Stroll by The Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue today and you’ll be met by a familiar New York City sight: scaffolding. As part of our ongoing renovation, the temporary structures are supporting a major cleaning and repair campaign for the ornate Beaux-Arts façades of our historic buildings. In this video, Lizzie Olson, the Frick’s Senior Project Manager, explains our collaboration with Walter B. Melvin Architects and West New York Restoration to fix damaged areas of limestone, weatherproof the buildings, and clean off years of dirt and grime. Following our reopening early next year, renovation projects like the exterior facelift will enable visitors to enjoy an enhanced Frick experience—even before you walk through our doors. Producer/Director: Lisa Goble Director of Photography: George Koelle Audio Production: Sean Troxell Editor: Courtlin Byrd Original Music: George Koelle Editorial: Noah Purdy
We are standing in the 5th Avenue garden of the Frick Collection right now overlooking Central
Park. You can see the building is a little bit obscured right now. We're actually standing
inside of scaffolding that we built so that we can repair and clean the exterior limestone walls
or facades of the building in anticipation of our reopening. Maintaining the facades
of the Frick Collection, it's an ongoing project. For decades we've been working with Walter B.
Melvin Architects. They're an architect that specializes in historic preservation,
and we've been working with West New York Restoration. They're a contractor who really
excels at traditional masonry work. Henry Clay Frick built his 5th Avenue residence during
the Beaux Arts movement of architecture, and that movement is really defined by big monumental
limestone buildings with classical details and a lot of ornate carving. Limestone is a bit of a
soft and porous material, so when it's exposed to wind and rain and pollution and other environmental
elements, it will erode, it will absorb dirt and grime, and it'll begin to deteriorate like you
would see a rock weathering in nature. The west facade here that we're standing in front of is
across the street from Central Park, so it's the most exposed to wind and rain in the elements and
therefore has suffered the worst deterioration. The last big cleaning that the Frick did of the
facades was about 10 to 15 years ago, and since that time some of the delicate rosettes and other
carved elements have eroded and deteriorated to the point where one actually fell off the building.
So at that point the Frick installed protective netting. That issue really served as the impetus
for this project and why we're doing this repair and cleaning campaign now. The work on the
limestone, it includes a number of things. It includes patching or repairing locally limestone that is
cracked or damaged. It involves restoring the mortar joints between the stone, and it involves
cleaning the stone as well. Where we've got heavily deteriorated carvings like the rosettes and the
brackets on the cornice, we have master stone carvers who are going to be replicating those
elements. Where we need to redo sheet metal waterproofing, roofing, flashing, West New York
Restoration and Walter B. Melvin are working very closely together to combine the traditional crafts
and the new technologies where it makes sense so that we leave the building sound, watertight, and
good for the next several years. So when all is said and done and the scaffolding comes down, our
hope is that most people actually won't notice that we've done any work on the facade of the
building and that it will look the same as they remember. But we do hope that they'll be impressed
by how crisp and clean it looks for the reopening.
