About Charm City Masonry

We repair existing masonry. In a rowhouse city that is a deliberate choice, not a limitation: repointing, rebuilding and restoration is a different trade from new construction, and it rewards decades of Baltimore masonry experience.

Baltimore is a brick city on purpose. An 1800s fire ordinance banned wood-frame construction, the clay was local, and by the Civil War the city was turning out about 30 million bricks a year. The housing stock is mostly attached rowhomes, and not all the same brick.

The era tells you how to repair it. Before the 1850s: soft, porous salmon brick from south Baltimore, so absorbent it was routinely painted and the most fragile brick in the city. From the 1850s on: pressed brick, harder, with tighter joints and white-struck grout lines. Around 1890 to 1900: narrow, hard, yellow-brown Roman brick. From the 1930s: red brick again with Colonial Revival.

You cannot repair an 1880s Federal Hill wall the way you repair a 1985 Owings Mills townhouse. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

Mortar is supposed to be the part of a wall that gives. The preservation standard is explicit: stress should be relieved by the mortar rather than by the brick, because a mortar stronger in compression than the brick will not move. Joints are cheap to redo. Brick faces are not.

Historic Baltimore mortar is lime and sand, roughly one part lime putty to three parts sand. Portland cement was not in common use until the early 20th century, and by the 1930s most masons mixed equal parts cement and lime. Brick laid here before about 1900 sits in nearly pure lime mortar.

Put hard modern mortar on soft old brick and the wall pays for it. Movement the joint used to absorb gets forced through the brick face. Water that used to dry out through the joint stays inside. Salts crystallize within the brick rather than at the joint face, and trapped water freezes and takes the face off, which is spalling.

The signature is hard, tidy joints standing proud of eroded, crumbling brick. That damage is not reversible. We would rather talk you out of the wrong repair than take the money and do it.

We cover Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and most weeks the truck is somewhere in the rowhouse belt. Hampden, Mount Vernon, Butchers Hill, Highlandtown, Union Square and Pigtown all send us steady work, and each asks for something different: pressed-brick fronts in Mount Vernon, tight working-class rows in Pigtown and Hampden, painted brick and old formstone scars around Union Square, Butchers Hill and Highlandtown.

Out in the county we work in Towson, Catonsville, Dundalk and Woodlawn. If you are near the county line and not sure whether you are in our area, call and ask.