Watertown Slate & Copper Roofing
Slate and copper roofing across Watertown, from East End three-deckers to Watertown Square Italianates. Restoration since 2005.
Watertown packs a lot of building history into four square miles, from the three-deckers of the East End to the Italianate and Victorian houses around Watertown Square. The roof a house needs here depends on which of those it is. Art Slate Roofing has worked Watertown for over twenty years, a short run down Mount Auburn Street from our Cambridge shop. 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 push asphalt.
What the neighborhood and the era tell us
Watertown grew along the Charles River and out Mount Auburn Street, and its housing ages block by block. East Watertown and the East End are dense with three-deckers, duplexes, and old Victorians cut into apartments, most of them standing before 1940. Around Watertown Square the stock runs to Italianate and Victorian houses from the late 1800s. Coolidge Square, the heart of the Armenian neighborhood along Mount Auburn Street, mixes former grand Victorians with three-deckers built shoulder to shoulder. Each era asks for a different roof.
Roofing near Watertown’s Mount Auburn Street district
Watertown’s oldest and most closely reviewed stretch runs along Mount Auburn Street. The town authorized the Mount Auburn Street Historic District in 2002, covering properties along the corridor from Summer Street to Lincoln Street, and Watertown’s Historic District Commission reviews visible exterior changes there before work starts. That district borders Mount Auburn Cemetery, the 1831 garden cemetery that was the first of its kind in the country and still holds some of the finest stonework and roofs in the area. A short walk off the corridor sits the Edmund Fowle House on Marshall Street, built in 1772 and the second-oldest house in town, which served as the seat of the Massachusetts government in the first year of the Revolution. On houses like these, a like-for-like slate roof clears review far more smoothly than a switch to another material, and we build the samples and drawings the commission wants to see. If you are not sure whether your property falls inside the district, the Town of Watertown publishes the commission’s boundaries and rules, or we will check the parcel for you.
For the copper detail these older roofs depend on, see our slate and copper gutter work in nearby Back Bay. For the review side, our note on historic roof permits in Boston covers what to expect.
- 2005 Family-run since
- 4.9★ 23 Google reviews
- 75–150 yr Slate roof lifespan
- In-house Crew — never subcontracted
Licensed & Insured · MA Construction Supervisor · MHIC Registered
Ice dams along the Charles
Watertown sits low and damp along the Charles River, and the heavy wet snow loads are hard on older roofs. Snow holds on shaded north slopes, attic heat melts it from below, and the runoff refreezes at the cold eave until it backs up under the slate. On the East End’s older Victorians and three-deckers, with original slate and undersized attic ventilation, that is the leak we get called about every winter. Chipping the ice off 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.