Welcome to Saturday Morning Home Repair Blogging. This is a weekly series, now in its fourth year, where we discuss how to keep your home standing and comfortable. I'm Bronx59, your guest host this week, writing in the spirit of the adage that says that you should write about what you know.
Not all of us grew up in the picket fence and green lawn suburbs. For some, it was a Midwestern farm, for others, the open range of the Mountain West. Still others, on DKos and elsewhere, have grown up on farms and in cities around the world.
For me, it was a 1920's vintage, five story brick Bronx apartment house. They are all over Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and upper Manhattan. The design found its way to a few places in southern Westchester and Northern New Jersey as well. They usually have 40 to 80 or 100 apartments, with spacious rooms (except for tiny galley kitchens where the top of a clothes washer was often used to prepare food).
Even though they don't get as much attention as the stylish 1930s art deco buildings, or the often taller Post WWII buildings, these 1920s buildings form the core of many New York City neighborhoods.
Anyone who has ever called an apartment building "super" to get something fixed knows that growing up in a fifth floor walk-up was not a serious impediment to learning about home repair. Supers were paid minimally, in it largely for the basement apartment that came with the job.
My father was both handy, and impatient at looking at broken things. He also had access to the parts storerooms of the Manhattan building where he worked. So, I had ample opportunity to learn, from replacing fuses inconveniently located in the basement to painting and patching plaster walls and changing faucet washers. These fuses could also be used to interrupt a neighbor's loud music, but this required rapidly leaving the basement and disappearing for an hour or two. Meeting the neighbor you plunged into darkness on the stairs was a bad idea.
The buildings are structural brick with wooden floors and support beams, except for the metal staircases and open stairwells with concrete walls, ceramic tile floors, and white marble stair treads. Modern codes mean that open stairs in a multi-family building are no longer built, but these will be around for a long time.
The most prominent feature is probably the steel fire escapes located on the outsides of the building. This (from Flickr user MD111) is a view of the rear of a row of six story buildings.
The difference between a five story and a six story building is that six story building have elevators! Not a big deal for young people, but a major hassle for aging parents or for moving groceries or furniture. All of us were called downstairs to carry when the groceries were brought home.
Floors were wood, often in complex patterns that used shorter pieces (but larger than typical parquet). Ceilings were usually 9 or 9 1/2 feet. Rooftops were flat and used for soaking in the sun or hanging laundry. Laundry was also hung to dry on clotheslines with pulleys from window to window.
These walls were beautiful in their day, but by the time I was growing up, the plaster walls of our top floor apartment had seen better days. Roof leaks and humidity from steam heat and crowding were the main culprits. Here is a restored version from a real estate ad.
About an hour after I left for school (8th or 9th grade) one morning, my father heard a crash. The plaster ceiling had fallen away from the lath, covering my entire bed. I won't say that I'd have gotten seriously hurt if it hit me, but it could have killed an infant or toddler.
We hauled the mess downstairs in steel trash cans that afternoon after I got home from school. A few days later, the super, a Cuban immigrant we called "Rocky", sheetrocked the missing section of ceiling. My father helped him hold the sheet while he got it nailed up.
Many of these buildings were burned during the 1970s, but the brick walls usually survived the fires--leaving see-through buildings. In one wildly stupid move by the city, some of these were boarded up and the window spaces covered with plastic appliques of windowshades and potted plants.
When spared the ravages of vandalism and fire, they've aged reasonably well. Wooden windows have been replaced with aluminum frame ones, though if my mother's (newer) apartment is any indication, they will not last nearly as long as the originals. Plumbing has long since been upgraded, but doors, cabinets, tubs, and bathroom sinks are usually still original.
Heat is generally oil-fired, often converted from coal, with radiators on the floor, usually waist high in every room. A thermostat was unheard-of, heat was regulated by opening and closing radiators. I recall a hill behind one apartment house that was covered in pieces of coal ash.
While the neighborhood of my childhood was not burned, it was still greatly affected. Many windows were covered with metal gates to prevent burglary, especially over fire escapes--sometimes with fatal results. Copper, brass, and stained glass elements in hallways also disappeared one piece at a time. The brass mailboxes in our building were pried open so many times they had to be replaced.
Needless to say, New York is a far more encouraging place to visit then when I left in 1981. We are formed by the houses we live in, and I'm glad to have had the chance to tell you about my childhood home.