Historical Commission to weigh Puritan teardown and Eulow roof raise

← All news · August 11, 2026

On Aug. 13, the Historical Commission is scheduled to decide whether to impose demolition delays on a full teardown at 39 Puritan Road and a roof-ridge raise at 11 Eulow Street. The town's 2004 demolition-delay bylaw applies to buildings 75 years or older, and to any part of one, but it can only delay a wrecking permit for up to nine months.

The Swampscott Historical Commission is scheduled Thursday to decide whether to delay the demolition of a two-family house at 39 Puritan Road, a case that would remove two housing units from one of the town’s oldest oceanfront streets.

The same 30-minute special meeting also includes 11 Eulow Street, where the owners of a 1905 single-family house want to raise the roof ridge to add attic living space. The two projects are different in scale, but they reach the commission under the same bylaw: Swampscott’s demolition-delay rule for buildings 75 years or older, and for any part of one.

The commission has no power to save a building. Under Article IX, Section 4 of the general bylaws, “The Preservation of Historically Significant Buildings,” which Town Meeting adopted in 2004, it can delay demolition for up to nine months while alternatives are explored. When the delay expires, the building inspector can issue the wrecking permit. There is no veto.

The meeting is posted for 6 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13, in the first-floor conference room of the Elihu Thomson Administration Building at 22 Monument Avenue. It is a special session called to finish business the commission’s regular Aug. 6 meeting began, which held public hearings on both properties but did not record final votes in the posted materials. The town has not posted minutes for Aug. 6, so the reason for the delay is not on the record. Vice Chair Jonathan Leamon leads both determinations Thursday; Chair Nancy Schultz opens the meeting. After the two houses, the agenda lists only housekeeping: notecards, a framed replica, and a membership vote.

39 Puritan Road would lose two units

The larger civic question Thursday is 39 Puritan Road, a two-family house built in 1885 on the town’s oceanfront.

The parcel is assessed at $976,700 for the coming fiscal year. Of that, $734,400 is the land and $242,300 is the building. The land is worth about three times the 141-year-old house on it — the standard economic signature of a teardown, and the condition the demolition-delay bylaw is asked to slow.

The property is also two-family housing. Tearing it down removes two units unless and until a replacement project restores them. The record does not show what, if anything, would replace the house, or who is behind the demolition. The assessor lists W. Kevin Condon as owner.

That housing loss comes as Swampscott has spent the years since 2022 trying to add housing through the Glover 40R overlay, the state’s MBTA Communities mandate, and accessory-dwelling-unit rules. The demolition-delay bylaw sits outside those policies. It counts years, not units.

11 Eulow Street hinges on a roof raise

The 11 Eulow Street case is not a full teardown. Michael and Julie Callum, the owners of record, want to raise the roof ridge of a 1905 single-family house in the A1 district to create about 902 square feet of attic living space. That is roughly 200 square feet more than the 702 the half-story rule allows as of right, and would create a third story where two and a half are permitted.

The building accounts for $932,500 of the parcel’s $1,408,600 assessed value. The project reaches the Historical Commission because the bylaw defines demolition to include “any part thereof,” making the roof work a partial demolition.

The project has already moved through other boards. On May 11, the Planning Board approved a site-plan special permit unanimously. The motion came from Vice Chair Angela Ippolito and was seconded by Ariane Purdy. The approval was conditioned on zoning relief and Historical Commission review, which the board said the building’s age triggered.

The Zoning Board of Appeals, chaired by Heather Roman, took up the petition May 26 and found it had no special-permit path to third-story dimensional relief. Only a variance would do, the board said, and it described that as an extraordinarily hard burden to meet. That account comes from a caption-derived record; the ZBA posted no official minutes. By a later account, the petitioner then withdrew the zoning appeal rather than seek a variance, apparently pursuing an as-of-right route instead.

That leaves the Historical Commission as the last discretionary board still holding the project. The petitioner throughout has been Jeff Tucker, an architect, not the owner of record. His exact relationship to the Callums is not clear from the record.

Bylaw applies same delay to different projects

The town’s Historical Commission FAQ says demolition review starts when someone seeks to demolish a building 75 years or older. The building inspector notifies the commission. The commission then decides whether the building is historically significant, including whether it is listed on or near the National Register, included in the town’s 1986 historical survey, or tied to important people or events. If so, the commission decides whether it is “preferably preserved.” A yes vote starts a delay of up to nine months.

The town’s summary is explicit that the bylaw cannot stop a demolition for good. The stronger penalties, including a fine of up to 10 percent of a property’s value and a two-year bar on building permits, apply to someone who demolishes a building without a permit, not to an owner who waits out the delay.

That makes the same tool apply to projects with different housing effects. A teardown at 39 Puritan Road would erase two homes. A roof raise at 11 Eulow Street would enlarge one. At 45 Pleasant Street, another two-family reached the commission in June; the plan now moving through the Planning and Zoning boards would replace it with five units, a net gain of housing. The town’s filings split on the wording there: the Planning Board petition calls it a demolition of the two-family, while the Zoning Board petition calls it a “partial demolition.” Demolition delay can slow each case for the same nine months.

Commission is rewriting the rule

The commission is also rewriting the bylaw it is using. A revised demolition-delay bylaw has been drafted for a Town Meeting warrant since at least April, and agendas in June and August carried discussions of updated bylaws.

