Those Metal Stars on Chicago Brick Buildings: Anchor Plates and Tie Rods Explained

Walk almost any older Chicago block and you'll see them: cast-iron stars, circles, S-shapes, and plain rectangles bolted flat against the brick, usually in a line at floor level, often painted the same color as the trim.

Most people assume they're decorative — a bit of Victorian flourish. They aren't. Each one is the visible end of a steel rod running through the building, and if you own a masonry building with them, they're telling you something about your walls.

Paul Lally's Masonry has been working on Chicago's load-bearing masonry since 1988. Here's what they are, why so many buildings here have them, and what to look for.

What an anchor plate actually is

In a load-bearing masonry building, the brick walls carry the floors. The floor joists run from wall to wall and their ends sit in pockets built into the masonry.

That works as long as the walls and the floors stay connected. But masonry walls want to move — they bow outward under load, they settle unevenly, they get pushed by wind and by the expansion and contraction of a hundred winters. And joist ends sitting in a damp masonry pocket can rot, which quietly disconnects the floor from the wall that's supposed to be braced by it.

A tie rod fixes the wall to the structure. A steel rod runs from the outside face of the wall, through the masonry, and back to either the floor framing or — on narrower buildings — all the way through to a matching plate on the opposite wall. Tighten it, and the wall is held.

The plate is what stops the rod pulling through the brick. A bare rod end under tension would punch straight out. The plate spreads that load across enough brick to hold. That's the whole job — and it's why the plates are large, thick, and firmly seated.

The decorative shapes are simply what they were cast as. They were going to be visible on the front of the building, so foundries made them look like something. A star is not doing anything a plain rectangle isn't.

Original, or retrofitted?

Both exist, and it's worth knowing which you have.

Original anchorage was built in as the building went up — common in warehouses, larger commercial buildings, and some multi-family construction where the design anticipated the loads. These read as regular, evenly spaced, and consistent with the architecture.

Retrofitted anchorage was added later, because a wall was already moving — bowing, separating from the floors, or pulling away at the top. These often look less regular: concentrated on one elevation, at one floor level, or clustered where the trouble was.

A retrofit is not bad news in itself. It means somebody identified a moving wall and stabilised it, which is exactly what should have happened. What matters is the condition now, and whether the wall has been stable since.

Why Chicago has so many

Three reasons stack up here.

The building stock is load-bearing masonry. Between roughly 1870 and 1930 the city built enormous numbers of two-flats, three-flats, greystones, courtyard buildings, corner storefronts, and warehouses where the brick walls carry the floors. That construction depends entirely on walls staying tied to framing.

The masonry is soft and the winters are hard. Locally-fired common brick and lime mortar, taking repeated freeze-thaw cycling — sometimes several cycles a week — for over a century. Mortar loses its bond, walls lose stiffness, and movement follows.

Joist ends rot. A joist sitting in a masonry pocket that gets wet — from a failed parapet, a leaking gutter, or open joints above — decays at exactly the point where it's supposed to be holding the wall. That's one of the most common reasons a Chicago wall needed tying in the first place, and it's why a leak in the parapet is a structural issue and not just a stain. See parapet wall repair.

What to look for on your own building

Signs an anchor is sound

• Plate sitting flat and tight against the brick
• Sound mortar in the joints around it
• Surface rust or old paint, but no scaling or delamination
• No cracking radiating from the plate
• Consistent appearance with the other plates on the same elevation

Signs an anchor needs attention

• Heavy rust, scaling, or flaking on the plate itself
• The plate sitting proud of the wall, or visibly pulling away
• Cracked or displaced brick radiating outward from the plate
• Mortar failing in a ring around the plate — the concentrated-stress signature
• Rust staining bleeding down the brick below it
• A plate that has rotated or shifted out of alignment with its neighbors
• Brick around the plate that's spalled through or loose

Signs the wall itself is the problem

• Bowing or bulging in the wall, especially between anchor points
• Horizontal cracking across the wall
• Displacement — one side of a crack sitting proud of the other
• Interior symptoms: sloping floors, sticking doors, fresh plaster cracks
• Gaps opening where floors meet exterior walls

That last group is an engineer's question, not a mason's. See mason or structural engineer.

The rust problem — same physics as a lintel

An anchor plate and rod are steel embedded in and against masonry, which means they fail the same way a lintel does.

Rust occupies several times the volume of the steel it came from. As a plate and the rod end behind it corrode, they expand — and the brick around them has nowhere to go. So the masonry cracks, displaces, and eventually loses its ability to hold the plate at all.

That's the same rust jacking mechanism that cracks the brick above a window. See failing lintels and cracked brick above windows.

The difference matters: a rust-jacked lintel is damaging the wall above an opening. A rust-jacked anchor plate is degrading the thing holding your wall to your floors. The masonry around an anchor deserves attention sooner than the wall around it, not later.

