Arlington Slate & Copper Roofing

Arlington reads like a walk through New England building history, one street at a time. East Arlington runs to 1890s Victorians and slate-roofed mansards, and Arlington Heights climbs into Colonials, Capes, and Tudor Revival. The roof a house needs here depends on which of those it is. Art Slate Roofing has worked Arlington for over twenty years, out of our Cambridge shop a few minutes down Massachusetts Avenue. The owner walks every roof, we measure on site, and the same in-house crew installs what we quote. On a house that was built for slate, we will not talk you into asphalt.

What the neighborhood and the era tell us

Arlington grew out from Arlington Center along Massachusetts Avenue, and each stretch carries its own building age. East Arlington, closer to Cambridge, is dense with late-1800s Victorians and mansard-roofed homes that were slate from the start. Arlington Heights, up the western hill, fills in early-to-mid-1900s Colonials, Capes, and Colonial Revival, with Tudor Revival and Shingle-style houses mixed through. Kelwyn Manor is almost entirely period Colonial Revival. The decade a house went up usually decides what belongs back on top of it.

Roofing inside Arlington’s local historic districts

Arlington has seven local historic districts, more than three hundred properties between them: Avon Place, Broadway, Central Street, Jason/Gray, Mount Gilboa/Crescent Hill, Pleasant Street, and Russell. If your house sits inside one, a visible change to the roof goes in front of the town’s Historic District Commission before the first slate comes off. The commission reviews the material, and often the color and trim, so a like-for-like slate or a period-correct replacement clears review far more smoothly than a switch to a different material. We build the samples and drawings the commission wants to see so the meeting does not stall your job. The oldest house in town, the roughly 1740 Jason Russell House near Arlington Center, is a reminder of how far this building stock goes back. If you are not sure whether your street sits inside a district, the Town of Arlington keeps the district boundaries and rules online, or we will check the parcel for you.

For the mansard work that East Arlington is full of, see a mansard slate roof we rebuilt in nearby Davis Square. On the paperwork side, our note on historic roof permits in Boston walks through what review actually asks for.

Ice dams on Arlington’s hills

Arlington runs uphill from the Mystic Lakes to Arlington Heights, and the higher, shadier streets hold snow long after the flats near Alewife have cleared. Attic heat melts it from below, the runoff refreezes at the cold eave, and the dam that builds up backs water under the slate. On older East Arlington mansards and Heights Colonials with original slate and thin attic ventilation, that is the leak we get called about every February. Clearing the ice is the symptom. We fix the ventilation and the eave flashing that let the dam form in the first place. More on that in our guide to preventing ice dams in New England.

Trades we run in Arlington