The buildings here
Dense blocks of two-family brick flats and brick single family homes built between about 1890 and 1915, with front bay windows, cut stone sills and lintels, corbelled cornices, rear wooden porches and alley garages behind almost every property.
What the brick in this part of town is like
The blocks running off Tower Grove Park were built out fast in the twenty-five years either side of 1900, mostly as brick two-family flats with a second flat stacked over the first. Walk Flora Place, Russell, Magnolia or any of the numbered streets in Tower Grove South and the pattern repeats: a bay front, cut stone sills and a flat stone or steel head over each window, a corbelled cornice at the roofline, and a shallow flat roof behind a low parapet.
That parapet is the detail that brings most owners here to us. It is masonry exposed on both faces with the roof membrane turning up behind it, and on a lot of these houses the original coping is gone or cracked. Water goes straight into the top of the wall and works down through the cornice brick, which is corbelled out and has the least support of anything on the elevation.
Soft brick and the wrong mortar
Nearly everything in Shaw and Tower Grove predates 1930, so the common brick is soft by modern standards. Around here a good deal of it has already been repointed once, in the 1970s or 1980s, with a gray portland mix that is far harder than the brick. You can see the result on side walls: proud gray joints standing out from a brick face that has eroded back behind them, and spalled units scattered through the wall.
Repointing over that work means cutting out the hard mortar carefully, which is slower than cutting out soft lime mortar and costs more. We price it honestly rather than quoting a soft-mortar rate and discovering it on day two.
Access, parking and scheduling
The gangways between these flats are narrow, often three or four feet, and both buildings drain into them. That gangway wall is usually the wettest masonry on the property and the hardest to get a scaffold into. Alley access makes rear work simple. Front work on blocks near the park competes with festival and farmers market traffic on weekends, so we schedule street-side elevations midweek where we can.
What matters locally
Historic district review applies on much of it
Shaw and the Tower Grove Heights and Tower Grove East areas include City of St. Louis local historic districts, where the Cultural Resources Office reviews exterior work and district standards can govern mortar and joint profile. We check your address before quoting.
Front elevations were built to be seen
The street face of a Shaw flat usually carries better fired face brick with tight joints, while the side and alley walls are softer common brick with wider joints. Those two walls need different mortar mixes and often different pricing per square foot.
Alleys are the access advantage here
Almost every block has a working alley, so rear scaffold and material drops are straightforward. Front elevations are another matter, because the houses sit close to the sidewalk and street parking is tight around Tower Grove Park on weekends.
Rear porches load the back wall
The wooden rear porches on these flats bolt into the brick and leak at their ledger connections. Rotted porch framing and failed brick at the porch pockets show up together, so we look at both while the scaffold is up.
Jobs we do most often in Tower Grove and Shaw
- Repointing the south and west elevations of a two-family flat
- Chimney crowns recast before winter on flat-roofed brick houses
- Replacing rusted steel lintels over bay window openings
- Cutting out spalled brick below stone sills and around downspouts
- Repointing rubble limestone basement walls in lime mortar
- Repairing corbelled cornice brick and parapet tops