Between 2014 and 2024, Lou Rubino inspected 10 homes in Prospect Heights. The neighbourhood's rowhouse blocks come with the trimmings buyers fall for — cornices, detailed parapets, generous bays — and every one of those ornaments is also a building component with a maintenance bill and a failure mode.
Rated 5.0 on Google as of August 2026 · U.S. Army veteran owned · NY licence #16000039568 · 516-330-3870
A cornice is a horizontal ledge that catches weather for a century; the parapet above it is a masonry wall with its cap exposed to everything. Open joints in the coping over a cornice is a classic Prospect Heights finding — small to see, expensive to ignore, because the water that enters there exits through the facade's best features.
Behind the parapet, the flat roof does its usual quiet work. Seams in aging coatings, flashings at every penetration, drainage that depends on pitch nobody can see from below — Lou photographs it all so the report shows you the roof you cannot otherwise look at.
Related: How Lou inspects a brownstone · What an inspection costs · Schedule an inspection.
Both photographs are from Lou's own Prospect Heights inspection reports, chosen because they show a building component and nothing that identifies a property or an owner.
A flat roof hides everything from the street: membrane seams, patches, drainage and parapet condition. Patching is normal maintenance — the question a report answers is whether the membrane still has a working life. How roofs are examined and reported.
All photographs are from Lou's own inspection reports for jobs in this area, screened so nothing identifies a property or an owner.
Lou covers Long Island, the five boroughs and Westchester from his base in Wantagh, and the archive behind these pages shows where that work has actually concentrated.
Also nearby: Park Slope · Crown Heights · Clinton Hill · all 26 towns.
His Prospect Heights file goes back to 2014. Yours would not be the first.
Not sure yet? Read what New York requires of your inspector or see a real report.