Prospect Hill Painters — The Highlands, Bacon Street to the park

Much of Prospect Hill is a city park: land first acquired in 1893, home to ski slopes from 1949 to 1987, with its main entrance on Totten Pond Road. The 485-foot figure is the summit, not the house lots. The Waltham Historical Society's survey calls the residential area on the hill's east side the Highlands, bounded by Bacon Street on the east, the park on the west and the old Massachusetts Central Railroad right of way to the south.

The survey says the land was woodlots, farms and peat bogs until the mid-1800s, when Bacon Street was straightened and improved. Four purchases opened it up: Oel Farnsworth's 60-acre woodlot in 1847 around Dale Street, Ebenezer Plympton's ten acres in 1851, Frederick Lawrence's land of 1855, and William Guinan's in 1873. After Lawrence died in the 1880s, his heirs developed that land as a planned suburb, the Lawrence Estates, which took in Lawrence, Leonard and Summit Streets and the northern part of Irving Street. The survey describes the result as a residential area for the rising middle class and skilled workers.

The census has no Highlands or Prospect Hill unit, so the closest proxy is Census Tract 3682, where addresses on Prospect Hill Road, Jennings Road and Hawthorne Road geocode. It is not a boundary: 50 Hammond Street, for one, falls in a neighboring tract, and the figures below describe the whole tract. Tract 3682 has 1,666 housing units with a median year built of 1957. Of those, 31.0% predate 1940 and 23.4% date from the 1950s. Single-family detached houses account for 60.1%, two- to four-unit buildings 21.6%, and 68.8% of occupied homes are owner-occupied.

Victorian-era lots next to postwar ones

With the tract split between pre-1940 houses and 1950s construction, an owner may be looking at a nineteenth-century house while the neighbors a few blocks over have a postwar one. Expect the older house to need more checking for trim, coat buildup and wood repair; the newer one may still predate 1978.

Two- to four-unit houses

About one home in five in the tract is in a two- to four-unit building. Where those units are condos, exterior colors and timing are a joint decision, and common hallways may be part of the job.

Lead in the older coats

Of the tract's units, 72.0% were built in 1979 or earlier. For the nineteenth-century houses the survey covers, lead in the first coats should be assumed, and prep is planned around containment before any scraping starts.