Fifteen Questions

What is this site, in one sentence?

A catalogue of eight building materials that have a face visible from a public sidewalk in this city, each one filed by how it was made before it arrived: cut, fired, cast, sawn or rolled.

It is a publication and nothing else. Tallyhouse is a publication. It does not sell, quote, price, survey or repair anything, does not supply building material, does not recommend a trade, and arranges no travel of any kind.

Why sort materials by how they were made rather than where they came from?

Because the making is the thing that decides everything downstream. Whether a material was cut, fired, cast, sawn or rolled determines whether it is a piece or a unit, whether it had to be ordered against a drawing, what it cost to move, and where in a wall it was allowed to be. Where it came from is one cell inside that answer rather than the axis over it.

Sorting by origin also collapses into a single question, local against brought in, and a two sided question is a weak way to organize eight things. Five making groups keep the entries apart on their own terms.

How is a material chosen for the catalogue?

It has to have a plane that can be seen from a public sidewalk somewhere in this city, and it has to be able to answer three questions: which bed or works, how it was dressed, how it got here. If any of the three cannot be answered from the published record, the entry is not written.

That rule is enforced by the program that builds the site rather than by good intentions: it refuses to lay a page for an entry with a missing cell, and the build stops with the file name in the error.

Can you tell me what my building is made of?

No. This publication does not assess any particular building, does not enter anybody's property, and offers no opinion on whether any wall is sound. It describes materials in general and what the published record says about them.

The reason is not caution. A material can be described from a survey bulletin and a public sidewalk; a building cannot, because the questions that matter about a building are answered by a drawing, a permit record or an opening, none of which this house has.

Will you recommend somebody to do the work?

No, and this is worth being blunt about: no mason, supplier, contractor or consultant is named anywhere on this site, no trade is recommended, and nothing is accepted from anybody in the trade.

There is exactly one commercial arrangement behind this publication, it has nothing to do with buildings, and it is set out in full on how this is paid for.

Does the color of a brick tell you how old it is?

No. Within one clay from one yard, color tracks how hot the fire was where that brick stood in the stack, which is genuinely useful. Across different clays it tracks nothing at all, because a clay full of ground limestone fires pale however hard it is pushed.

So color compares bricks from one source and says nothing about two. What the kiln decided sets out the mechanism, and cream brick from the lakeshore counties is the case that breaks the folk version.

Why is the back of an old building a different color from the front?

Because one burn of a temporary kiln produced three grades of brick, and a builder put the good grade where it would be seen and the pale, underburned, cheaper grade everywhere else. It is a rational answer to the fact that a wall has two jobs and only one of them is done by every wall.

It is not decay and it is not corner cutting in any scandalous sense. Common brick, and the back wall is the entry.

If a wall shows header courses, is it a solid wall?

Probably, and it is not proof. In a solid wall a header is a brick turned sideways to tie the layers together, so the pattern was structural. In a twentieth century wall the load is carried by a frame, the brick is a single skin tied back with hidden metal anchors, and bricks were cut in half so the same pattern could be reproduced with no structure behind it.

Nothing visible from a sidewalk settles it, so this catalogue says unknown. The bond a wall is laid in explains why the answer has to be unknown.

Is a soft, eroded mortar joint a sign of neglect?

Usually the opposite. Mortar is meant to be the weakest, most permeable, most replaceable part of a wall, so that movement and freezing damage go there rather than into the units. A wall with worn lime joints and intact brick faces has been working as designed for a century.

The wall to be curious about is the one with hard, sharp, proud joints and crumbling brick faces, because that ranking is inverted. What a mortar joint does states the principle, and offers no advice about any particular wall.

Why is there no author name on the site?

Because the work is compilation from published sources and observation from public sidewalks, and attaching a personal byline to that would suggest an authority it does not have. The publisher is named in full on every page and in the footer of this one.

Letters are read and answered by whoever is at the desk during posted hours, and a correction is credited by initial only unless somebody asks otherwise.

Which sources does the catalogue actually use?

The state geological survey's bulletin on the building stones of the state from the middle eighteen nineties and its bulletin on the clays of the state from the turn of the century, both of which print maps with dates on them; fire insurance atlases of this city from the eighteen eighties and nineties, which color a wall by what it is made of; and National Register nominations, which describe fabric carefully because they are required to.

Where a claim would need something the record does not contain, the entry says so. Corrections lists the standing uncertainties that are not errors and are not settled.

What is the fare lookup doing on a site about masonry?

Paying for it. There is one form, on one page, and where a reader books through it Tallyhouse LLC may earn a commission from the booking service at no extra cost to the reader. That is the entire commercial arrangement behind this publication.

It is kept structurally separate rather than promised to be harmless: no entry and no article carries a form, a price or a button, and nothing in the catalogue depends on the form existing. Remove it and every page reads exactly as it does now.

Does this site track me, or sell anything about me?

No. Nothing on this site counts a visit, and there is no measurement code of any kind in any page. Every part of every page, down to the two typefaces, is served from this domain alone, so there is nobody else to hand anything to.

Four things touch a browser in total and they are all listed on the storage page, including the one that belongs to the booking service and not to this site. There is no card field anywhere here.

Can I use the text or the pictures?

Quote a sentence or two with the page named and there is no need to ask. Reproducing a whole entry, or using the images, needs permission in writing, which is usually given for teaching and for local history work and is answered from the same desk as everything else.

The images on this site are made rather than photographed, and every one of them is captioned as an illustration of a material rather than as a record of a particular building. Terms of use is the formal version.

Something here is wrong. What happens if I say so?

The report is read at the desk, checked against the source the statement came from, and then either the page changes and its date moves, or a reply explains why it does not and names what was checked. Two working days, sometimes three.

Spelling and broken links are fixed as found without a note. A statement that is accurate and unwelcome stays, and the reply will name the source. Corrections is the whole procedure.