Avoiding a Crack-Up in a Bronx Co-op

It was a daunting job – but somebody had to do it. For the board at the 239-unit co-op at 920 Metcalf Avenue in the Soundview neighborhood of The Bronx, it was a question of refurbishing 190 aging terraces.

“It was a big job – a tremendous amount of work,” says Josh Koppel, the president of HSC Management, which manages the 21-story property. Built in 1967, the co-op, with two elevators and a full-time super, is tax-subsidized as part of the city’s Housing Development Fund Corporation affordable-housing program.

Koppel spent a great deal of time coordinating access to each apartment so that the contractor, Teamwork Restoration, could get on the terraces and apply a rubberized material called Neoguard that would protect the concrete from the elements.

“The biggest challenge was keeping everybody off their terraces during the construction,” Koppel says. He reports that he “got a lot of complaints, believe it or not, because we had changed the surface material of the terrace; we did that simply to make it slip-proof. Apparently, people like to walk on their terraces barefoot, but the new material felt rough and a lot of them don't like it.”

Another change was the color of the terraces. Before this, says Koppel, “everybody liked to paint their terrace their own colors. But we don't allow that anymore; now everything has to be uniform, which is better for the building. We feel that the aesthetics of the building have improved dramatically.”

The board's five members were very involved in the project, especially the board president, who actually works for Halstead as a property manager, although not in this building. “It’s wonderful to have somebody who understands what needs to be done,” says Koppel. The $860,000 job, which began in October 2015 and ended in May of this year, was funded from the co-op’s reserves.

The terraces have aluminum railings. Square vertical posts are anchored four inches deep in each concrete terrace floor, and they’re connected by horizontal railings. For some reason, some of the concrete floors were cracking.

“So we chopped off the corners of the railings, and we realized that the vertical posts were taking in water somehow,” the manager reports. “The water entered at the joints where the top railings and posts met, then went down the insides of the vertical posts, settled at the bottom – four inches below the terrace surface – and froze.” When water turns to ice, it expands, and the pressure caused the concrete to crack.

The solution? “We drilled a hole in the vertical posts, two inches above the concrete floor, then poured in a liquid rubber called Sikaflex,” says Koppel. “Now, if any water gets into the posts, it will weep out of the hole instead of going to the bottom of the posts. It was a very easy fix,” he notes, adding that it was subsequently applied to every post on every terrace.

Thanks to Neoguard, Sikaflex and some ingenious engineering – and the hard work of the contractors and the super, Victor Perez – the days of cracked terraces at 920 Metcalf Avenue are now a fading memory.

PRINCIPAL PLAYERS – MANAGER: HSC Management. CONTRACTOR: Teamwork Restoration. ENGINEER: Koenigsberg Engineering.