On April 9, Secretary Brad Graham moved to cut proposed language that would have let the commission photograph and salvage parts of a building being torn down. There was no legal basis for it, he said. A majority preferred softer language saying the commission could request access instead.

Whatever the commission decides Thursday may be hard to reconstruct later. The Historical Commission has never appeared on the town’s video record, and it has posted minutes for only half its recent meetings. A decision that can hold a century-old house for up to nine months may leave, for now, little more than a line on an agenda.

Addendum (2026-08-11): the enacted bylaw has been recovered, and it is stronger than the summary

This piece described the demolition-delay bylaw from the town’s Historical Commission FAQ, a staff summary, because the enacted text was blocked — ecode360 sits behind a Cloudflare challenge and the bylaws page this beat had been using exposes no document. The full text has now been obtained from the town’s own General By-Laws, published as a Word file at swampscottma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/342, and is cached at data/legal/swampscott-demolition-delay-bylaw.md. The citation holds — Article IX, “Uses of Land,” Section 4. Five things change.

The nine-month delay freezes the replacement project, not just the demolition. This article said the commission “has no power to save a building” and that when the delay expires the wrecking permit issues. Both are true. But the summary left out the sentence that gives the bylaw its actual leverage: “Upon a determination by the Commission that any building which is the subject of an application is a preferably preserved building, no building permit for new construction or alterations on the premises shall be issued for a period of nine (9) months from the date of the determination.” An owner who waits out the delay is not merely waiting to knock a house down. They are waiting to start building anything at all.

Nothing comes down until the replacement is fully permitted and every appeal is over. The bylaw’s sharpest provision does not appear in the FAQ in any form: “No permit for demolition of a building determined to be a preferably preserved building shall be granted until all approvals necessary for the issuance of a building permit are obtained; including without limitation any necessary zoning variances or special permits, and all appeals from the granting of such approvals must be concluded.” It is an anti-vacant-lot rule. For a teardown that needs zoning relief — the ordinary case at 39 Puritan Road, where three-quarters of the assessed value is land — nine months is the floor, not the ceiling. The binding constraint is how long the Zoning Board and any appeal take.

Against that, the commission holds a release valve. The building inspector may issue inside the nine months “if the Commission notifies the Building Inspector in writing that the Commission finds that the intent and purpose of this bylaw is served even with the issuance.” The delay is the commission’s to shorten. That makes a preferably-preserved vote less a sentence than an opening position.

The bylaw’s own clock is the likeliest reason Thursday’s meeting exists. This article reported that the commission held both public hearings Aug. 6, did not record final votes, and posted a special meeting one week later, and that the record does not say why. The enacted text supplies a strong candidate: “Within ten (10) days of the close of the public hearing the Commission shall file a written final determination with the Town Clerk” — and if it does not notify the building inspector in writing within those ten days, “the Building Inspector may issue the demolition permit.” Aug. 13 is the seventh day after Aug. 6. The commission’s next regular meeting would fall in September, long past the deadline, and missing it would hand both applicants their permits by default. The agenda for Thursday lists final determinations only, not continued hearings, which is consistent with the hearings having closed Aug. 6 and started the clock. Every deadline in this bylaw runs against the commission, and silence is a yes to demolition.

The roof clause is written into the bylaw by name. This article said the 11 Eulow Street roof raise reaches the commission because demolition is defined to include “any part thereof.” That is right but understates it. The definition continues: demolition “shall also include significantly altering the shape of the roof, or removal of significantly integral components of the building or structure such as a turret.” A roof-ridge raise is the enumerated case, not an aggressive reading of a catch-all.

Two smaller corrections. On age, the bylaw makes the assessor’s database the subordinate source: the inspector of buildings uses the assessor’s records “and/or MACRIS,” and “in instances where there is a discrepancy … MACRIS shall prevail.” The 1885 and 1905 build years in this article come from assessor cards. And on the records posture, the town’s agenda page shows the commission has posted minutes for two of its seven posted 2026 meetings, not half.

Addendum (2026-08-11): no initial determination for 11 Eulow Street appears in the posted record

The bylaw runs demolition review in a fixed order. The building inspector notifies the commission; the commission makes a written initial determination of whether the building is significant and files it with the town clerk; a public hearing follows within 45 days of that filing; a final determination follows within ten days of the hearing’s close.

For 39 Puritan Road that sequence is visible on the town’s own agendas: initial determination July 8, public hearing Aug. 6, final determination scheduled Aug. 13. For 5 Huron Street it is visible too — initial determination April 9, found significant unanimously. For 45 Pleasant Street, initial determination June 11.

For 11 Eulow Street there is nothing. The town has posted seven Historical Commission agendas in 2026 — Feb. 5, April 9, May 7, June 11, July 8, Aug. 6 and Aug. 13 — and none of them carries an initial determination for 11 Eulow. The property first appears in the commission’s posted record on Aug. 6, already at the public-hearing stage. There is no posted March meeting for it to have happened at, and a February determination would sit far outside the bylaw’s 45-day hearing window.

That is a gap in the posted record, and it is not the same thing as a defect in the process. The determination may have been made and filed with the town clerk without appearing as its own agenda line, and a filing with the clerk is not something the agenda page would show. But it cannot be verified from what the town publishes, and the commission has not posted minutes for any meeting since April 9. A resident trying to check that the nine-month clock on their neighbor’s roof was started lawfully has no way to do it. HUMAN-REVIEW: the town clerk’s demolition-review file is the resolving document.

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