LEGACY a in STONE
We built a roof, and connections, with recycled slate
When a neighbor asked me why I put a recycled slate roof on my house, I replied, “Because I got a good deal on it.” That’s the cheap and easy answer.
In truth, I made the choice because I’m a sucker for historical and personal connections. The slate came from the roof of what was once known as the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children in Leet. In 1952, when polio was one of the most feared diseases in the U.S., Jonas Salk first tested his polio vaccine at Watson. The vaccine eventually led to the elimination of the disease.
That’s the historical connection. The personal connection is this: My wife, Brenda, worked for years as an occupational therapist at Watson.
Now, after a lot of backbreaking work (mostly by roofer David Danylo), the slate that protected the children at Watson tops a house that has, for more than a century, provided shelter for a handful of families, including mine. I figured this old house deserved a stone roof similar to the one it had in its younger days.
Our house in Emsworth is a typical Pittsburgh Foursquare — a 2½-story, yellow brick cube with a wide front porch. Dormers jut from the roof. When we bought the place for $104,500 in 1997, we were charmed by its faux-grained woodwork, pocket doors that rumble when opened and the stained-glass window, warped by age, in the landing.
Buying this house must have represented a significant investment for the original owners. Census records reveal that breadwinners in Emsworth in the early decades of the 1900s worked as laborers, streetcar conductors, clerks and salesmen. The interior woodwork indicates the builders were mindful of their money. It has no pricey hardwoods or carved spindles. The balusters are square and plain, the floors soft pine, easily scarred.
Previous owners made few
renovations, leaving the house largely intact, so it’s possible to sit in the living room and imagine the house in, say, 1910. Perhaps it still smelled of new wood when its first occupants, Jeremiah and Anna Toomey, celebrated the landmarks in their daughter Mary’s life — first steps, first words. I can imagine the laughter and joy, just as I can imagine Anna and Mary’s grief and confusion when, in the cold winter of 1915, Jeremiah died of pneumonia two days after Christmas.
After his death, Anna and Mary stayed in the house for at least five more years, according to census records. By 1930, the house had new occupants — Nicholas and Stella Puhl, their seven children and Stella’s mother. The Puhl clan miraculously survived with only one full bath. I wonder about meals in the dining room. Were they raucous? Quiet and respectful? What did they talk about? The family occupied the house for more than six decades.
Over the years, Brenda and I have found pieces of its past tucked away in basement corners — spindles from the original front porch, dusty light fixtures, remnants of knob-and-tube wiring. While digging a garden in the backyard, we found several pieces of broken slate, evidence of the original roof. At some point, the slate was replaced with the asphalt shingles that were there when we bought the house.
A few years ago, we discovered water damage on the second floor from a leak in the roof. I called Danylo, a roofer and a friend who lives in nearby Kilbuck. He patched things up but said the roof would continue to fail — it was beyond its age limit. We’d need a replacement in a few years. I told him I’d love to install a slate roof but couldn’t afford it. Then I forgot about the roof until March 2020, when he called me with a surprise.
“If you want slate, you can get it for free,” he said. “It’s recycled slate. You’ll have to help me pull it off the roof it’s on now. Are you up for it?”
Once he told me the slate was coming from Watson, I was all in.
Recycled slate?
Is it wise to roof your house with recycled slate? At the time, I didn’t think much about it. I was too thrilled with the idea of using the Watson slate. I was trusting Danylo. He’s been climbing on roofs since he was a teenager working for his father, who owned a roofing company in Woods Run. Now 64, he works almost exclusively with recycled slate, as well as tile and metal materials. He likes finding new uses for discarded items.
“I got into reclaimed slate because I hated the idea of wasting it,” he said. “We’re in an age where everybody’s talking about disposal, waste, climate change. What does it take to make a bundle of shingles? How much in the way of resources are going into that?”
He first used reclaimed slate more than 25 years ago, when he salvaged it from a home in Ambridge and laid it on the roof of one in Ben Avon, where it remains today.
