Anchorage Apartments Location: Charlestown, MA

Project Overview:

Challenges:
The Charlestown Navy Yard is home to many historic facilities that were once used as factories and manufacturing facilities to support Boston’s nautical heritage in a bygone era. Many of these massive buildings have been converted to apartments and condominiums over the years, as part of redevelopment efforts.

The Anchorage Apartments is an extremely long building at 460-ft., and required a substantial amount of staging just to access the roof and cornice area. The building had been experiencing recurring roof leakage and the owner wanted to resolve it as well as address concerns at the cornice area where sections of the ornate copper work had become displaced and in some locations were missing.

Alpha Weatherproofing Solutions for this
Historic Restoration of the Roof and Gutter System

• The owner retained the services of Wessling Architects to develop bid documents for the project, and solicited bids from a select group of contractors. Alpha Weatherproofing was awarded the project in late summer 2012.
• Part of the project included cleaning and coating the metal roof and gutters with a reinforced waterproofing system, to provide another 20+ years of service for the roof and gutter system.
• After the building was staged, Wessling Architects and Alpha inspected the copper cornices to determine deficiencies. This inspection revealed that over the years, the copper gutter had leaked quite extensively into the framing structure that supports the cornice framing, causing extensive damage to the steel framing members.
• It was determined that all of the ornate copper cornice would be removed and salvaged for re-installation to preserve the historic fabricate of the building.
• After removing the copper cornice and cutting out the deteriorated steel support framing, Alpha installed new support framing for the cornice to be reinstalled to, and new shelf support for the copper gutter trough that sat on this system.
• The missing or damaged copper was replicated with new red copper to match the historic design of the building.