IRONS NURTURES BRICKS AND MORTAR
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Cracking and eroding mortar between the bricks holding the Pacific Club together are being shored up with lime mortar, the original glue used to put together the 235- year-old brick candle factory.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Over two centuries after its construction, the Pacific Club on Main Street gets some needed attention. Restoration mason Richard Irons prepares the brick for re-pointing. At left, a third-story view of Lt. Max Wagner Square, recently decorated by the Garden Club.

Chiseling, hammering and chipping away at the crumbling mortar holding the building together is restoration mason Richard Irons and his crew from Maine. They are re-pointing the exterior bricks of the Pacific Club at Lower Main Street, said Pacific Club President Ginger Andrews.

The work, which Andrews expects to take about three weeks, is a long overdue project necessary for the continued existence of the Pacific Club building.

"0ver time, some cracks have appeared and some of them are the result of some older repairs that have caused a problem and some of them are just age," said Andrews. "It's an old building, so I guess every two or three hundred years you have to do a little maintenance."

Part of the problem is the Portland Cement, said Andrews, used to repair the building in the past that is known to be porous when it hardens, allowing water to seep in, freeze and crack the bricks.

Also, iron in the walls used during the original construction of the building is rusting and expanding, and as it does, causing cracks in bricks.

"There seems to be some places where iron has expanded and caused cracks, so they're repairing that [too]," said Andrews. "It was a brick shell after the Great Fire 1846, so another building was constructed inside that, so they seem to have left some of the stuff from the previous structure.

"They're basically just artifacts from 1772 that are just now getting around to causing some problems."

Most of the work is being done on the south and west sides of the building, as Andrews said that Irons had already completed extensive repairs to the north and east walls of the Pacific Club over the years. Working with limited means from the leases of the building's spaces to the club's tenants and Irons' frenetic schedule, Andrews gets him when he can and he chips away at the project in between other jobs on the island.

Built in 1772, the Pacific Club building was originally known as the William Rotch Warehouse after whaling company owner and candle maker William Rotch who was one of the first candle makers on Nantucket and also used the building for a base of operations for his four whalers: the Beaver, the Bedford, the Dartmouth and the Eleanor. His whaling captains also played cribbage in the Rotch Warehouse.

Pacific Clubm members have keys to club that they use to access its part of the building to hang out, play cribbage and use its bathroom. Ironically, Andrews inherited one of the club's 24 shares from her late father Clinton Andrews who got his from one of the original, founding shareholders, Clinton Parker, and is president by default because she lives on island year-round.

In charge of the club itself, but not the cribbage club, a subset within the club membership and probably outside of it as well, Andrews' work is more preservation of the structure and its historical aspects.

"We're just maintaining what we have and trying to do it in an appropriate and sensitive way," Andrews said, adding that she hopes the necessary building

maintenance work does not inconvenience anyone. I