Prospect Hill Painters — Munroe Street, Walnut Street & Vinal Avenue

According to the National Park Service, troops fortified Prospect Hill with a redoubt after Bunker Hill, and in January 1776 Washington's men hoisted a flag there that most scholars believe was the Grand Union Flag. Civil War regiments drilled and camped on the land in the 1860s. After that the hill was divided into residential lots, and the castle-style monument at the top opened in October 1903. The Grand Union Flag still goes up there every January 1.

The houses that went up on those lots are well documented. Thirteen properties labeled Prospect Hill were added to the National Register together in 1989, on Columbus Avenue, Munroe Street, Walnut Street, Vinal Avenue, Warren Avenue and Prospect Hill Avenue. The James H. Brooks House at 61 Columbus Avenue, built around 1880, is a clapboarded 1½-story Second Empire house with a mansard roof and a three-story tower topped by iron cresting. The A. L. Lovejoy House on Warren Avenue, from the early 1870s, carries a polychrome slate mansard with brackets at the porch, cornice and bay. The Hollander Blocks, at Walnut Street and Pleasant Avenue, are two Queen Anne apartment buildings of 10 and 12 units from the early 1890s.

Census Tract 3513, which contains several of those listed houses, including 61 Columbus Avenue, 30 Warren Avenue and 37 Walnut Street, has 2,229 housing units. Of those, 64.0% were built in 1939 or earlier and 89.0% before 1980. Only 10.3% are single detached houses, while 41.8% are in buildings of five or more units, and owners occupy 24.2% of occupied homes.

Mansard roofs meet painted trim

On Second Empire houses like the Brooks and Lovejoy houses, the painted work wraps around a steep slate or shingle roof: dormer cheeks, cornice moldings and window hoods. Slate should not be walked on, so access to dormers and upper cornices is usually by ladder or staging from below, and that has to be planned before anything is scraped.

Brackets and window hoods

Published descriptions of the Lovejoy House, drawn from its National Register nomination, note brackets at the porch, cornice and front bay plus hoods over the windows. Each of those pieces has joints and top surfaces that catch water. They get checked for soft wood and loose fastenings, and repaired with epoxy or a matched replacement, before the finish coat goes on.

Apartment blocks and renters

With 41.8% of units in five-plus buildings and about three in four households renting, the person deciding on exterior or hallway work may be a landlord or an association rather than a resident owner. Tenant notices, lead-safe rules for rental units and shared-entry scheduling come into play. See condo and multi-unit painting.

Historic review is common on this hill

In a 2014 presentation, the city's preservation commission named Prospect Hill as one of three areas where Local Historic Districts concentrate. For a property in an LHD, visible changes to exterior design or materials go before the commission; same-material maintenance does not. Replacing wood clapboards with vinyl, as an example, is a materials change worth asking about first.