Facades, Chimneys & Roofs

The first time I walked a client under a sidewalk shed on West 84th Street, she asked me why the scaffolding had been up for three years on a building that looked fine. It looked fine from the street. Six floors up, a section of terra-cotta cornice had been flagged as unsafe, and the shed […]

A piece of brick came off a Midtown facade a few years back and landed on the sidewalk a few feet from a pedestrian. Nobody was hurt, that time. But I sat in on the aftermath from the claims side, and what struck me was how far back the responsibility reached: not to the day

When our office gets called to a pre-war building in Harlem, the problem is almost never in the middle of the wall. It is at the top: the parapet standing above the roofline, or the cornice projecting out over the sidewalk. These are the most exposed, worst-drained, and most neglected parts of a masonry building,

When I bought a rowhouse on Capitol Hill, I thought the wall between me and my neighbor was mine on my side and theirs on their side. It is not. It is one wall, shared, carrying both our roofs, and when a crack showed up running through it, the question of whose problem it was

Roofers have a saying that a chimney is just a hole in your roof with bricks around it, and like most trade jokes it contains the whole truth. The chimney penetrates the one surface whose entire job is to keep water out, and the two small details that seal that penetration, the crown on top

I laid brick and worked exteriors for forty years before I slowed down, and if there is one thing I learned about wind, it is that it does not attack the middle of a roof. It attacks the edges. After every big blow up in the Highlands I get calls about the same things: gutters

Of all the wall systems I assess on claims, stucco and EIFS generate the most surprising losses, because the damage is almost always hidden. The wall looks intact from outside, sometimes for years, while water that got behind it quietly rots the sheathing and framing underneath. By the time anything shows, the repair is structural,