Why Lake City is differentWhat should owners of Lake City's century homes know before re-roofing?
About one in four Lake City homes was built before 1940, and the city's Heritage Preservation Commission marks 100-year-old houses with bronze Century Home plaques. On a locally designated Heritage Preservation Site, City Code Chapter 153 requires a Commission-reviewed site alteration permit for any exterior change, on top of the regular building permit. Plaque or not, an older Lake City roof should be inspected and documented before anyone picks shingles.
Lake City was platted in 1855 and became a busy Lake Pepin grain market in the 1860s, and the houses from that era are still here. The city's Century Homes list reads like an architecture tour: an 1860 Greek Revival on South Oak Street, 1888 Queen Annes with fishscale shingles in the gables, foursquares with full front porches, and gable-and-ell Homestead houses on North High and North Garden streets. One house on South Lakeshore Drive is listed as one of about two dozen homes brought across the ice on Lake Pepin in the 1860s, when lumber was in short supply.
Those steep, cut-up rooflines are where we slow down. Tall gables, dormers, porch roofs tied into the main roof, old chimneys and decorative trim all mean more flashing, more valleys and more places for hail and wind to do damage that you can't see from Oak Street. We photograph every slope and every piece of trim before tear-off, so the owner, and the Heritage Preservation Commission when a site is designated, can see exactly what's there.
Chapter 153 lists roof style and building materials among the things the Commission weighs, and it treats the application as approved if the Commission hasn't acted within 60 days. It also lets the city approve an emergency repair without waiting for the Commission when the structure or the people inside need protecting. Locally designated sites include the 1872 Stout Cottage at 310 S Oak St, the George R. Patton House, the Hoyt House, Crane Bros. Jewelry on West Center Street and the Lake Pepin Pearl Button Co. building on South Washington Street. If you're not sure whether your property is one of them, the city's Planning and Community Development Department can tell you before any work is scheduled.
