Montello Painters — North Brockton, by the tracks

In 1884, residents and shoe manufacturers in what was then called the Huntington Heights area of northern Brockton wanted a station of their own. A brick depot opened that year on the west side of the tracks. Locals first asked to call it Newburg, but Montello was the name that took effect on January 15, 1885. The W.L. Douglas Shoe Co., one of the city's two largest shoe makers around 1899, had its No. 1 factory on Spark Street; a 1906 newspaper item placed its new office building beside it, facing the Montello depot. The current station at 150 Spark Street opened in 1997.

The 1881 horsecar line that ran down Main Street, electrified in 1891, ran from Montello in the northeast of the city to Campello at the south border; a 2015 National Register nomination credits those short runs with making the trip to and from work easier.

Census Tract 5103 takes in Ames Street and the 700 block of North Montello Street, a few hundred feet from the station. It holds about 1,700 housing units. Only 17% are single-family detached houses; roughly 73% are in buildings of two to nine units. About 39% of the tract's homes were built in 1939 or earlier, and in Block Group 2, the part of the tract that includes those two streets, the figure is about 48%. Owners occupy roughly 27% of the units. These are survey estimates with wide margins, and the tract line is not a neighborhood boundary, so read them as a rough picture.

Several households under one roof

With only about one unit in six in a detached single-family house, roughly five of every six homes in the tract share a building with at least one other household. Painting the outside of such a building can mean stacked porches, several entries and stair runs, and possibly more than one owner who has to sign off on color and timing. See exterior painting in Brockton for how a multi-unit scope is broken down.

Pre-1940 wood near the station

Close to half the units in the block group nearest the tracks predate 1940. Clapboard, trim and porch parts of that age can carry many layers of paint, and where those layers have lost adhesion, scraping back to sound paint can take longer than applying the finish coats.

Renters in most units

Roughly 73% of occupied units in the tract are rented. For an owner who lives on one floor and rents the others, interior turnover painting between tenants is its own kind of job, and pre-1978 rules for disturbing paint apply in rental units just as they do in the owner's own rooms. Read about interior painting in Brockton.

Lead-safe prep is the starting assumption

About three in four homes in Tract 5103 were built before 1980. Paid work that disturbs paint in a pre-1978 home generally falls under EPA's RRP rule unless testing shows no lead. Our lead-safe painting page covers containment and cleanup.