Tourists visit the Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End.

In downtown Boston, the high rise office building at 33 Arch St. doesn’t seem like much of a threat to the historic Old South Meeting House nearby – the two buildings don’t even touch.

But after 33 Arch St. went up in 2004, the Old South Meeting House was sitting in its shadow much of the day, for the first time since it was built in 1729. Even that small change is bad news for an ancient masonry building, said executive director Emily Curran. That winter, ice coated the building and stubbornly wouldn’t melt.

The ice problem didn’t warrant a call to the insurance company, but it took some extra maintenance – and it demonstrates the tricky nature of protecting the state’s prized historic buildings, especially in a constantly changing urban setting. Boston got a reminder of this recently, when construction in Copley Square created a massive crack up the length of a wall in the Old South Church.

Most insurance companies don’t want to deal with elaborate older buildings because repairs are often costly and complicated. And complex as such policies are, only a few agencies in the world deal specifically in historic structures. The rest get farmed out to local property/casualty agents – many of whom don’t put in the needed time to arrange for proper underwriting, some agents say.

Bob Emerson of Beverly-based Appleby & Wyman is a property agent who has worked for nearly 25 years with Historic Boston Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving historic property.

Know The Details

It doesn’t require any elaborate training to be an agent for historically significant buildings, he said, but it does require careful work and the arrangement of an expert evaluation of the building’s worth and replacement costs.

The trouble is, plenty of brokers don’t realize that, he said – many treat such buildings like any modern facility that can be replaced with modern materials, applying for a standard bread-and-butter structural insurance policy. Often, neither the insurer nor the broker really understand the essential details of the building, and when an insurer doesn’t even ask to see the notable building it’s writing for, he said, that’s a big red flag.

Museums like Hartford’s Harriett Beecher Stowe Center have to keep up with constant maintenance issues, but rely almost entirely on their agents’ expertise for more serious problems, says executive director Katherine Kane.

“Insurance is not a museum’s area of expertise, necessarily, which makes that relationship with the agent that much more important,” she said.

Baltimore-based National Trust Insurance Services is one of the few agencies that specializes in historic buildings. Brian Phoebus, program director for nonprofit, said he started the agency in 2003 after realizing that the insurance industry was sorely lacking this type of specialization. Since its founding, he said, the agency has written for 17,000 historic clients in 48 states, including Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The company, which is a for-profit subsidiary of nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, often finds its clients had been vastly underinsured, Phoebus said. While he admits his agency’s policies sometimes carry higher premiums than those offered by standard brokers, he said the new policies are more thorough and specifically designed for historic buildings – something owners need if they ever have to make a claim.

If there are very few agencies with this specialization, Phoebus said there are zero insurance carriers specifically for all types of historic structures.

Nowhere To Turn To

Instead, different property insurers tend to take on different types. For example, Connecticut-based, Middlesex Mutual is a good one for private residences, while New Jersey-based Chubb does well with cultural centers and museums, but stays away from churches and theaters.

“Most companies look at ‘historic’ as a lesser class of business,” he said. “It’s just that most of them want to handle their claim at aisle 13 of Home Depot,” instead of dealing with masonry, statuary, hand-carved woodwork and the kinds of things that make historic buildings so valuable.

But Phoebus argues older structures make for good insurance risks – the buildings are often sturdily built and the owners are passionate about taking care of the places.

“If that doesn’t translate into a good insurance client, I don’t know what does,” he said.

Nina Zannieri, executive director for the Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End, said employees know they’re the first line of defense in keeping the tourist attraction and landmark safe from disaster. Still, the threat of certain devastating risks – such as fire or flood – always hovers.

“It makes my stomach hurt a little bit even to talk about it,” she said. “How do you replace what’s irreplaceable?”