First Congregational Church
Exposed to the harsh New England weather, located just a hundred yards from Rockport’s Back Harbor, the church was in need of restoration.
The challenge for the First Congregational Church.
Built in 1805, the First Congregational Church is a classic New England Greek Revival that sits overlooking beautiful Rockport Harbor. In 2010, Alpine successfully performed a Lead-Safe OSHA and EPA compliant exterior paint job on the main church, and in 2013 the church enlisted Alpine’s help again when they were ready to restore the 16 foot tall sanctuary windows dated from the mid-19th Century.
Alpine erected scaffolding so that the building could be enveloped in plastic while the delicate work of scraping the lead paint was underway.
How Alpine shaped the solution.
Using lead-safe work practices, Alpine removed the window sashes and stripped them to bare wood off site. Due to the age and size of the sashes, a significant amount of epoxy repairs were needed for both the window frames and sashes to preserve the window systems. Some of the original glass had broken over the years, but Alpine was able to locate restoration glass that matched the bubbles and distortions of the original glass, and the repair work was unnoticeable. Alpine then painted the windows and re-hung them on new copper chains with reproduction brass weather-stripping for a usable, historically accurate final product.
client
First Congregational Church of Rockport
project type
Lead Paint Abatement and Historic Restoration
location
Rockport, MA
