Stair railings - Oakland County
Birmingham is an Oakland County city of 21,813 (2020 census) on the Woodward Corridor, a village from 1864 and a city from 1933. Many of its older houses near downtown and the Mill Pond are each designated as a historic district of their own.
Birmingham’s first land entries were made in 1819 and 1821 where Maple Road now meets Pierce Street; it became a village in 1864 and a city in 1933. Instead of drawing every historic district around a whole neighbourhood, the city designates many single houses as districts by address: the Stickney House at 412 Willits, the Abigail Carter House at 415 Merrill, the Quarton Homestead at 1155 Quarton and the Wallace Frost House on Tooting Lane among them. Other districts take in parts of the Mill Pond neighbourhood, Shain Park, the Merrill-Townsend-Brown area, Bates Street and the Central Business District.
Under Section 127-10 of the city’s preservation ordinance, construction, painting, alteration, repair or demolition that affects the exterior appearance of a resource in a district must be reviewed and approved by the Historic District Commission. Review follows the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, which favour repairing a deteriorated feature over replacing it and matching the old material when replacement can’t be avoided. On a porch, that often means mending original balusters and posts before anything new is ordered. Some changes can be approved administratively, and a city planner is the place to start.
The Building Department’s FAQ says a single-family home needs a building permit for a deck or a porch, with or without a roof, and that the permit should be in hand before work starts. It does not mention railings on their own, so ask the department before a railing-only job. The city is a compact 4.8 square miles bordered by Bloomfield Hills, Bloomfield Township, Troy and Royal Oak, and work just over those lines answers to a different building department.
Around Booth Park, Baldwin Park, the Baldwin Public Library and the old Grand Trunk Western depot, typical jobs are repairing original porch rails, ironwork matched to an older house, porch and stoop railings, staircase railings and rear deck railings.
Stair and porch railings across Detroit and Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties:
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