Roof replacement near the Public Square Historic District in Medina, Ohio

How did the Square come to look the way it does?

Medina was laid out in 1818 in the Connecticut Western Reserve, around a public square in the New England manner. Fire shaped it twice. In 1848 the whole business district burned. In 1870 a second fire, which began in a wooden building that housed a barbershop, took 45 buildings and left only two blocks of the business district standing. Rebuilding took most of a decade, which is why the blocks facing the park share one Victorian style.

The Medina Public Square Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 11, 1975. Locally the district covers about nine blocks around Uptown Park, the green bounded by Court Street, Liberty Street, Broadway and Washington Street. The houses on the streets leading away from it went up in the same years and the generation after.

What makes these roofs different to replace?

Pitch

Late 1800s builders liked a tall roof. Many of these houses carry pitches too steep to stand on, so every square is worked from roof jacks and planks with harness lines. It is slower and it takes more setup than a ranch on the edge of town.

Many small planes

A main gable crossed by a second gable, a dormer or two, a bay with its own little hip, a front porch and a back addition. Each plane meets another in a valley or runs into a wall. That means more flashing per square than any modern house, and flashing is where care counts.

What is under the shingles

Houses of this age were often decked with spaced or solid planks, not sheets. Planks can be sound after a century, or split and gapped. The City of Medina's guidelines require asphalt shingles to be fastened to solidly sheathed decks, so gapped boards get sheathed over or replaced. Some of these roofs also hide an older covering beneath the shingles. Where the existing covering is wood shake or slate, the same guidelines require a tear-off, not another layer on top.

Chimneys

Older houses here have brick chimneys, sometimes two, and many have lost their original flashing to patches of tar. New step and counter flashing is part of a proper reroof. The chimney flashing page shows how that is done.

Old trees

The street trees on these blocks are among the oldest in a city that has been a Tree City USA since 1981. Their shade keeps north slopes damp and mossy, and their leaves pack the short valleys each fall.

Which office approves a roof near Public Square?

Two city bodies can be involved, both run from the offices at 132 North Elmwood Avenue.

The Building Department handles the roof permit, as it does for every address in the city. Applications go through the city's online portal.

The Historic Preservation Board comes in if the property lies inside the Public Square Historic District or is a designated local landmark. Those properties need a Certificate of Appropriateness before work that changes the exterior. A few practical points from the city's own materials:

• The board usually meets on the second Thursday of the month, and applications are due about three weeks before.
• The city's planning and zoning fee schedule, effective September 15, 2026, lists $25 for a residential certificate.
• A certificate lapses if work has not begun within one year of approval.
• The residential design guidelines for roofs say to keep the existing slope and form, and to match materials and profile as closely as possible when replacing.

Board packets from 2023 show roof replacements on South Broadway and South Court going before the board, including a request to move from slate to asphalt. So a roof is squarely the kind of project it looks at. Many houses near the Square are outside the district boundary and are not landmarks. For those, the roof permit is the only city approval. The planning office can tell you which group your address is in.

What will we and will we not do here?

We replace asphalt shingle roofs with asphalt shingles. If your house already has asphalt, that is a like-for-like job and usually the simplest case for any review. If your house has slate and the answer from the city is that slate should stay, we are not your roofer and we will say so at the inspection. We also do not rebuild built-in cornice gutters.

What we can always do is the first step: a free roof inspection with photos of every plane, the chimney flashing, and the layers at the roof edge. Those photos are useful to you, to a specialist, and to the city if an application is needed.

How should you time a roof near the Square?

Allow for the review before picking a date. An inspection in winter, an application in late winter and an install in spring is a comfortable order. The written quote is good for a year, so waiting on a board meeting does not change the price. The post on reroofing near Medina Square works through the sequence, and the main Medina roof replacement page lists what every job includes.