The Fifth Avenue Station

This sprawl­ing build­ing locat­ed in the old part of Naperville was orig­i­nal­ly the Naperville Lounge Fac­to­ry. Par­tial­ly destroyed in the ear­ly 1900s by a cyclone, it was rebuilt in 1913 as the Krohler Fur­ni­ture Com­pa­ny. It has now been con­vert­ed into com­mer­cial, res­i­den­tial and office space known as Fifth Avenue Sta­tion which takes up most of a square block.

The first floor com­mer­cial space at the east end of the build­ing is approx­i­mate­ly three feet below ground and had been plagued with leak­ing for years. When the ten­ant decid­ed to move, the man­age­ment peo­ple called in U.S. Water­proof­ing Co. to pro­vide a solution.

The foun­da­tion was con­struct­ed of brick which was exposed on the inside. There were some obvi­ous gaps in the mor­tar joints as well as evi­dence of leak­ing at the floor/​wall joint. The leak­ing was exac­er­bat­ed by rain water and snow melt from their own large park­ing lot. The build­ing man­age­ment want­ed to take care of the worst sec­tion and pre­ferred that all work be done from the exte­ri­or to lessen any dis­tur­bance to the ten­ants of the building.

U.S. Water­proof­ing Co. pro­posed exca­vat­ing approx­i­mate­ly 170 l.f. of the exte­ri­or of the foun­da­tion from grade to foot­ing. This required that the owner’s land­scap­er to tem­porar­i­ly relo­cate three recent­ly plant­ed trees. The work was start­ed dur­ing the last half of Novem­ber 2002. We knew that weath­er could cause some delays but a build-out for a new ten­ant was sched­uled so it was not pos­si­ble to wait sev­er­al months for good weather.

Once the wall was exposed, we found that there were sev­er­al voids, some as large as one foot square. The holes were filled and a parge coat of cement plas­ter was applied to the entire below grade sur­face. As luck would have it, it rained a day or two lat­er and we got a call from the leas­ing agent that some of the exca­vat­ed spoil spilled over onto the adja­cent pub­lic side­walk. The school chil­dren were forced to walk in the street. We had men and a machine there the next morn­ing to relo­cate the spoil and clean the walk.

The parge coat was coat­ed with a primer and then we trow­el applied a bitu­men mod­i­fied polyurethane liq­uid mem­brane at approx­i­mate­ly 60 mil thick­ness. Once that had a suf­fi­cient time to cure, drainage board was attached to the wall which has a twofold ben­e­fit. It acts as pro­tec­tion for the new­ly applied mem­brane and it directs water down to the base of the wall and the drain tile which we installed. The drain tile was installed with a fil­ter sock and the drainage board has an inte­gral fil­ter fab­ric on one side to pre­vent clog­ging by soil particles.

The drain tile was con­nect­ed to the storm sewer.

The work was com­plet­ed on time and with­out any extras, in spite of the bad weath­er. The retail space has been built out and we received a very appre­cia­tive note from the owners.