The Red Brick Times

We threw a pancake breakfast this morning to raise funds for our Kiwanis club. Funds will go to Elyria Health Department programs for infants and babies and to the local 4-H kids (who helped us serve and clean up).

Tried something new this time - chocolate chip pancakes. One of the members loves them. Put the blob of batter on the grill, and sprinkle a few choc chips atop the batter. They were popular with the customers.

Well, the people who have been flipping the pancakes for years complained about them. They left melted chocolate on the grill. They left melted chocolate on the spatulas. They were messy. They were not "normal". Who ever heard of choclolate for breakfast? I heard about this after the fact, and observed that they could have used a side of the grill just for the choc-chip cakes, and used a separate spatula. Betsy said that they tried to do that, but that they kept changing the implementation constantly, making no decisions that stuck. I guess when you have a volunteer team of retired insurance sales people, and real-estate people, and accountants trying to implement a production scheme, things go their own way.
The customers were happy anyway.

We had the event in the Elyria High School cafeteria. The high school custodial staff was giving guided tours of the entire school campus, including boiler house and steam tunnels. There were many areas throughout the several buildings where the outside brick fascias were pulling free of the structure. Anchor plates held by bolts drilled through the walls have had to be installed to keep the walls from falling down.
The walls of the auditorium, on the stage, have big cracks from top to bottom right through the structural concrete block and visible inside. Big multi-story I-beams have been required outside the stage walls to keep them standing.
There was a new series of cracks in one of the walls of the choir room that they just discovered last Thursday.
The brick facing on the outside of the building in the hallway past the chemistry labs (outside the old elevator near the back stairs) actually fell away onto the roof over the athletic department hallway below.

Water leaking past the central stairwell skylight in the oldest Washington Building (on the Register of Historic Places) forced them to build a big "dog-house" cap on the roof to shed weather. Other places have needed sheltering structures on the roof to keep water out of ventilating shafts, roof access hatches and walls. Water from the third floor roof has found its way all the way down to the girls locker room off of the old gym (formerly the "girls' gym) and has destroyed walls and fittings there.

In the tunnels, there is one area, where the floor is awash in water, where the solid concrete wall is bowed like a rubber sheet from the pressure of the water behind it that is leaking in. A now fenced-off section of the parking area adjacent to the boiler house has been reinforced from below with steel jack posts to keep the concrete beams from falling in, and the entire ceiling area there has mesh screening installed to keep chunks from falling on the custodians' heads.

The boiler house, built in 1921, has had to have the entire roof area on the East end covered with welded steel plate to keep the many cracks in the ceiling concrete from separating and allowing the whole East end of the building to fall away. There are three old gas-fired steam boilers in the boiler house. They try to rotate them to keep one off-line as backup, or for repairs.

I give the maintenance staff credit. All operating equipment is in the absolute best condition that age and hard use will allow. The boiler house is cleaner and better organized than any of the industrial equivalents I ever saw in the automotive industry. It is just that everything is so blamed OLD and WEARING OUT.

All of you would recognize the cafeteria kitchen. The huge industrial steam kettles and ovens are still there, still in place and operational. Everything was built like you would build a steamship, strong and indominable. But I do not know of many steamships from 1894 (Washington Building) or 1905 (the Lincoln Building) or 1913 (The Vocational Building ) or even 1956 (the Gym/Auditorium Building) that are still plying the seas providing a supposedly up-to-date service. Think of the plumbing. Think of the wiring.

Actually, while in the tunnels, I stuck my nose into a few corners where old, unused stairwells are filled with crumbled plaster, peeling and cracked walls, and rotting floors. I don't think that these areas have seen the light of day or human use for at least half a century. As a construction-savvy person, my opinion is that the best thing to be done to rehab these structures is to erase them and begin again with better planning and a cogent long-term use plan. They never suspected the changes that technology and society would bring when these buildings were first constructed. At least today, we suspect that the future will bring stuff that we can't even dream about, and can use some forethought and flexibility.

And for the sake of all that's sensible, DO NOT use flat roofs in this climate. What is saved at the time of construction will be paid out several thousandfold in maintenance and leak damage costs over the long run.
Posted 4:54 PM by Andy (1) comments

       Comments:

My dad tells me that there was an old grade school building at the West Avenue end of the block between 5th and 6th Streets that was torn down to make room for the Gym/Auditorium building in 1956. He speculates that over the past half century, the fill has compacted enough to contribute to the problem. I also found out from one of the custodians that when the sandstone Washington Building was constructed in 1894, it had no basement. It was built above ground on foundation piers or posts. It wasn't until around 1926 that they dug and installed the current basement level under the building. How does one hold up a three-story sandstone building while inserting a foundation? Whew!

# posted by  Andy : March 08, 2007 10:00 PM
 
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