Plumbers in Hyde Park

Mid-century houses and Fairmount Hill Victorians

Hyde Park's homes are younger than most of Boston's. Census estimates for ZIP 02136 show only a third (33%) of its roughly 14,170 homes built in 1939 or earlier, against 47% city-wide, but 27% went up between 1940 and 1959, the largest mid-century share of the Boston neighborhoods covered on this site. The median year built is 1954. The older layer survives on Fairmount Hill, in Italianate, Gothic Revival and Victorian houses from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Most buildings are small. Detached single-family houses account for 36% of homes and attached ones 13%, with two-families at 15% and three- and four-unit buildings at 16%. Just over half (53%) are owner-occupied, and gas heats about two-thirds of homes, with roughly 10% on oil.

A house built in the 1940s or 1950s is now 65 to 85 years old. Its first water heater is long gone, but the drain lines, shutoff valves and buried service pipe may well be original. BWSC says exterior connections made before 1950 may contain lead, which puts the 1940s houses and everything older in the range worth checking. Eligible owners can have the private side of a lead service replaced free; our lead pipes guide explains how to check.

Living beside the Neponset and Mother Brook

Mother Brook is part of a flood-control system that carries Charles River water into the Neponset, and the two have flooded Hyde Park before. In 1955, water from the brook and the river broke through embankments in Hyde Park and 150 residents were evacuated. In March 1958, crews placed 1,200 sandbags where the Neponset meets Mother Brook. Stony Brook also starts in Hyde Park, at Turtle Pond in Stony Brook Reservation, and goes underground into a conduit near Enneking Parkway and Gordon Avenue.

In its 2016 Climate Ready Boston study, the city found no coastal flood exposure in Hyde Park and projected about 170 acres of stormwater flooding, 5% of the neighborhood, in a 10-year, 24-hour storm by the 2030s to 2050s, a smaller share than Boston's 7%. Those figures measure stormwater, though. The floods of 1955 and 1958 are a reminder that homes near the Neponset and Mother Brook face a separate river risk.

Keeping the boiler and water heater above the water

Most of BWSC's flood advice for homeowners is plumbing work. It recommends a backwater valve for fixtures below the top of the sewer manhole cover that serves the building, a floating plug in basement floor drains, and setting heating and hot-water equipment on a masonry base at least 12 inches above flood level. The owner pays for and maintains the backwater valve, and BWSC suggests getting three written estimates from licensed plumbers.

The best time to raise a boiler or water heater is when it is being replaced anyway. In Boston that replacement takes a plumbing permit even if nothing else in the house changes, and the application has to come from a contractor with a valid Massachusetts trade license. Our water heater repair page covers when a repair still makes sense.