Old-World Skills Come to the Fore at City Hall

Working on the hand-formed copper dome and gutters of City Hall’s northwest stair tower has been like a trip back in time for craftsman Dick Fresquez.

Sixty years ago, artisans, using only hammers and other simple tools, could form flat sheets of copper into the intricate and subtle shapes that now adorn City Hall.

“The guys who taught me are dead,” said Fresquez, 52. “It’s really a dying trade.”

But a few modern craftsmen such as Fresquez still have those skills and are using them on the $6-million renovation of City Hall.

Abbe Cohen, city project manager for the restoration, said that because of the techniques used in building the 60-year-old structure, it was difficult to find craftsmen schooled in the time-consuming trades of the past.

Five-Year Project

The building, which took hundreds of workers two years to complete, has been in the hands of fewer than three dozen craftsmen who may spend more than five years restoring it.

Workmen have just finished restoring one of the four stair towers and have not begun work on the major portion of the building.

Fresquez, who learned his trade more than 30 years ago, said that the work can be tedious but that it is a challenge for a modern craftsman to work on one of the grand buildings of the 1920s.

“Oh yes, I wanted this job,” he said. “It was obviously a great opportunity.”

Pasadena’s City Hall, the eighth in the city’s history, was designed by the San Francisco firm of Bakewell & Brown, which a decade earlier had fashioned the stately San Francisco City Hall.

Plans Revised

The original plan called for a U-shaped building surrounding a courtyard, topped with a “camapanario,” or a multilevel belfry, like those on many of California’s early missions.

But after receiving numerous complaints about what one observer at the time called “that horrible belfry,” the architects replaced it with a 206-foot, tile-covered dome that has become the building’s trademark.

According to historians, the dome’s design was derived from the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, Italy, the Hotel des Invalides in Paris and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Construction of the 170,000-square-foot building, begun in January, 1926, required more than 1 million board feet of lumber, 20,000 cubic yards of concrete and more than 35,000 tons of rock and gravel from the San Gabriel River.

The building, which cost $1.3 million, was opened on Dec. 27, 1927.

It has been recognized as one of the finest examples of civic architecture in the country and is listed, as part of the Civic Center, on the National Register of Historic Places.

Cathleen Malstrom, an architect with Architectural Resource Group, the San Francisco firm overseeing the project, said one of the reasons the project is taking so long is the city’s inability to fund the entire renovation at one time.

But she added that there is no way to rush delicate restoration work, such as cleaning and repairing the cast-concrete plaques, called cartouches, that adorn the domed towers.

“It’s a very labor-intensive project,” Malstrom said. “The majority of the work relies on older skills that have been lost over time.”

City Hall has been fairly well maintained, she said. “It’s merely suffering from what all buildings of that age are suffering from. It’s not in bad shape at all.”

Most of the damage has been caused by water seeping into cracks and eating away the bond between the concrete walls and their plaster coating.

The seepage was largely caused by a deteriorating gutter system handcrafted out of copper.

In November, the city hired CPW Inc. of Los Angeles to conduct a trial restoration of the northwest stair tower.

“A lot of companies just didn’t want to touch the project,” said Cohen. “It’s a lot of very trying work.”

With that part of the restoration a success, work is set to begin on a second tower this month.

CPW President Robert Dugger said the hardest task was finding an artisan who could restore the gutter system and the copper-clad dome.

“The true craftsmen are just not around anymore,” Dugger said. “It’s that attention to detail more than anything else.”

CPW settled on Fresquez, owner of Cornice Sheet Metal Co. of Montrose.

Fresquez said his main task was to restore the curved copper sheets covering the dome’s wooden frame.

Each sheet was pulled off, numbered, and soldered or screwed back into place, he said. The frame was also inspected and treated to prevent termite infestation.

Fresquez said the gutter system was a big problem because it had been built by hand with varying widths and sizes around the tower.

“It was really piece-as-you-go,” he said. “Just trying to get it to lay flat was a real challenge.”

After working on the tower for five months, Fresquez said that it was almost impossible to tell where restoration work had been done.

“The whole point is to restore it in a way that no one can tell,” he said.

Work on the cast-concrete cartouches also required the careful touch of a craftsman, Cohen said.

The cartouches, a type of plaque attached to the walls and bearing designs of lions, scrolls and the city seal with its crown and key, are cast in several panels and joined with a seam of mortar.

Over the years, the mortar has softened and, in some spots, the surface of the cartouche has cracked.

Bob Heimerl, owner of Mowery-Thomason Inc., the plastering company that did the work on City Hall, said all the joints had to be scraped out and replaced with a material that would match the cast stone of the cartouche.

In addition, Heimerl said, the plasterers had to repair broken sections of the cartouches by hand-carving new concrete.

“It’s very tedious work, but I think the end result came out very nicely,” he said.

Heimerl said plenty of tradesmen still work with plaster, but very few--mostly old-timers--have the skill to reproduce the molded ornamentation found on many mansions and older buildings.

“There’s a real talent to be able to do this kind of work,” he said.

CPW’s Dugger said some modern techniques have also been used to restore the building.

For example, his firm tested several types of materials that could be injected between the exterior plaster coating and the concrete walls.

Cohen, the city’s project manager, said water eating away at the bond between the plaster and concrete had caused the plaster to crack and, in some cases, break off the building.

The entire building was tapped by hand to find the hollow spots behind the plaster, which will be filled with epoxy.

Once the restoration is complete, Malstrom said, the building will be as good as the original, or even better.

“It won’t last forever, but it will last another 60 years,” she said. “I have no doubt about that.”