North Abington Painters — Around the depot

The landmark here is the North Abington Depot on Railroad Street. Its National Register record describes an 1893–1894 Richardsonian Romanesque station designed by Bradford Lee Gilbert, put up for the town after the North Abington Riot, a fight between the railroad and a local streetcar line. It was entered on the Register in 1976. Across from it is the 1894 Peerless-Capitol Theater, built of cut granite and brick, and the same commercial core includes the brick Italianate Arnold Shoe Factory of 1875, a reminder that this was a shoe town.

Older houses sit among them. The Orcutt-Ford Homestead began around 1751 as a half cape; tradition credits a later owner with the other half, which produced a Georgian Cape with a fluted-pilaster doorway, a dentil cornice band and 12-over-12 windows. North Abington also had its own congregation, the Fourth Church, separate from the First Church at the town center.

Census Tract 5202.01 covers the northeastern part of town, including Railroad, Adams, Wales and Arnold Streets. Of its 1,582 housing units, 25.9% were built in 1939 or earlier and 76.3% before 1980; the median year built is 1958. Single-family detached houses make up 63.8% of units, and 29.7% are in buildings of two to nine units. In the block group that contains the depot, 49.1% of units are in those small multi-unit buildings and 36.4% predate 1940, though block-group estimates carry wide margins of error.

Two-families and small apartment houses

Near the depot, about half the units are in buildings of two to nine apartments. On a building with separate owners or a landlord and tenants, the exterior is one job but the schedule is not: access to porches, back stairs and each unit's windows has to be arranged ahead. For owner-occupied condos, see condo painting in Abington.

Pre-1940 wood in the older blocks

About a quarter of the tract's homes, and more than a third near the depot, were built before 1940. Clapboard that old can carry many coats, and where the stack has started to crack across the grain, the loose layers need to come off to a sound base before new paint will bond. Our exterior painting page for Abington covers that prep.

Lead-safe rules for pre-1978 paint

The Census counts 76.3% of the tract's units as built before 1980. Its decade bins don't isolate 1978, but any house here built before then may have lead in its original coats. Federal RRP rules apply to paid work that disturbs paint in housing built before 1978, which means containment, controlled scraping and cleanup. Details are on the lead-safe painting page.

Mid-century houses in between

One in five units in the tract went up in the 1950s. Those houses are far younger than the depot-era blocks but still predate the 1978 lead ban, so sanding original trim, doors or window stools inside calls for the same lead-safe care as work on the exterior. See interior painting in Abington.