Traditional Masonry Archives — Restoration Case Study

Project: Bayard-Condict Building 65 Bleecker St., Manhattan, N.Y. Original architect: Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924), Chicago. Restoration architect: Stephen E.v. Gottlieb, AIA, senior conservator, Walter B. Melvin Architects, New York, and retired partner and former director of preservation, Wank Adams Slavin Associates, New York. Masonry consultant: Norman Weiss, professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York, and Senior Scientist, Integrated Conservation Resources. Contractor: Richardson & Lucas (Jose Martinez, chief mason). Scope of work: Restoring the building’s facade while conserving 1,270 pieces of Louis Sullivan’s buff terra cotta.

Saving the Angels: The Bayard-Condict Building
For preservation architect Stephen E.v. Gottlieb, retaining the original terra cotta on the Bayard-Condict Building was crucial to the success of restoring Chicago-based architect Louis Sullivan’s lone creation in New York City.
by Stacey Enesey Klemenc

Top: Seen here at the entrance is based on a typical lunette (half round) style from Quattro Cento Florence. Above: This condition survey drawing shows cracks, loose terra cotta and open joints.

Designed by Sullivan in 1897 and completed in 1899, the 13-story office and loft building features a mesmerizing mix of foliate and geometric ornamentation complete with Gothic fluted columns and cabbage-like capitals, wing-spread angels, gargoyle lions large and small, spiky leaves, swirling vines, plump seed pods, interlocking Celtic patterns and Art Nouveau tendrils. The buff terra cotta clay was both molded and hand-carved to form exquisite detail.

Besides its intricate ornamentation, Gottlieb points out, it’s also important in the history of skyscrapers because it was built using cast-iron columns and steel beams, a transition building to the all-steel buildings of today. It also was among the first to have separate cladding support plates.

Few will argue differently — the building is loaded with significance. Off the beaten path in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, the Bayard-Condict Building was Sullivan’s first solo commission. His famous student Frank Lloyd Wright said Sullivan considered the building his all-time favorite. Although of average height for its day, the increased glass window area in proportion to its solid wall foreshadowed today’s curtain-of-glass high rises. At the time of its construction, it was cutting edge. The building is not only an official city landmark, it’s a designated National Historic Landmark as well.

That’s why Gottlieb and his team were dead set against the conventional method of throwing away the aging building’s damaged terra cotta and replacing the blocks with newly fabricated pieces. The more building fabric you replace, the closer you get to creating a reproduction of the building rather than restoring it as it was built, explains Gottlieb. “This was our thinking: Would you go to the National Archives in Washington to see a copy of the Declaration of Independence?”

Richardson & Lucas, the project’s contractor, removed 1,300 cracked units of the building’s 7,000 pieces of terra cotta, including the complete east and west corners. Under the direction of Gottlieb and Norman Weiss, a professor at Columbia University in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the crew repaired and reinstalled all but 30 pieces that were too badly damaged to reuse.

“The crux of the project was that almost no terra cotta was replaced,” Weiss says. “We retained nearly all of the historic fabric of the building, which is highly unusual for terra cotta buildings. It was not only cheaper to do it this way, but it saved most of the building fabric. It was very preservation-oriented.”

Gottlieb says that they photographed and numbered each piece before the exterior was disassembled. Restoring the pieces rather than replacing them helped keep the project on a shorter time schedule, as replacement pieces took six months to create and ship. “And that was once you discovered hidden damage and figured out what you needed,” he says.

Top: Architect Stephen E.v. Gottlieb performs the initial inspection on the facade. Note the milkweed pod repetitive motif in the window jamb, one of Sullivan’s favorite design motifs. Above: A broken piece of terra cotta was removed from the column (seen from the back). It was later epoxied back together and replaced on the building.

Materials and techniques
Workers at the project conserved individual cracked pieces of terra cotta by readhering the 3-centimeter-thick fractured “webs” and faces with Hilti HIT C-100, a two-part epoxy adhesive. The backs were reinforced with an alkali-resistant C- or E-glass woven polyester mesh coated with an acrylic acid and then set in the Hilti epoxy.

