The crooked stairs in my apartment building turned out to be a 100 year old foundation shift

I was complaining to my landlord about the weird slant in my hallway for months until a tenant who's a retired architect told me the building sank 4 inches after the 1906 earthquake. He pointed out the original brickwork at the ground floor matches the old photos he found at the city library archives downtown. Has anyone else discovered something like that in an old building and found out the real reason it's like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

wren_mitchell13d ago

My own house has a door frame in the basement that's a perfect parallelogram. I'm a mechanic, not a carpenter, so I spent a solid year thinking I was just bad at squaring up door jambs. Turns out the previous owner's grandfather built the addition in 1923 and apparently eyeballed the whole thing after a few drinks. The plumb bob doesn't lie, but it does humiliate you on a regular basis. I wish my issue was a historic earthquake, not just a generations-old hangover. But hey, now I have a good excuse for why every shelf I install looks like it's trying to escape.

abby_cooper13d ago

I actually have to push back a little on the "eyeballed after a few drinks" thing. I've seen a lot of old houses with weird angles like that, and a lot of them were built by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Before laser levels and digital squares were a thing, carpenters used string lines and plumb bobs and their own eyes, and sometimes they made choices that look sloppy to us but actually worked fine for a hundred years. A parallelogram door frame could be from the foundation settling unevenly over time, or the guy might have been working with lumber that wasn't perfectly straight because that's all he had. I'm not saying grandpa wasn't drinking, but old construction often looks wrong to modern standards even when it's totally solid. Does the door still close and stay put, or does it stick at the top?

mileslane13d ago

You figure the shelves angle makes it look artsy now?