St. Johns Episcopal Church New Haven Connecticut

A sad, but all too common occurrence when someone with a slate roof seeks to find a qualified craftsman to work on their roof. Many times I get a call to look at a slate roof. When I arrive at the person’s home, I see samples of asphalt slate have been left there. The homeowner has been convinced by some roofing company that they have to have their slate roof removed.

I’ll ask two questions, do you like the way it looks? And, where is leaking? The answer usually is I love the way it looks, but I keep having the same leak repaired. These roofing outfits told me my slate roof is worn out. Then I will say if I can fix the one or two areas that were leaking why would you have the whole roof removed and inferior looking and inferior performing roof installed?

We can proudly say that we at Tarantino roofing and Coppersmith I’ve saved many vintage slate roofs from being thrown in a dumpster. Most times it’s more expensive to save a slate roof, then to install a new asphalt roof, but your saving a roof that would $100,000 or more to install at today’s prices.

One example of us saving a vintage slate roof is St. Johns Episcopal Church on the corner of Humphrey Street and Orange Street in New Haven Connecticut.

It started in 2010 when the church had contracted with a local roofing contractor to install new gutters on the church. The contractor proceeded to remove sections of the slate roof just above the gutter. Many of the slates went into a dumpster after gutters were installed and the contractor told the church they needed a new slate roof. They left the slate roof in a state of disarray.

The slate immediately above the new gutters is left out and never reinstalled. So now this poor church is left with a puzzle of incomplete sections of roof. Plus trying to repair a slate roof from 1880 with new slate.

So in comes Tarantino Roofing and Coppersmith. First task at hand is finding a slate that could match existing black slate roof. Thanks to the vast experience of Tarantino they identified the original slate to be slate from Munson Maine, a quarry that produced slate of superior quality up to the 1930s. We were able to find some munson slate that was salvaged from a building in Massachusetts. As you can see in the photo it’s a perfect match. Then we proceed to repair masonry related links that were plaguing the church for decades.