The Highlands Painters — The Highlands, Lowell

The city traces Highlands growth to transit: streetcar lines through the neighborhood were encouraging house building by 1886, and around 1893 the trolley was electrified and pushed west to Pine Street. Wilder Street shows the earlier phase. Charles H. Wilder bought most of that land in the 1860s, lots went to separate buyers in the 1870s and 1880s, and by 1896 every one had a house on it, in Italianate, Second Empire, Stick, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival dress.

Tyler Park shows the later phase. Its 1989 National Register nomination places it "in the Lowell Highlands west of the city center" and describes a planned streetcar suburb of mostly single- and two-family houses, the two-families built either as party-wall doubles or as double-deckers, nearly all of them wood frame and most dating from 1890 to 1924.

Census figures show how much of that older stock is still standing, and also where it isn't. The city's 2011 planning report assigns four census tracts to the Highlands. In Tract 3115, around Pine and Stevens streets, 66.9% of homes were built before 1940 and none are counted as built since 2000; 43.2% are single-family detached and 22.7% sit in two-unit buildings. Tract 3114, which takes in Tyler Park, is different: its median home dates from 1976, and just over half its units are in buildings of 10 to 49 apartments.

So a Highlands project can be a Queen Anne with a wraparound porch, a 1950s house on a side street, or a unit in a 1970s complex. For the house-by-house work, see our exterior painting in Lowell and interior painting in Lowell pages; owners in the newer buildings can start with condo painting in Lowell.

Clapboard first, then everything else

The Tyler Park nomination lists the district's sheathing as "principally clapboard, followed by shingling, stucco, and more recently, aluminum and vinyl siding." Each surface needs its own prep. Clapboard gets scraped, spot-primed and caulked at the laps, while shingles and stucco each call for a primer and finish rated for that material. Where a house was later wrapped in aluminum, the original trim underneath may be buried or gone.

Granite foundations and cut corners

The same nomination calls two details local trademarks repeated throughout the district: high granite foundations and chamfered first-floor corners. Granite should stay unpainted. The angled corner boards and the trim around them are wood, though, and their end grain and joints need to be sealed and primed before the finish coats.

What the Historic Board district pages list

Wilder Street, Tyler Park and the Livingston-Harvard area are Lowell Historic Board review districts. The city's pages say review applies to demolition, new construction and partial demolition, which includes removing architectural details to install siding or taking off porches. None of those pages mention paint. If a job means stripping trim or replacing a porch, call Historic Board staff before work starts.

Lead in the oldest layers

In Tract 3113, around Harvard Street and Livingston Avenue, 87.8% of homes went up before 1980, the year bracket the Census uses closest to the 1978 lead-paint ban. Paid work that disturbs paint in pre-1978 housing falls under the EPA's lead-safe Renovation, Repair and Painting rule. Our lead-safe painting page explains what that involves.