What Preservation Review Asks of a Ground Floor Storefront

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group

On a designated building the masonry pier standing between two ground floor openings is usually what decides the storefront. It carries load, it is part of what was designated, and the width it keeps is width the display window never gets. I am writing this for developers taking on a conversion, for the restoration architects who will draw the base, and for the retail teams who arrive late and find most of their decisions already made.

The base of an old building is the part a person can touch and the part that has been rebuilt the most. Floors above the second tend to survive by neglect. The ground floor has been reworked for whatever business occupied it, which is why by the time we buy the building the storefront is often the least historic thing on the facade and the most closely reviewed.

That gap between what is there and what is protected is the first thing to establish. The designation report describes the building the city chose to protect, which may be the building of a hundred years ago rather than the one standing now. Reading the report against a measured survey of the existing base tells you which parts of the storefront you are actually negotiating about and which were replaced by somebody in the meantime.

What preservation review governs at the base of a building

Review governs what a person can see from the public way, and at the base that is nearly everything. The bulkhead under the glass, the proportion of the display window, the transom above it, the band where a sign may go and the pier between openings are read as one composition.

The pier is the one element in that list that is also structural. On a masonry building the piers between the ground floor openings are carrying the wall above them, so widening an opening means picking up that load on a new lintel or a frame and proving the wall above will tolerate the change. The question of what review will permit and the question of what the building can give up are therefore the same question.

That reading is the part teams get wrong. A storefront arrives in most projects as an interior scope, drawn by whoever is fitting out the space, priced as finish work and submitted late. Review receives it as an alteration to a designated facade, which is a different conversation held with different people on a different schedule.

So the first decision on the base is not a design decision at all. It is a decision about which drawings the storefront belongs to. We keep it with the facade package, in the restoration architect's hands, and we draw it at the same time as the masonry repair above it.

A storefront on a designated base is facade work that happens to be leased.

That has consequences a developer feels immediately. The facade package is the long pole on a conversion, because the survey, the mockups and the approvals in it all run in series. Putting the base in that package means the ground floor is designed before anyone knows who will occupy it.

Can a new storefront in a historic district be contemporary?

Yes. In New York the rules let staff approve a storefront that either replicates the historic one or reads as contemporary, so long as the design is based on historic features found in the district and carries the ordinary storefront elements of large display windows, bulkheads and transoms.

That is a more generous rule than most owners expect, and it points the opposite way from instinct. The reflex on a designated base is to reproduce something old, usually from a photograph of a neighbor. The rule asks instead for a design that belongs to the district and behaves like a storefront.

The federal rehabilitation standards say the same thing from the other direction, warning against changes that create a false sense of historical development by adding conjectural features or elements borrowed from other historic properties. A guessed at Victorian shopfront is weaker than an honest modern one, and it is also harder to get through review, because nobody can tell you what the guess is based on.

What survives from the old base is therefore the frame rather than the ornament. Keep the pier widths, the sill and bulkhead line, the head height of the opening and the position of the sign band, and the new work can be flat, metal and entirely of this decade. Change those five things and no amount of period detail will carry the proposal.

The detail that decides whether a contemporary storefront reads as careful or careless is the inch where the new frame meets the old masonry. A reveal that lets the metal sit back from the stone, a head condition that does not hide the original lintel and a sill that drains away from the joint are what a reviewer looks at closely.

Who decides whether a storefront design is appropriate?

The review body does, usually through staff rather than at a public hearing, and the instrument is a certificate of appropriateness or a staff level permit issued under the published rules. The project's own case is made by the restoration architect.

That is the professional to retain, and to retain early. A restoration architect who has taken storefronts through this process knows which mockups will be asked for, what a reviewer needs to see of the junction between new metal and old masonry, and which of the five dimensions above are worth defending on this particular building.

Expect the mockup to happen on the sidewalk rather than in a conference room. A sample of the metal, a length of the sill profile and a painted panel in the proposed color get mounted on the building and looked at from across the street, in daylight, by people who will decide what appropriate means on this block. A project that has not scheduled it loses weeks to it.

It also matters whether the building is designated on its own or protected because of the street it stands on, since the two regimes read the same alteration differently. I have written separately about what changes when a landmark sits in a historic district, and the storefront is where that difference shows up first.

The schedule consequence is the one I would plan around. A proposal that meets the published rules can be approved by staff, and a proposal that does not can be sent to the full commission, which is a different calendar entirely. The design that keeps the base inside the rules is worth more than the design that is slightly better and outside them.

Designing a storefront before there is a tenant

A restoration architect reading this can reasonably tell me I have the order backward. A storefront is a commercial instrument, and a base drawn with no occupant in mind produces an opening nobody wants and a second approval later to correct it.

There is something in that. I have seen a base designed cleanly on paper and then reopened because the use that eventually arrived needed its door somewhere else. My answer is that the five dimensions worth protecting are the ones no occupant has a view on, and everything an occupant does care about, the glass, the entry, the lighting and the sign itself, sits inside the frame those dimensions make.

So we draw the frame and leave the contents loose. The pier widths, the bulkhead line, the head height, the sign band and the junction detail go to review with the facade. The glazing layout, the door swing and the interior of the window stay open as long as the permit allows.

The sign is the piece we have stopped trying to win. A sign band sized to a historic facade is smaller and lower than a modern brand standard wants, and the version that satisfies review is usually a custom assembly approved after its own mockup. We budget the time for that now rather than discovering it in the last month, and we tell anyone taking space what the band can hold before they commit to it.

At Walker Tower we worked inside a Ralph Walker Art Deco telephone building, and at The Brooklyn Tower we built above the landmark Dime Savings Bank. On work of that kind the base is the sheet that everything else in the facade package waits on. It is the only part of the building where the old fabric, the public way and a future occupant all have to be satisfied by one drawing, and nothing above the base ever has to do that.

The ground floor of a conversion is the hardest sheet in the facade drawings rather than the last one, and the project that treats it that way from the survey onward is the one still on schedule when the scaffolding comes down.

Michael Stern is the founder and chief executive officer of JDS Development Group.

Photos by Naturalist Boat and E on Unsplash

Sources

Storefronts
Rehabilitation as a Treatment and Standards for Rehabilitation