Recycling a Collapsed House
My backyard used to be a house. It was likely even older than my current rickety old house, because access to the yard is through the main hallway — a century ago one would go through the public area of the front house, exit through the back door, and then cross a small courtyard before entering the back house. What I have left is the bottom half of the first floor of the house — most of the brick walls were smashed to pieces, according to the previous owners, when the city cited them for having ruins too tall for the DOB’s tastes.
So since I have finished cleaning up the left front area of the “raised garden” part of the yard (the part inside the old house walls), I took a minute to plan out the patio I had been envisioning there, and got to work building retaining dams out of some of the scrap plywood left in the yard. When I had the dirt level in the far corner, I just started arranging the bricks, tapping them with a rubber mallet to sort of even them out. I’m leaving generous cracks between most of them, into which I’ll put potting soil and then seed with creeping plants that do well in cracks. This will have a dual purpose of securing the bricks without just slathering cement all over the place, in addition to creating a “gardeny” patio space. The area between the plywood dams and the old walls will be an in-ground garden.
Being a history and architecure dork, I was having a moral crisis involving the original bluestone and brick steps into the front of the old house. They were already half-destroyed, but the coup de grace is the fact that the goofy addition on the back of my house sticks out over the bottom of the steps — even if I fixed them, nobody could walk on them as intended. So I decided to demolish them and reuse the salvaged materials in the garden. As I worked, I thought about the long-dead men who might have mixed the cement and laid the bricks I was now snapping apart. I felt guilty for undoing their handiwork. But seeing the patio come together, my guilt faded and I grew excited at the promise of summer BBQs.
I wonder how common this sort of thing is in Brooklyn. In the scheme of things, we’re a young city, but we have a disproportionate share of ruins. Anyone have a similar experience?
Holes which would have held the original floor joists.
Bluestone from the half-demolished stairs.
Wow, that’s really something. No ruins at our place that I can see.
Have you thought about planting thyme in some of those cracks? It spreads really nicely which makes it a great groundcover, and you can snip it off and use it in cooking, too.
Yeah, I have heard that. It’s pretty tough, too, right? It’s gonna get stepped on
Oh, yeah, it’s pretty durable. If ours is any indication, it’ll last through the winter and keep coming back every year.
I’m currently living in a 100+ year old Victorian cottage on the Jersey shore. At the end of last summer, I finally began demolishing the decrepit shed behind the house. Soon I realized that the shed was as old as the house, which made me feel very guilty about ripping it apart, but it was just too big and hard to maintain. So I understand your conundrum. My thoughts, though, lean toward the philosophy that you save what you can, and try to adapt and recycle the things you can’t, as you’re doing.
Old materials are treasure. Had the same situation in my first garden in NYC, in the East Village. The paths were brick and the retaining walls for he raised walls were bricks and foundation stones.
Chamomile is another hardy plant choice for planting between the bricks. It looks too sunny for moss, otherwise I’d suggest letting that grow in. And I’ve always wanted to be able to grow Corsican mint, a creeping mint species which is not quite hardy here in NYC. However, in a protected site, as it looks like you might have, it’s worth a shot.
Two maintenance problems you will have: weeds and heaving. Seeds from every weed from blocks around will settle in the cracks between the bricks. Prepare to spend lots of time digging the weeds from between the joints.
Because you’re laying the bricks directly on the ground, as I did in the East Village garden, you’ll also need to re-level all the bricks every Spring. This will include needing to remove and reset some of the bricks that are too far out of line to pound back in place.
Thanks! Actually, the bricks aren’t TOTALLY level, but that doesn’t bother me too much, nobody’s gonna be playing soccer on it or anything.