Brick Pointing in Downtown Brooklyn

Which Downtown Brooklyn Buildings Need Brick Pointing?

The older ones. Downtown has many glass and metal towers with no brick to point, but it also has early twentieth century office buildings, civic buildings and a few blocks of row houses with brick facades. Those walls have decades of weather in their mortar, and pointing keeps water out of them.

Brick pointing means cutting out the failing mortar between bricks and filling the joints with new mortar. On tall buildings it is often part of a wider facade job, so the work is planned around scaffolds, sidewalk sheds and inspection reports.

• Mortar washed out of upper wall joints
• Parapets with loose brick and open joints
• Cracks running through mortar lines
• Water stains below windows
• Chimneys at older row houses
• Past repairs in the wrong mortar

Parapets take the worst of it. They face weather on every side, and a parapet in poor shape lets water into the wall below. That water shows up later as stains and peeling paint inside.

What Happens if Pointing Is Put Off?

Water gets in, freezes and widens every gap. Bricks then crack and fall away, steel behind the wall rusts, and a small joint repair becomes a major masonry job. Pointing costs far less than rebuilding a wall section, so it pays to act on the first open joints.

The problem hides at height. Most owners do not see a parapet joint from the street, and the first sign is a stain on a ceiling. An inspection from a lift or a scaffold finds it sooner.

For an older row house, the same rule holds at smaller scale. A few open joints near the roofline are an easy fix now and a costly one after a couple more winters.