Roofing in Cambridge. Slate, copper, historic.

Cambridge packs three centuries of building into four square miles, and the roof a house needs here depends on which decade it went up and which block it sits on. Art Slate Roofing has worked Cambridge for over twenty years. 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 block and the era tell us

Cambridge grew outward from the colonial village around Harvard Square, so the housing gets younger the farther you get from the river and the older squares. Brattle Street and Old Cambridge run to Georgian and Federal mansions. Avon Hill and Mid-Cambridge are dense with Victorians. Cambridgeport fills in with mansard cottages and workers’ housing. East Cambridge and Kendall carry flatter industrial and modern roofs. The build date usually decides what belongs back on top.

Roofing under the Cambridge Historical Commission

Cambridge protects its roofs more tightly than almost any town around Boston. Two neighborhoods are local historic districts, Old Cambridge and Fort Washington, and four more are neighborhood conservation districts: Avon Hill, Half Crown-Marsh, Harvard Square, and Mid Cambridge. Inside any of them, a visible change to the roof goes in front of the Cambridge Historical Commission before work starts. On top of that, the city runs a demolition review on every building more than 50 years old, which is most of Cambridge. A same-material re-roof usually clears without a hearing, but a mansard tear-off or a roofline change can pull the job into review. We have taken roofs through that process, and we build the material samples and drawings the commission wants so the hearing does not stall your job. If you are not sure whether your street is covered, the Cambridge Historical Commission publishes the district boundaries and rules online, or we will check the parcel for you.

For the paperwork side, our note on historic roof permits in Boston walks through what this kind of review actually asks for. When the job is a full period-correct replacement, we cover it on our historic roof replacement in Cambridge page.

Ice dams on Cambridge’s shaded, tight-packed blocks

Cambridge is a dense, tree-lined city, and both work against its roofs in winter. Houses sit close together on narrow lots, so snow that lands on a shaded north slope has nowhere to shed and no sun to melt it cleanly. Attic heat melts it from below instead, the runoff refreezes at the cold eave, and the dam that builds up forces water back under the slate. The mansard roofs take the worst of it, because the near-flat upper deck holds snow like a tray. Clearing the ice is the symptom. We fix the ventilation and the eave flashing that let the dam form. More on that in our guide to preventing ice dams in New England, and if a leak or a slide is already active, our emergency roof repair in Cambridge crew is on call.

Trades we run in Cambridge