the parapet walls, the internal conditions of the brickwork and mortar were found to be severely deficient. The back-up masonry was loose laid in many areas with no mortar.
The failures of this building were directly attributed to the mortar. The mortar used in the original construction of this building consisted of a high-lime content resulting in little or no binding between the mortar and the bricks. The mortar within the walls was loose and powdery. Adverse weather conditions and poor maintenance over the life of the building accelerated the deterioration of the mortar. Several structural engineers were invited to the building to inspect conditions and provide recommendations. The consensus was that the walls required complete reconstruction from the ground up. This solution was prohibitively expensive for the building owners; therefore and extensive search was undertaken for an alternative solution to repair the internal condition of the walls.
After the research and testing of many masonry techniques and products, including mechanical pinning, brick repair products and soil consolidation products, Cathedral Stone Products’ Jahn M30 Micro Injection Grout was found. When injected, Jahn M30 will travel into the substrate and continue until it flows freely from this port and other ports at the same level. The ports are then sealed using non-staining clay, sealant, or caulk. A series of injection ports must be drilled on the face of the substrate to create a “drill frame.” Ports should be drilled in a downward direction. Cathedral Stone Products, Inc. supplied Jahn M30 Injection Grout for a test area. Cathedral Stone Products representatives, including Dan Perakes, conducted the initial testing on the building. A second and larger test was performed to confirm initial results. This test involved injecting the Jahn M30 into specific areas in the walls to determine whether or not the repair process was going to work. Jahn M30 again proved successful. Extensive testing was performed until the correct installation procedures and amounts of grout required were determined to consolidate the existing lose, powdery mortar, to fill the voids between the internal brickwork, and ultimately to provide a structurally stable building.
It was originally thought that the cost to replace the exterior walls would be an estimated $1.8 million. The repairs would have to be completed section by section. Because of the success of Jahn M30 the entire project cost was $106,000 saving the owners over $1.6 million. Scott Henson Architects hired Viles Contracting Corporation to complete the repairs. From February 9th to April 22nd, 2005, they drilled 1,435 holes into the building and pumped in 1,280 gallons of the M30 Injection Grout.
After 241 Eldridge Street was completed, the project was featured in the NY Times and drew interest from the engineers with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). They wanted to look at the project to see if the repair method was a viable alternative for maintaining their buildings. They met with both Cathedral Stone Representatives as well as Scott Henson. In the summer of 2005, CSP successfully completed Jahn M30 Injection test of the New York City Housing Authority. They are currently monitoring the tests and are considering using the method of restoration for future projects.
Go to Cathedral Stone Newsletter
The Wall (Didn’t) Come Tumbling Down
A new product solves an old problem.
Jody Shen (Additional reporting by Jennifer Wu)
The sky wasn’t falling but the wall was a definite possibility. That was the dilemma facing 241 Eldridge Street, a 12-unit condominium on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, about two-and-a-half years ago. But thanks to a bit of detective work and the discovery of a product relatively new to the U.S., the board found an affordable answer.
It was during routine parapet repair work that the problem was uncovered: the contractor discovered that the internal mortar between the exterior wall’s bricks had turned to sand. Such a finding had not been anticipated in the repair plan because the inspection report the board had commissioned was for the cornice, bulkhead, and fire escapes.
The solution seemed dire: spending about $1.8 million to replace the exterior walls, section by section. Even if raising the money were possible (and it would be a strain for the 12 apartment owners however it was done), the financial hardship of large assessments seemed daunting. However, the flip side would have been equally grim: do nothing and risk the walls coming down on their own. That didn’t seem like a great alternative, either.
“To have not done anything would have left us with questions, doubt, and possible peril,” explains Robin Schanzenbach, the president of the condo’s five-person board. David Bergman, a board member and professional architect, recalls that his thoughts started to turn to what could shake his building enough to bring it crashing down. Subway vibrations? Nearby construction? An unlikely – but not impossible – Manhattan earthquake?
Seeing that completely replacing the building’s walls would be more or less impossible financially, Scott Henson, the building’s architect, started looking for a solution. Possibilities included products used to stabilize dirt at construction sites and a variety of restoration products. He tested HTC, a chemical used to preserve marble statues that had been invented by Norman Weiss, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University. That solution failed because it needed to interact with oxygen, which couldn’t find its way into the thick walls.
Then Henson stumbled upon a product called Jahn M30 Micro-Injection Grout, manufactured by Jahn International of Germany and distributed by Cathedral Stone Products. It had been utilized on large projects in Europe but, according to Dennis Rude, the president of the Hanover, Maryland-based distributor, it had only been used in the U.S. for small jobs, such as the repair of cracking walls. The National Park Service is using it to fix a cornice on the historic Ryan Center at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
Often, Rude notes, to solidify walls in situations like the one at 241 Eldridge Street, contractors will repoint. According to Henson, repointing was not enough for this project because that would only address the surface, about three-quarters-of-an-inch deep. (The Jahn M30 was ultimately used in conjunction with repointing.)
