Message text written by "BP - Dwell time 5 minutes."
>Everywhere I walk I see brownstone rowhouses begin restuccoed - "like
new".
To me, the flaking, peeling real stone is the beautiful thing, not the
opaque
cementitious repairs.

Has anyone noticed a brownstone owner who has purposefully kept the real
stuff?

Christopher Gray
<

A lot of brownstone work done in New York continues to follow the old
cement plastering approaches which were published by the New York Landmarks
Conservancy in the late 70's. I have noted that row houses in Park Slope
are routinely given a "new" scratch coat/browncoat/finish coat treatment
using lime, cement, dry pigments and mason's sand. Other than generally
being sort of red or brown, this finish bears very little resemblance to
stone and tends to look like what it is -- colored cement plaster.

I have seen some examples of more tasteful repairs done to brownstone row
houses. The key obstacles seem to have been convincing the owner that
minimal intrusion is better than an entirely new finish, and convincing
mason contractors who work on smaller residential restorations that
something more convincing than cement plaster may justify a cost of more
than 3 cents a pound.

Mike Edison