Winter Hill Painters — Broadway, Central Street and the hill above McGrath Highway

Broadway began in the 1630s as Winter Hill Road, and Central, School and Walnut Streets were laid out as rangeways between 1681 and 1685. According to the Winter Hill Neighborhood Plan, adopted in 2016, dairy farms covered the hill through the 1700s and early 1800s. A horse-car line to Charlestown and Boston in 1858 set off house building, gas and water service followed in the 1860s, and electric trolleys started running up Broadway in 1889, the year Langmaid Terrace was built at 359–365 Broadway. McGrath Highway, opened in 1925, cut the hill off from East Somerville.

The plan says over half the land in its 295-acre study area is single-, two- and three-family housing, in styles from large Queen Anne houses built for businessmen to plain workers' cottages on small lots, and that these blocks have gone relatively unchanged apart from renovations and additions. The hill tops out at 128 feet near Glenwood Road and is steeper on its west side.

On the city's National Register list, eleven entries carry the Winter Hill label, with the Downer Rowhouses counted as two. They include the Peter and Oliver Tufts House at 78 Sycamore Street, a clapboarded, gambrel-roofed house whose oldest part dates to about 1714; the clapboarded Adams-Magoun House at 438 Broadway from about 1783; and the Downer Rowhouses, ten Second Empire units built around 1880 at 55 Adams Street and 192–200 Central Street, with steep mansard roofs in patterned slate, brownstone lintels and sills, and full-height polygonal bays. Census Tract 3502.02, which contains the Tufts House and the Central Street rowhouses, has 1,761 units: 61.1% built in 1939 or earlier, 86.0% before 1980, and 8.5% between 2010 and 2019. Its units split among three- and four-unit buildings (31.4%), two-unit buildings (22.7%), five- to nine-unit buildings (15.2%) and single-family houses (21.5%). Owners occupy 54.0% of homes, compared with 34.2% citywide.

Mansards, slate and brownstone

On a Second Empire house like the Downer Rowhouses, with patterned slate on the mansard and brownstone at the lintels and sills, the paintable wood sits right against surfaces that should stay bare. That is why masking and drip control around them matter as much as the coating itself. Our exterior painting page covers trim-heavy facades.

Clapboard from the 1700s onward

The hill's listed houses run from the early 1700s to the 1880s, and the plan's housing ranges from Queen Anne homes to cottages. Old clapboard can carry many generations of paint; where layers are failing, scraping to a sound base comes before any new color, and on pre-1978 houses that scraping follows EPA lead-safe rules. See our lead-safe painting page.

Slopes on the west side

The plan notes the hill is steeper toward the west. On sloping lots, ladders and staging need level, stable footing, which can add setup time to a tall house compared with one on flat ground.

Owners alongside renters

The plan counted 63% renter and 29% owner households across its study area, while Tract 3502.02, around Sycamore and Central Streets, is 54.0% owner-occupied. That mix means one job may be a single owner's house and the next a three-unit building with tenants or a condo association, which changes who signs off on color and scheduling. The condo painting page explains association work.