The manufacturer supplied a small amount of Jahn M30 for a test. After that was successful, the condo spent about $10,000 for a larger test, which involved injecting the Jahn M30 into specific areas and opening the walls to see if it worked. That seemed to do the trick, reconsolidating the loose, sandy mortar, and filling the gaps.
With the solution in hand, it still wasn’t easy. There was a question of money. Recalls board president Schanzenbach: “There are multiple factors in the finances related to the project. It is fair to say that, with the multiple engineering studies, testing, and architect’s fees, the mortar reconsolidation aspect of the project reached close to $140,000. That amount is lower than it might have been, however, because we had already started on a larger capital project to replace the roof, cornice, and parapets, and do pointing, so some of the major costs – such as scaffolding or the process of preparing extensive bid proposals for contractors – did not have to be incurred. Our active board involvement and the cooperation with the architect and contractor, who were already on the job, also helped keep the costs down.”
Funds were used from the building reserve fund to help pay for the work, but more money was needed. According to the president, the unit-owners approved an additional assessment of $100,000. Each owner’s portion of the assessment was based on his or her percentage of ownership in the building. To pay for the assessment, some owners refinanced, while the surging apartment prices in New York enabled others to take out home equity loans. And, thanks to a multi-year financing plan, still others were able to pay in installments.
After a short newspaper article on the repairs appeared in the spring, everyone involved, from Weiss – who called it a possible solution for “hundreds, maybe thousands of buildings” – to the distributor, began hearing from people in similar situations seeking help. Seven engineers from the New York City Housing Authority wanted to inspect the project to determine if the product and process would be effective in repairing aging public housing. They visited the job site and queried Henson and a representative from Cathedral Stone. They seemed impressed, Henson recalls, and said they planned to perform a test on some of their buildings.
As for the condo’s board: after repairs on the sidewalk in front are finished, they will have spent $500,000 to finish a building revamp that began with a “cornice subcommittee” years ago and, with the wall repair, may have saved the building. There is still the dream of one day creating a roof deck, but for now, Bergman is happy that the “sky” isn’t in danger of falling anymore. Says he, with a sigh: “We can breathe for a while.”
Go to HABITAT MAGAZINE
Lower East Side
For a Frail Old Tenement, a Fortifying Dose of Goop
Stephen Chernin for The New York Times
Workers drilled 1,435 holes into the structure, and pumped in 1,280 gallons of the secret stuff.
By EVE M. KAHN
Published: May 22, 2005
A year ago, owners of condominium apartments at 241 Eldridge Street heard dire news. Cavities were forming within the brick walls of their century-old tenement, so much so that the place was held up largely by inertia.
Scott Henson, an architect whose Manhattan firm is restoring the building, offered residents two options. They could spend $1.4 million dismantling and rebuilding the decrepit walls, while protecting their apartments temporarily with wallboard and tarpaulins, or they could try a less invasive and less costly stabilization technique that had never before been used in the United States.
After examining sheaves of test reports and letters from scientists and engineers, residents voted unanimously to go with the avant-garde solution, even though it called for pumping the walls full of gray goop.
“We investigated enough to put our faith in it,” said Robin Schanzenbach, president of the condo board. “We’ve felt we’re totally on the cutting edge.”
The milky chemical, whose official name is micro injection grout, is manufactured by a German company called Jahn International, and its formula is secret. From Feb. 9 to April 22, construction crews drilled 1,435 holes into the building and pumped in 1,280 gallons of the mixture. Final price tag: $106,000.
The grout filled crannies between bricks, where mortar had been crumbling into dust, and it set in half an hour. It also sometimes made a mess. A dozen times it spilled onto apartment window sills or floors, but, as David Bergman, an architect who has lived in the building since 1995, pointed out, “It cleans up very easily, with paper towels and 409 or Fantastik.”
The Jahn product, which has been commonplace in Europe for 30 years, has been imported into the United States since the 1980′s for small repair jobs, said Dennis Rude, chief executive of the distributor, Cathedral Stone Products. But Mr. Henson is the first customer to apply it to an entire building.
“It’s a drastic solution,” said Norman Weiss, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University. “It’s also a very exciting project. The idea could be applied to hundreds, maybe thousands of buildings that have problems the owners don’t know about yet, or problems that have been covered with superficial repairs – that’s like putting makeup on what turns out to be melanoma.”
The Eldridge Street building, a neo-Renaissance style structure, was built in 1904, but although the masons apparently lavished care on the facade, which is trimmed in terra-cotta scrollwork, they skimped elsewhere. By the 1970′s the structure was abandoned, condemned and used as a drug den. A gallery owner, Nicholas Logsdail, bought the blackened shell from the city, and a veterinarian, Mary Finger, moved in and rebuilt it as condominiums. Her own 1,000-square-foot loft is listed for sale at $859,000.
Next door, at 245 Eldridge Street, stands a rental building that is a twin of No. 241. Its rear and side walls are coated with gray weatherproof stucco, and show signs of cracking and sagging. Catherine Economakis, a managing agent for the building with Granite International Management, did not return calls seeking comment on the condition of the brickwork. Mr. Henson said: “We don’t want to scare anybody, but we assume conditions in those walls are the same as here.”
Go to The New York Times
