THE
BLACK DRIP
“It’s black and oozes down from the ceiling on hot summer days,” she cried over the phone. At the time, we had just been hired to manage an older, poorly rehabbed, eighty-unit loft building on Chicago’s near northwest side. Within days, I had this resident crying to me. “You must do something,” she continued. “I can’t live like this.” We had been told there were building roof leaks, but no one had warned us of the black drip. Was the place haunted? Who knew what horrors had happened in these century-old buildings?
One of the first residential loft conversions in Chicago, this complex of three buildings had been rehabbed in the 1970s as loft-style apartments and then sold as condominiums in the mid-1980s. Little beyond cosmetic work had been done since then. The tallest of the three buildings had the biggest problems. We investigated the horror scenes and were shocked to discover that over the years, roof layer after roof layer had been added, covering up old problems and adding weight to the structure. City code only allows three roof layers before a complete tear off of the previous layers; we found eight layers in some areas. Leaks and tears in the roofing had allowed water to get into and between the various layers. On hot summer days, the dark colored roof acted as a “pressure cooker,” heating up the water and tar in the roof. This black liquid tar was oozing down into the top floor residences.
The solution was not easy or inexpensive. The liquid tar had saturated much of the wood decking that acted as the ceilings of the units and would need to be replaced, along with all the roofing and some of the supporting beams. Acting with “ghost buster” precision, we had to move residents briefly into hotels and had their possessions packed and stored off site while the roof structure was rebuilt, and a new roof installed. The black drip was finally exorcised.
www.cai-illinois.org • 847.301.7505 | 23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
