Friend of OSE – and occasional collaborator – Glenn Boornazian sent me a few vacation photos from Massachusetts. That’s pretty nice masonry for an apparently abandoned building. In a non-aesthetic sense, the interesting stuff is going on near the eaves.
That’s a damned big crack and displacement at the corner pier. The crack starts at the corner of the original window (before the window opening was partially filled with brick to make it smaller) and the soldier course of brick at the window head is a common way to hide a steel lintel, so my first reaction is that this is a particularly bad case of rust-jacking from that lintel. Looking at the other eave…
I’m not so sure. There is, again, a crack radiating from the corner of the lintel but that’s a lot of sideways movement to be caused simply by lintel deterioration.
The great unknown here, looking at just a few pictures, is how the roof is built. I assume it’s a gable that matches the slope of this wall’s top, but within that geometry it could be steel trusses, wood trusses, simple wood rafters, simple steel rafters, and so on. Are purlins bearing on this wall or is the connection between the roof and wall more tenuous? If there is no load being transferred from the roof to this wall, than rust-jacking from a lintel might well be enough to cause this damage, as the jacking only has to lift the weight of the brick. If some portion of the roof bears on the wall, the damage may be caused by a combination of rust on the lintel and deterioration of the attached portion of the roof. The lintels are definitely rusted – the gap caused by rust expansion is clearly visible at both window heads – so there’s no doubt that rust jacking is involved to some degree.
I don’t know the answer and that’s nothing more than a reminder of why we go to look at these things: without looking at the wall from the inside and without seeing enough of the building to establish the relationship between the roof and the wall, the problem can’t be accurately diagnosed.
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