Teele Square Painters — Broadway, Holland Street and Curtis Street

Teele Square sits on Clarendon Hill, about half a mile out Holland Street from Davis Square, where Holland meets Broadway and Curtis Street. Local historian Bob Doherty traces the name to Jonathan W. Teele, who built a travelers' roadhouse at the Broadway–Curtis corner in 1836. The Teele family went on to acquire and build on much of the hill between Professors Row and the Cambridge line, and Jonathan's son Samuel inherited a homestead of more than 82 acres. Doherty writes that the junction grew rapidly from 1867 and that extending Holland Street from Davis Square out to Broadway and Curtis is what created the square. During the Civil War, Camp Cameron on Clarendon Hill trained troops, and later street names honored Army and Navy heroes and battles.

Published architectural detail for the neighborhood is thin. None of the city's National Register listings is tagged Teele Square, and none sits on Holland or Curtis Street, so this page relies on Census counts rather than survey forms. Tract 3507.01, which contains the square, has 1,628 housing units. Of those, 69.5% were built in 1939 or earlier, another 9.8% in the 1940s, and only 1.7% since 2010. Two-unit buildings hold 53.6% of units, three- and four-unit buildings 27.0%, and single-family houses, detached and attached together, about 11.6%. Owners occupy 38.0% of occupied homes.

A two-family tract

A 53.6% share in two-unit buildings is high even by local standards; citywide the figure is 28.2%. In a two-unit building, an exterior project involves two households, whether two condo owners or an owner and a tenant, and both need to know when ladders and staging go up. Shared buildings are covered on our condo painting page.

The 1940s layer

The 9.8% of units dating from the 1940s is a small but distinct group. Houses from that decade may have different trim and wall materials than the pre-1940 stock, so it is worth identifying what you have, whether plaster or early drywall, before choosing primers. Our interior painting page goes into surface prep.

Lead-safe work is the default

With 91.3% of the tract's units built before 1980, most paid paint jobs here will involve housing covered by EPA's certification rule for pre-1978 buildings. That means containment, dust control and verified cleanup, inside and out. Read the details on our lead-safe painting page.