The buildings here
Two and three story brick rowhouses and flats from the 1840s through the 1880s, built wall to wall on narrow lots with shared party walls, flat roofs behind parapets, tall chimney stacks, stone lintels and sills, and dug-out basements with rubble limestone walls.
The oldest brick stock in the city
Soulard was built before most of St. Louis and it shows in the masonry. Blocks around the market, along Allen, Russell, Ninth and Twelfth carry buildings from the 1840s through the 1880s, some of them with handmade brick that predates mechanized brickmaking here. That brick is soft, irregular and porous. It was laid in lime mortar with wide joints, and that combination has worked for over a century precisely because the mortar gives before the brick does.
The buildings sit wall to wall on narrow lots with flat roofs behind parapets and tall stacks rising above them. There are no eaves to speak of and no overhang to keep rain off the face, so the brick takes direct weather on every elevation that is not shared with a neighbor.
What goes wrong here
Three things dominate the work in Soulard. Parapets, because they are wet on both faces, often missing their original coping, and carry the roof membrane turn-up. Chimney stacks, because they are tall, exposed on four sides and frequently shared. And previous repairs, because a lot of the rehab work done here through the 1970s and 1980s used a hard gray mix on brick that was never going to tolerate it. Walls repointed that way show the same pattern: standing joints and an eroded, spalled brick face between them.
Basements add a fourth. Soulard sits low, close to the river, on older dug cellars with rubble limestone walls laid in lime. Those walls need repointing in lime, and sealing them with a cement parge or a waterproof paint simply moves the damp somewhere else.
Working on a street with no room
Practically, the constraint in Soulard is space. There is no side yard to stand a scaffold in. Front elevation work means the sidewalk, and that means a permit for the closure and pedestrian protection during Mardi Gras season and market weekends. Rear access often runs through a courtyard or a gangway a person can barely turn a wheelbarrow in. We look at all of this on the estimate visit and price the access honestly, because it is a real part of what the job costs on these blocks.
What matters locally
Local historic district review is the norm
Soulard is a City of St. Louis local historic district. The Cultural Resources Office reviews exterior alterations, and district standards address mortar composition, joint profile and tooling. Approval time has to sit in the schedule, and a contractor who skips it can cost you a stop work order.
Party walls make it a two-owner conversation
Most Soulard buildings share a wall with the building next door, and often a chimney stack too. Repointing a party wall or rebuilding a shared stack usually needs the neighbor involved, and access to their roof. We raise that early rather than on the morning the scaffold arrives.
The oldest brick in the city is here
Pre-Civil War buildings in Soulard can have handmade brick that is genuinely soft, laid in lime mortar with no portland in it at all. On those walls we recommend a mortar analysis before specifying a mix, because guessing at a building that age is expensive to get wrong.
No side yards, so no easy scaffold
Buildings sit on the lot line with a narrow or nonexistent gangway. Front elevation work generally means scaffold over the sidewalk and a permit for the closure, and rear work often means carrying material through the house or over a courtyard wall.
Jobs we do most often in Soulard
- Lime mortar repointing on front elevations facing the street
- Rebuilding tall chimney stacks above the roofline
- Parapet repair and new stone or metal coping on flat roofs
- Repointing rubble limestone cellar walls in lime
- Replacing spalled handmade brick with salvaged units
- Repairing stone lintels, sills and areaway walls