Drain cleaning in East Somerville's older multi-familiesEast Somerville

East Somerville is the part of the city east of McGrath Highway, lying between Washington Street and Broadway ^[1]. It is close to Charlestown, from which Somerville itself was set off as a separate town in 1842 ^[1].

Its streets are lined with closely spaced wood-frame houses: workers' cottages, two-families, and triple-deckers on small lots, some with a narrow side yard and little else. Somerville as a whole became one of the most densely populated places in New England through building booms that lasted into the 1940s, and East Somerville shows that density as clearly as any neighborhood ^[1].

Many of these houses have been altered repeatedly. Single-family houses were split into apartments, back porches were enclosed to make kitchens or bathrooms, and basements were finished or partly finished. Each change usually tied new fixtures into whatever drain was nearest, which is why a camera run through an East Somerville building drain can reveal several generations of pipe in a few yards.

Broadway runs along the northern edge as a commercial street, with shops, restaurants and apartments above, while the residential blocks between it and Washington Street are quieter. Close to the highway and the rail lines, there is a scattering of older industrial and commercial buildings as well.

Just north and east of the older neighborhood, Assembly Square has gone through several lives. A Ford assembly plant opened there in 1926 and closed in 1958; the site later became a shopping mall area through the 1980s and into the mid-2000s, and it has since been redeveloped as Assembly Row, beside I-93 and Route 28, with its own Orange Line station ^[2].

New apartment towers and offices come with modern plumbing, but their wastewater joins the same regional system as the century-old houses nearby. That is one reason the city has planned for more capacity in this part of Somerville. Its long-term combined sewer overflow plan includes a storage tank in Assembly Square, part of a goal to eliminate overflows in a typical year by 2050 ^[4].

For homeowners in the older blocks, the main thing to know is that public improvements do not reach inside private property. If your house's drain is old, scaled or root-bound, it stays that way until someone clears or repairs it, regardless of what is built across the highway.

The Mystic River forms Somerville's northern boundary ^[1]. Somerville is co-permitted for a combined sewer overflow outfall on the Mystic, as well as having its own permitted outfall to Alewife Brook ^[4]. In a combined system, rain and household wastewater share one pipe; in a large storm the flow can exceed what the pipes can carry and some can overflow to the river ^[4].

That is the public-system side. The private side is your basement. When a combined sewer runs full during a storm, low basement fixtures are the first places water can push back into. Separately, the EPA notes that sanitary sewers can overflow into basements because of blockages, including grease and roots ^[6]. In practice, both can be at work in an older East Somerville house during a wet spell.

If water rises in your floor drain only during heavy rain, mention it on the call and report it to the city through 311. If it rises on dry days too, especially during laundry or showers, the cause is more likely a blockage in your own building drain or lateral.

East Somerville station opened on the Green Line's Medford branch in December 2022, along with Gilman Square, Magoun Square and Ball Square ^[3]. Better transit tends to bring renovation, and many older houses in the neighborhood are being updated, sometimes with an extra bathroom per unit or a basement apartment.

Those projects are the right moment to deal with old drain pipe. With floors and walls open, replacing a corroded section or adding an accessible cleanout is straightforward, and it is permit work for a licensed plumber under Somerville's inspector ^[5]. Owners who skip it often end up calling about the same line a year later, after the new finishes are in place.

East Somerville's residential streets are narrow and mostly permit parking, and Broadway and Washington Street are busy. Tell the contractor on the call whether a van can pull into a driveway or will need to find a spot on the street, and how far it is from there to the cellar door.

Basements in converted houses are often shared and cramped, with each unit's storage, boilers and laundry in the way. Clear the area around the cleanout and floor drain. Let every household know when the work is happening and ask them to stop running water. If any tenant does not speak much English, it helps to have someone who can explain what is going on, so that nobody starts a wash halfway through the visit.

When a house built for one family becomes three apartments, the plumbing rarely gets redesigned from scratch. A new kitchen goes where a bedroom was, and its drain is run to the nearest pipe that will take it. A bathroom is fitted under the stairs or into a former closet. Over a few decades, an East Somerville building drain can end up collecting branches from fixtures it was never meant to serve.

That history shows up as specific weak points. A branch that joins the main at a shallow angle collects debris. A section of plastic joined to old iron with a rubber coupling can leave a small lip where paper catches. A long horizontal run from a rear kitchen, laid with too little pitch, holds grease. None of these is visible from the apartment; they only show up when a contractor runs a cable or a camera through the line.

If you own a converted house and do not know how it is plumbed, the next time a line is cleared is a good time to ask for a camera inspection. Recording where each branch joins, and in what condition, gives you a map you can hand to the next plumber or the next buyer.

Tenants in these buildings can help in simple ways. Scrape plates into the trash rather than the sink, keep wipes and paper towels out of the toilet, and say something when a drain first starts to slow. A guide to what not to pour down drains is worth posting near a shared laundry or in each kitchen.

A sewer smell in an older basement often comes from a trap that has dried out, most commonly in a floor drain that rarely sees water. Pouring a bucket of water into it refills the trap and often settles the smell. If the odor persists, a cracked pipe, a loose cleanout plug or a vent problem may be letting gas escape, and the sewer smell in the basement guide explains how to narrow it down before you call.

Broadway through East Somerville is lined with small businesses at street level and apartments above: bakeries, restaurants, corner markets and salons among them. In buildings like these the ground-floor business and the upstairs apartments often drain through the same pipe to the street, so a problem caused by one can be felt by everyone in the building.

Food businesses add grease to the mix, and Somerville requires food preparation establishments to manage fats, oils and grease with proper devices. A restaurant line that clogs repeatedly may need its grease trap looked at as much as the pipe itself, and commercial drain cleaning is set up for that kind of work, usually outside business hours.

For residents upstairs, the signs are the same as in any shared building: slow tubs, gurgling toilets and odors near drains that are rarely used. Reporting them to the landlord early, rather than living with a slow drain for weeks, makes it far more likely the line can be cleared before anything overflows into the shop below.