Stucco repair costs in New Haven

New Haven was stuccoing houses before the Civil War. In the Chapel Street Historic District, the National Register inventory lists a three-story brick Greek Revival townhouse on High Street, from about 1840, sheathed in stucco scored to look like stone blocks. A masonry Italianate villa on Chapel Street from about 1860 has the same scored finish. Over on Orange Street, the 1858–59 William B. Deforest House is listed as a brick Italianate whose stucco was removed around 1980.

The early 1900s brought a different kind of stucco house. The Whitney Avenue Historic District nomination lists stucco on dozens of houses built around 1910 and into the 1920s: hip-roofed Colonial Revival homes on Bishop and Avon streets, Tudor Revivals on Canner Street, an Italian Renaissance building on Bishop. Many of their neighbors, the same inventory notes, had already been covered in aluminum or asbestos siding by the time the district was listed in 1989.

So a New Haven stucco wall can be anywhere from a century to nearly two centuries old, and it may have survived a round of re-siding that took its neighbors' original walls out of sight.

If your house has scored stucco, those lines are part of the design, not cracks to fill. A patch that skips them shows from the sidewalk, so ask your plasterer to carry the scoring through the repair.