The buildings here
A mix of late 1800s frame houses on limestone and brick foundations, early 1900s brick and stone trimmed homes, 1920s Tudor and Colonial Revival brick, and post-war brick ranches, spread across large lots with mature trees.
Not a brick neighborhood, but plenty of masonry
Webster Groves was built over a long stretch, from the railroad suburb years of the late 1800s through the 1920s and on into post-war subdivisions. The result is a genuine mix. Frame Victorians with wrap porches sit near 1920s Tudor and Colonial Revival houses in brick and stone, which sit near brick ranches from the 1950s. Streets around Old Webster, Webster University and the older stretches near the tracks carry the most pre-1930 material.
Because so much of the older stock is frame, the masonry work here is different from the city. We do fewer full elevations of tuckpointing and far more chimneys, foundations and ground level structures. That suits owners who have been told their house does not need a mason and then find sand piling up at the base of the basement wall.
The exterior chimney problem
An exterior chimney on a frame house is the most exposed masonry on any building in this part of the county. It runs from the ground to above the roof with three faces open to weather, no wall to shelter it, and often no cast crown on top. Once the crown cracks, water takes the shortest route down the middle of the stack and the top courses start letting go. On a shaded north wall under mature trees it can stay damp for most of the winter.
Those are the calls we get most often in Webster Groves, usually in October when somebody wants a fire and has just found brick chips in the gutter.
Foundations, piers and the ground around them
Below the framing, most older Webster houses sit on rubble limestone or brick laid in lime mortar. Those joints wash out slowly, the sand collects at the base of the wall, and the fix is patient repointing in a lime mix that lets the wall breathe. A cement parge over the top of it looks tidy and traps the moisture in the stone.
Outside, porch piers, steps, stone cheek walls and garden walls do the real suffering. They sit in wet soil, take salt in winter and have no roof over them. The upside of working here is the space: driveways, side yards and room to stage material mean access costs less than the same job on a city lot.
What matters locally
Webster Groves runs its own permits
Webster Groves is a separate municipality with its own building department, and it has local historic districts and a preservation review process of its own. Nothing here goes through the City of St. Louis, so the permit route and the review standards are Webster's.
Frame houses still have masonry problems
An outside chimney on a frame house is exposed on three sides all the way to the ground, and the foundation under the framing is usually limestone or brick laid in lime. Both fail the same way brick walls do, and both are commonly overlooked because the house does not read as masonry.
Mature trees complicate access and keep walls damp
The tree canopy across Old Webster and the surrounding streets shades north elevations so they stay damp and grow moss and algae. It also means scaffold and lifts have to thread around large trunks and low limbs, which we work out on the estimate visit.
Deep lots, easy staging
Unlike the city blocks, most Webster properties have driveways, side yards and room to stand scaffold and stage material on site. That usually brings the access portion of a quote down compared with the same work in Soulard or the Central West End.
Jobs we do most often in Webster Groves
- Rebuilding exterior chimney stacks above the roofline
- Recasting cracked chimney crowns and adding rain caps
- Repointing limestone and brick foundation walls in lime mortar
- Rebuilding porch piers, steps and stone cheek walls
- Repointing brick elevations on 1920s Tudor and Colonial homes
- Repairing stone garden and retaining walls