GREAT ARTICLE FROM NEW YORKER

What goes into the thinking of a “tear-down”? What do you want to preserve? What must you destroy? What has past its lifetime?

Style can become dated? This is an opionion…

Or resurrected.. think 50’s or Arts and Crafts.

Old wiring, plumbing, well that is a fact, and has to be addressed (see? I didn’t say “deal breaker” just that you have to put a time and price on it.

Here is

every era has its problems…take NYC

Colonial houses are handsome but frail. Their wood wasn’t kiln-dried, so any original boards will be warped, rotten, or split.

Town houses from the eighteen-hundreds are good for their shells and not much else. Their walls may be one brick thick, the mortar washed out by rain.

Prewar buildings can be nearly bombproof, but their cast-iron sewers are full of corrosion, their brass plumbing brittle and cracked.

A mid-century building may be the most reliable, but watch out for those built after 1970.

Construction was a free-for-all in the eighties. The crews and work sites were often run by the Mafia. “If you wanted to pass your job inspection, a guy would call from a pay phone and you’d walk down with an envelope of two hundred and fifty dollars,” Ellison recalls.

New buildings can be just as bad. In the luxury apartment house in Gramercy Park where Karl Lagerfeld owned a unit, the façade leaked so badly that some of the floors rippled like potato chips.

But the very worst, in Ellison’s experience, was Trump Tower. In an apartment he renovated there, the windows howled and had no weather stripping, and the electrical circuits seemed patched together with extension-cord wire. The floors were so out of level, he told me, you could drop a marble and watch it roll.

Learning the flaws and foibles of every era is a lifetime’s work.

There’s no doctoral degree in high-end construction.

No Cordon Bleu for carpenters. It’s the closest thing in America to a medieval guild, with a long and haphazard apprenticeship. It takes fifteen years to become a good carpenter, Ellison estimates, and another fifteen to do the style of project he does. “Most people just aren’t up for it. It’s too weird and hard,” he says.

Even demolition can be a refined skill in New York. In most cities, a crew can just whale away with crowbars and sledgehammers and toss the debris into dumpsters.

But in buildings filled with wealthy, finicky owners, the crews have to work with surgical stealth. Any dirt or noise could prompt a call to City Hall, and a single busted water pipe could ruin a Degas.

So the walls have to be carefully dismantled, the pieces packed into rolling containers or fifty-five-gallon drums, sprayed down to settle the dust, and sealed in plastic. Just gutting an apartment can cost a third of a million dollars.