What a mason does — and where the line is

Let's be precise about scope, because this is one of the areas where an honest contractor should say what they don't do.

Masonry work around anchorage — ours:

• Repointing the joints around plates, where concentrated stress opens them first
• Replacing spalled and cracked brick around a plate
• Rebuilding masonry where an anchor has damaged the surrounding wall
• Preparing openings and rebuilding around anchorage that an engineer has specified
• Matching brick and mortar so the repair reads as part of the wall
• Keeping water out of the wall — the root cause of most anchor corrosion

Structural determination — an engineer's:

• Whether the anchorage is adequate
• Whether a wall needs additional or replacement anchorage
• The design, size, spacing, and specification of any new tie system
• Whether observed movement is active or historic
• Whether the wall can stay or has to come down

Anyone offering to "fix your tie rods" without an engineer involved is overstepping. We'll do the masonry to a specification, and we'll tell you when what you're looking at needs one.

How the masonry work is actually done

1. Assess the plate and the masonry around it — plate condition, mortar condition, brick condition, evidence of movement.
2. Determine whether it's a masonry job or a structural one. If there's displacement, bowing, or heavy section loss in the anchorage, that goes to an engineer first.
3. Find and fix the water. Anchors corrode because water reached them — a failed parapet, open joints, a leaking gutter, bad flashing. Repairing around the plate without closing that path is temporary work.
4. Carefully remove damaged brick around the plate without disturbing the anchorage.
5. Treat or replace steel per the engineer's direction where that's in scope.
6. Rebuild and repoint with matched mortar — soft, lime-rich mixes on pre-1930s masonry, tooled to the existing joint profile.
7. Reset the plate properly so it bears evenly on sound brick rather than on a patch.
8. Never bury the condition. A plate should stay visible and assessable, not be plastered over.

A word on painting and covering them

Two things we'd ask you not to do.

Don't cover an anchor plate during a facade project. Cladding, stucco, or heavy coating over an anchor hides its condition permanently — and it's the one component on the wall you most want to be able to look at.

Be careful painting them. Keeping steel painted is genuinely good maintenance and slows corrosion. But painting over heavy scaling without preparing the surface just seals the rust in and makes it harder to see what's happening underneath.

Modern wall ties are a different thing

Worth clearing up, because the terms get mixed.

	Anchor plates & tie rods	Modern veneer wall ties
Building type	Load-bearing masonry	Brick veneer over frame
What the wall does	Carries the floors	Carries nothing — a skin
What the tie does	Ties wall to framing or opposite wall	Holds the veneer flat
Size	Heavy rod + large visible plate	Small corrugated metal strip, hidden
Visible?	Yes	No
Failure mode	Corrosion, rust jacking, structural	Corrosion — veneer bows outward
Who diagnoses	Structural engineer	Mason can assess

Both corrode. A failed veneer tie lets a non-structural skin bow away — serious, and a masonry repair. A failed tie rod is a structural matter. Our guide to brick veneer vs. solid masonry covers telling the two wall types apart.

Maintenance that protects anchorage

Nearly every anchor problem starts as a water problem:

• Keep the parapet and coping sound on flat-roofed buildings — that's the most common route to wet joist pockets
• Repoint before joints recede deeply, especially around plates
• Keep gutters clear and downspouts discharging well away
• Watch for rust staining below any plate
• Look at the plates each spring, after the freeze-thaw season
• Photograph them with a date, so you can tell change from imagination

See the masonry maintenance checklist for Chicago and, for multi-unit owners, the two-flat and small apartment building guide.

Related services

Masonry work around anchorage draws on tuckpointing and repointing, brick repair, brick replacement, parapet wall repair, lintel repair and replacement, foundation masonry repair, and historic or commercial masonry restoration.

The bottom line

The stars aren't decoration. Each one is a plate spreading the load of a steel rod that ties your masonry wall to the structure behind it — usually because, at some point, that wall needed tying.

An original, sound, tight plate on a plumb wall is a building working as intended. A heavily corroded plate with cracked brick radiating from it is a structural component failing, and it deserves attention sooner than the rest of the wall, not later.

Look at yours this spring. If the plate is scaling, the brick around it is cracked, or the wall between anchors is bowing, that's the point to get eyes on it.

Paul Lally's Masonry Inc. is a family-owned, insured masonry contractor serving Chicago and the Chicagoland suburbs since 1988 — tuckpointing, brick repair and replacement, chimney repair and rebuilds, lintel replacement, masonry restoration, and waterproofing for residential and commercial properties. Built on Craftsmanship. Backed by Experience.

We'll look at the masonry around your anchorage and tell you honestly whether it's a repointing job or a conversation to have with a structural engineer first. Our family name is on every job.

Free on-site estimates — call (708) 448-8866 or request an estimate online.