The remaining cracks or small face losses were filled with Jahn Terra Cotta and Brick Repair Mortar. Three shades of patching were used for the restoration. “The original blocks came in three different shades that gave the surface a lot of richness,” Gottlieb says. “We wanted to use the matching tone for each of the shades of block.”

The terra cotta was attached to the backup brick with mild steel anchors, many of which had corroded and cracked the terra cotta, which had also sustained damage from the clay body expansion that occurs after firing. After the broken terra cotta and its brick backup were removed from the building, the underlying corroded iron columns and steel beams were cleaned by coal slag grit blasting and coated with an anticorrosion coating by Benjamin Moore called IronClad Alkyd Low Lustre Metal & Wood Enamel.

New backup brick was placed, and the repaired terra cotta column units were reinstalled on the building with 204-208 nickel/stainless-steel threaded rods.

Removing and reinstalling the terra cotta relieved the stress from clay body expansion. Soft joints, created from sealant rather than mortar, were installed below every cladding support plate to protect against future stress or thermal cracking. “One hundred feet of masonry will expand a half inch from winter to summer,” Gottlieb explains. “You need to accommodate that movement.”

Finally, under the watchful eye of Weiss, the facade was cleaned with Prosoco Sure Klean heavy-duty restoration cleaner and repointed. The cleaner was used in both gel and liquid forms diluted with water and left on for varying times. Repointing was based on the original mortar composition. A 1-1-6 mix of cement, lime and sand was used with Type II cement, high-calcium lime and ASTM C-144 sand passed through a variety of sieves.

All totaled, this restoration method cost about $800,000 when the project was completed in 2002. Gottlieb and Weiss estimate the price of restoring the pieces was 30 percent less than the cost of replacing the pieces.

Most replacement pieces were made by Ibstock Hathernware, now Shaws of Darwin, of Great Britain. Some were made at Boston Valley Terra Cotta located in Orchard Park near Buffalo, N.Y.

Top: After firing in the manufacturing plant, new terra cotta pieces are spread out on the floor. Above: Note the heavily corroded beam coming in from the right. It sits on an angled support bracket cast integrally with the cast-iron column. A second bracket, seen here with a worker resting his left hand on it, rises above the beam.

Site challenges
The Bayard-Condict Building is located east of Greenwich Village in NoHo, in a very busy area with narrow sidewalks. Protecting the walking public was high on the list of safety priorities. Cleaning the building required the use of a lot of water and various chemicals that weren’t compatible with pedestrians. A scaffold gutter and roof drainpipe had to be constructed to protect them.

There were also technical challenges involved with the restoration of the Bayard-Condict Building. The contractors had to survey the condition of all the terra cotta on the building. Two corners of the building had to be completely disassembled to the second-floor line, with each piece numbered, drawn and photographed. Terra cotta that surrounded some columns, typically a total of seven pieces, had to be lettered left to right and numbered from floor to floor.

For other columns, only the cracked pieces were removed. “It was a very sophisticated operation,” Gottlieb explains. “The masonry was stack-bonded (with joints over each other rather than staggered) and individual pieces could be ‘cozied out’ under the watchful eye of the chief mason, Jose Martinez. The contractors took out middle pieces without disturbing the others around them. I never saw them damage a piece.”

And then there was one of the angels at the east end. “Her wing was broken,” recalls Gottlieb. “Cracked right through.” But she survived “orthopedic surgery,” he says, and is back in business guarding pedestrians once again.

The owner, Marvin Shulsky of Shulsky Properties, whose family has owned the building for more than 60 years, showed a special sensitivity to the building. He didn’t expect the end result to look like a new building. “He was an immaculate dresser,” Gottlieb recalls. “You’d expect him to want everything perfect because everything about him was perfect. But he wasn’t that way. He appreciated the building even with its slight imperfections. There was no facelift for these angels.”

TM