Stucco Contractor
Bay Ridge Brooklyn

What the Narrows Does to Bay Ridge Stucco

Bay Ridge sits on the water, and that changes how stucco fails here. Shore Road, Colonial Road and Narrows Avenue take wind driven rain straight off the Verrazzano Narrows. The salt in that air does not stop at the paint. It works into hairline cracks, reaches the metal corner bead and the lath behind the finish coat, and starts rusting them. Rust takes up several times the volume of the steel it came from, so the expansion widens the crack from the inside. A crack that was a hair wide in April is often a quarter inch wide by March.

Move four blocks east to Ridge Boulevard or Fourth Avenue and the pattern changes. Those blocks are rows of attached houses, so nearly all the stucco faces the street and the side walls are shared with the neighbor. Water that gets behind the front elevation has nowhere to drain sideways. It runs down between the stucco and the sheathing and surfaces at the base of the wall, usually as a hollow sounding band 12 to 24 inches above the sidewalk.

The commercial corridors have a third pattern. Along Third Avenue, Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, cornices and the stucco bands above shop signs were often reskinned over original brick or limestone. Where that work was done without control joints, the stucco cracks on a regular grid every 10 to 15 feet. Those cracks are not structural, but they let water in, and on a south facing storefront they will keep reopening until joints are cut in.

The Bay Ridge blocks we are on most

Shore Road, Ridge Boulevard, Colonial Road, Narrows Avenue, Bay Ridge Parkway, Marine Avenue, 86th Street, Fort Hamilton Parkway, Fourth Avenue, and the side streets around Owls Head Park. We also cover Fort Hamilton and the blocks that border Dyker Heights and Sunset Park.

What we check on a first visit

We sound the wall with a mallet to find drummy areas the eye cannot see, look at the base of the wall for the soft band, check every corner bead for rust bleed, and look at the parapet and the roof to wall junction, because most of what people call a stucco problem in Bay Ridge started above the stucco. The estimate is free and nothing is owed for the visit.