Moody Street Painters — Moody Street, High, Walnut, Chestnut and Adams Streets

Moody Street was laid out in 1846, the same year its bridge over the Charles was built. A South Side land history published by the Waltham Historical Society notes that an 1848 map showed no buildings along it, while an 1854 map already showed a number of houses nearby. In 1847 lots on the north side of Chestnut Street were sold, and Walnut Street was then called Alston Street.

The street itself is the core of the Moody Street Historic District, placed on the National Register in March 1990. It is a commercial district, not a residential one: eight properties built roughly between 1880 and 1950, including two 1887 Romanesque Revival buildings, two Georgian Revival buildings, and the 1948–49 Art Deco Woolworth building. The largest, Cronin's Landing, grew in stages from 1879 to 1930 as a department store and now has residences on its upper floors above first-floor retail.

Step off the main street and the older housing appears. The same history identifies 40–42 High Street as probably the house Bernard McCusker built in 1871, and suggests 59 Walnut Street may be older than 1849. A few blocks away at Adams and Cherry Streets, the Charles Baker Property is a 2½-story clapboarded two-family with a cross-gable roof and two stacked polygonal bays on its front, built around 1881–83, probably by the watch company for factory workers.

Census Tract 3685, which takes in the north end of Moody Street, shows how much newer, denser housing now surrounds those survivors. Of its 2,112 units, 36.5% are in buildings of 50 or more units and only 75 are single-family detached houses. One third were built in 2000 or later, while 22.5% date from 1939 or earlier. Renters occupy 83.9% of the occupied units.

Units inside larger buildings

With more than half the tract's units in buildings of five or more, a lot of the painting here happens behind a unit door: walls, ceilings, doors and trim in an apartment or condo. A building of that size may have a management company or association with rules for elevators, hallways, parking and work hours, and some require a contractor's certificate of insurance before work begins. Our condo painting page covers how that process goes.

Clapboard and bay windows on the side streets

The Baker house on Adams Street is clapboarded and has two stacked polygonal bays on its front. Bays have many short runs of siding, angled trim joints and window sills that catch water, so they take far more prep and brush time than their size suggests.

Historic listing without paint rules

The National Park Service states that National Register status alone does not restrict what a private owner does with a property, including repainting, unless federal money, licenses or permits are involved. We found no local historic district covering Moody Street, though we could not confirm there is none, so asking the city before a major exterior change is still sensible.

Old layers next to new construction

A unit built after 2000 and a house built in 1871 can be a block apart here. In Tract 3685, 48.9% of units were built in 1979 or earlier, and on anything built before 1978 the federal lead rules apply to work that disturbs paint. See our lead-safe painting page for what that involves.