Slate is an incredibly durable material that can last hundreds of years, so it makes sense to recycle it, said Joe Jenkins, author of “The Slate Roof Bible,” a nearly 400-page guide that delves into the details of stone roofs. He’s worked with slate for decades and runs a Grove City training center to teach others how to do it.
“If you’re going to salvage slate, the No. 1 criteria for success is to ask: What kind of slate is it? If you get the right slate, then you’re off to a good start,” he said.
Homeowners considering a recycled slate roof should do plenty of research, he said. Jenkins suggested the website of the Slate Roofers Contracting Association (www.slateroofers.org), which includes guidelines for installation, maintenance and repair of slate roofs.
Some roofs in Western Pennsylvania were made with black, peach bottom or cathedral gray slate. These are excellent candidates for reuse. “I can show you 100year-old black slate roofs that look new.”
The Watson roof was Vermont slate, and that, too, is good recycling material, he said.
Work begins
A few days after talking on the phone with Danylo, I joined him and his son, Richard, in what turned out to be a month of weekends removing slate from the Watson roof. We were determined to take only those pieces worth salvaging, but I had no idea how to tell the good ones from the bad. The roofers offered this suggestion: Knock on the slate with your knuckles and listen.
“It’ll have a ring to it,” Jenkins said. “If you hit it with a hammer, it will sound like steel. It’ll sound solid. Softer slate will have a dull sound.”
The slate varied in texture, size, thickness and color. Smaller pieces weighed about 5 pounds, the largest over 25 pounds.
We hauled the selected ones to the house, organized them according to size and stacked them in our side yard. A year passed before Danylo could do the installation. Friends joked that the stacked slate looked like a fine art project. In warm weather it was a haven for snakes.
On a chilly day in March 2021, he began erecting scaffolding. Then we began removing the old asphalt shingles. Each morning, he and I climbed to the roof. My job was to carry the old shingles to the scaffolding’s edge and drop them into the bed of his truck so they could be hauled to the dump. When he was done removing the shingles, he covered the exposed wood planks with organic felt underlayment, overlapping it to double the protection.
Next, he relined the box gutters with copper and attached copper flashing around chimneys and other vulnerable areas of the roof.
Then it was time to install the recycled slate. We used a pulley to hoist about 2,000 heavy pieces of stone to the scaffold, more than 25 feet above ground level. Work began around 8 a.m. each morning. With Danylo’s guidance, I selected pieces of slate that were then tied in bundles of four or five and hoisted to the roof. This process often took hours.
Once I left to begin my shift as a Post-Gazette photographer, he worked alone, hammering the pieces into place, the taptap-tap of his hammer echoing down Walliston Avenue. On the south-facing section of roof, he attached the largest stones (up to 20 inches long) at the bottom, where the house walls could bear most of the weight. As he worked his way up, he attached 18and then 16-inch slates near the top.
It’s called a graduated slate roof. The practice started centuries ago in England and Scotland, in part because roofers didn’t want to carry the largest and heaviest pieces of slate to the roof’s peak. The end result is pleasing to the eye, like the roof extends further into the sky.
Danylo took special care with the dormers, making certain the tops of the slate formed a straight line all the way around. When finished, it looks like someone drew slate on a piece of paper and folded it over the corners of the dormer.
“When I was young, my dad would yell at me for that stuff,” he said. “If I didn’t do it right, he’d say, ‘Oh, no, it all has to line up.’”
A new/old roof
Thirteen weeks after the project had begun, the roof was finished. He and I stood in the street and admired his work. The old slate takes on varying shades of green, gray, brown and red, with a rough-hewn, textured appearance. My youngest daughter, Jessie, says it looks like a roof on a centuries-old Scottish estate.
The cost? A little over $25,000. And the roof has the potential to last several decades. Asphalt roofs normally last 15-25 years.
The roof’s appeal, however, extends beyond economics or aesthetics. It satisfies a yearning to connect with those who came before, a desire to leave something of real value and permanence to those who will follow. It’s a bit of a legacy.
Danylo understands. He’s now a part of the story of this house, and every other house he’s roofed with recycled slate. As we stood in the street and examined his work, he said. “One day I want my son to drive by this house with his children and say, ‘Your grandfather put this roof on, all by himself.’”