Billed in promotional tourist literature as "Historic Waltham," cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America and home to the annual "Historic Waltham Days" festival each September, the city has a gaping hole in the protection of one of its most visible resources: historic homes.
Unlike many other area communities, Waltham has no laws on the books to protect architecturally or historically significant homes. It is one of only a handful of towns in the Boston area without a demolition delay law, which aims to give local authorities time to find alternatives to tearing down a historic property.
Many of the hundreds of Waltham houses identified as worthy of preservation by the Massachusetts Historical Commission two decades ago are already gone. The city has more than a dozen nationally recognized historic districts - including clusters of early 19th-century housing for factory workers on Lawton Place and a stretch of stately Victorians on Lyman Street - but few of them are marked with identifying signs.
Although such painstakingly preserved mansions as the Lyman Estate (built in 1793), Robert Treat Paine House (built in 1883-1886), and Gore Place (built in 1806) are among the city's better-known tourist attractions, there are many other houses that are also important markers on Waltham's timeline, and they are largely unprotected.
Morton Isaacson, a Waltham resident who created a self-guided tour booklet on North Waltham's historic houses for the Waltham Historical Society, said more needs to be done to identify notable houses and make sure they are embraced as part of the city's heritage.
"Not only is there nothing on the books," said Isaacson, the Community Master Plan that was passed by City Council earlier this year "has virtually nothing on historical preservation in it. There's no thought about what might be historically significant or not."
An engineering professor at Boston University by day, Isaacson has spent nights, weekends, and days off trying to find out what happened to the houses listed in state Historical Commission surveys done in the 1970s and 1980s. Many no longer exist. Others have been altered so extensively over the years that little remains of their original architecture. Some of those that have survived more or less intact are unknown to the general public.
A Clark Street house, built around 1825, was once home to Dr. James Jackson, who cofounded Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and an early proponent of vaccination against smallpox. He sold the house to Francis Cabot Lowell II, son of the man who started Waltham's Boston Manufacturing Co. and a lifelong friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. But its early life as a grand country estate is imperceptible from the outside. Now a multifamily residence surrounded by postwar bungalows, its exterior is covered in gray tar shingles and the woodwork is all but invisible. A trained eye might notice the Federal-style brick chimney that thrusts up from the center of the roof.
River Street is still home to a number of residences built for Boston Manufacturing Co. employees. Housing was integral to the "Waltham system" of industry, which was copied all over the country. It originally required a workforce of young, single women living in boardinghouses run by the company. As the need for labor grew, the company began building housing suitable for families. The two brick, mansard-roofed duplexes near Willow Street are later examples, built around 1870. According to the state commission's surveys, they're notable for being the only company housing made of masonry instead of wood, and were probably built for people at the upper reaches of Boston Manufacturing's management.
Arthur "Archie" Bennett, a preservation consultant who serves on the Waltham Historical Commission, said that he has watched dozens of homes disappear from the local landscape. Among the most heartbreaking, he said, was an elaborate Queen Anne-style house at 50 Weston St., once the residence of Nathan Warren. A prominent Waltham politician in his day, Warren was one of the orators at the memorial service for assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.
According to a 1986 survey done for the state Historical Commission, the house "ranks among the finest examples of the Queen Anne style in Waltham." The report notes its colorful stained-glass windows, tongue-and-groove woodwork on the veranda and porte cochere, corner tower, two-story bay, and Tuscan columns.
Standing in its place now are 12 townhouse condominiums, constructed last year. The house was gone in a matter of weeks, before local preservationists had a chance to research it or discuss with the owner alternatives to tearing it down.
Wayne McCarthy, copresident of the Waltham Historical Society, was able to do a walk-through and take some photos of the interior shortly before the house was demolished in the summer of 2006. He entered expecting it to be heavily damaged by students and other tenants who had lived there over the years. But what he saw stunned him.
"I was absolutely aghast at how great a shape that house was in. The walls were solid; there wasn't any broken plaster; the woodwork was amazing," said McCarthy. "In hindsight, I'm convinced it should have been restored . . . It was a beautiful home."
Now all that remains of it is an antique weathervane, which once topped the carriage house, that the developer gave to the Historical Society. McCarthy believes the house could have been saved if the city had a demolition delay law.
"Maybe we would have had time to work with the developer to make sure he didn't lose money, and that we didn't lose that house," he said.
Councilors discussed a demolition delay law in 2003, but the proposal spent the next four years tabled in committee. Recently revived, the proposed bylaw is scheduled to be discussed during the Dec. 17 meeting of the City Council's Ordinance and Rules Committee.
The proposal would provide for a six-month delay in the issuance of a demolition permit, for a building 75 years old or older, if the Waltham Historical Commission determines that the building is "in the public interest to be preserved rather than demolished."
Ward 2 Councilor Edmund P. Tarallo, who originally proposed the ordinance, said he did so at a time when the housing market was soaring and teardowns of all sorts of properties - historic or not - were rampant. Realizing that Waltham was alone among such peers as Newton, Watertown, Weston, Lexington, and Lincoln in not having such a law, and having seen its success in other communities, Tarallo felt something needed to be done.
The mothballing of the proposal may have had something to do with fears that it would impinge on property rights, he said. He thinks that with a cooling housing market making teardowns less profitable, councilors might be more amenable to the idea of a stay of execution for a house with historical value.
"You don't want to wake up the next day and it's not there," said Tarallo, who also chairs the ordinance committee. "There's nothing to give anybody pause to think for a moment about it. It could be here one day and gone the next."
Stephanie V. Siek can be reached via e-mail at ssiek@globe.com.
