Prospect Heights Painters — Prospect Heights, Prospect Street & Water Street

The Draper Corporation of Hopedale built Prospect Heights as housing for its employees, about a mile northwest of the town center between Prospect Street and Water Street. The Boston firm Peabody and Stearns designed the buildings in versions of the Colonial Revival style, with Queen Anne, Tudor Revival, Dutch Colonial and Craftsman touches. The 1990 National Register nomination counts 37 contributing buildings and 104 housing units in all, on roughly ten acres.

MHC's 1983 town survey called it an innovative worker suburb, built between 1903 and 1913, and pointed out that its brick multifamily buildings of four to six units, set around a cul-de-sac, broke from the wooden duplexes Draper had favored in Hopedale. The state inventory lists 39 buildings inside the district boundary, 36 of them multi-family. Their style tags run to Colonial Revival (19), Craftsman (11) and row house (9), with English Revival on four of the brick rows.

Two building types sit side by side. The wood-frame duplexes were first sided in wood shingle; according to the nomination, Draper covered every wood-frame building in asbestos shingle in the early 1950s to cut repair and painting costs, and later owners painted it, mostly white, gray, green or brown. The brick rows rest on granite foundations with granite window sills and carry the Draper diamond logo in blue and yellow cast brick in a gable. Census Tract 7444, which includes the district, reports 38.2% of its 1,593 units built before 1940 and 48.0% of occupied homes rented.

Asbestos-cement shingle siding

As of the 1990 nomination, most of the frame duplexes wore the 1950s asbestos shingle. That siding should never be sanded, ground or power-scraped. The EPA's advice is to leave asbestos material that is in good condition alone and not to saw, sand, scrape or drill it. Intact shingle can be gently washed, spot-primed and coated; cracked or broken pieces are a job for a licensed asbestos contractor.

Painted versus unpainted brick

Before choosing a product for a brick row, find out whether that brick has ever been coated. Brick that already carries paint needs sound mortar and a breathable masonry coating; brick that never had any is best left bare. The blue-and-yellow Draper diamond and the granite sills are features to mask and protect, not paint over.

Gable trim and half-timbering

The nomination records bargeboard and stick trim surviving in gables, dormers and door hoods, with half-timbering on brick-row dormers and on some duplex cross gables. These thin, projecting pieces take the most weather, need the closest prep, and are where an accent color against shingle or brick reads most clearly. Some bargeboard had already been replaced by 1990, so check whether a piece is original before matching its profile.

Shared walls and pre-1940 paint

In a duplex or brick row, one unit meets the next at a shared wall, so trim colors and scaffold placement are worth agreeing on early. Every original building predates 1978; plan on testing and lead-safe methods for windows, porches and trim.