Babe Roof: A Complex in The Bronx Gets Some Beautiful New Surfaces

Parkchester, a 110-building complex build by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company between 1939 and 1942 as one of the now-legendary planned communities of that era. The name is a portmanteau of two neighborhoods beside the development — Park Versailles and Westchester Heights. Met Life, which also built Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village and Riverton Houses in Manhattan, even showed a scale model of the planned Parkchester at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Initially rental apartments for working-class, middle-income New Yorkers, it eventually converted to condominium in two stages, in 1974 and 1986. Built with stolid beauty and impeccable workmanship, its buildings are alive with terracotta ornamentation by sculptor Joseph Kiselewski and others, and the fountain at the Aileen B. Ryan Oval (a.k.a. the Metropolitan Oval) boasts Raymond Granville Barger's "Fantasia." Parkchester's 129 acres fell on hard times on one point, but by the early 2000s, a $130 million renovation had been completed.

Extending from that, says Sullivan, 33 — a Whitestone, Queens, native who got his engineering degree at Manhattan College in Riverdale, The Bronx — was a project that replaced the roofs of 36 of the 55 Parkchester North buildings. "So they needed to replace an additional 19," he says. The company he works for, Merritt Engineering Consultants, together with the contractor, Df Restoration, "did work on all 55 roofs," he says, "but 36 of them were really were just at the bulkheads," those projections at the top of the building that house the elevator rooms or the tops of stairwells. "For lack a of a better word," says the plain-talking Sullivan, "they're little buildings on the roof."

Rather than a black or white surface, as is typical of New York City roofs, Sullivan choose "cinnamon brown," which sounds more like a lipstick color, but what they hey. The point is, it's a neutral color, utilized "so that the buildings wouldn't get too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter. If you use a black roof it retains heat in the summer and a white roof deflects it in the winter. It also looked nicer than a black roof," Sullivan says. "There are a lot of seven- and thirteen-story buildings on the property, so a lot of residents look out on the roofs. You want to give them something aesthetically pleasing to look at."

The trickiest part of the job, he says, was "doing leak investigation on the other 36 roofs. We go around to any resident who has reported a leak, whether through the roof or through the façades, and investigate inside the apartment, identifying when the leak occurred."

As for the roof of the future, Sullivan says, "There's a big push on Energy Star ratings for roofs and reflectivity. Whether a highly reflective roof in the Northeast is the best idea is an open question. I prefer better insulation," the most modern of which is "liquid-applied roof systems." This, he says, "is a resin system that goes on almost like paint, either roller- or brush-applied, and then a fleece reinforcement is set into the liquid and an additional coat of liquid resin is applied. So you have an essentially seamless roof." That wasn't done here. "It's more expensive at this point for large roofs to do liquid-applied. It's a relatively new technology, but more and more manufactures are coming out with liquid-applied products, so down the road we'll see more and more of it. It's best right now for smaller roofs and for roofs with a lot of penetration – mechanical equipment, plumbing vents, telecommunication equipment."

So, next time — in the future. And in the meantime, Parkchester seems to have best of the past and the present.

(Click on image directly above for larger view.)