Meet the Team - Top Hat Chimney

Meet the Rockland County Team Behind Top Hat Chimney

Top Hat Chimney has been climbing roofs and dropping brushes down flues in Rockland County since 1999, and the crew that shows up today is built the way it’s always been built: local people who know these houses because they live near these houses. Wendell Pike has kept the roster small on purpose. No rotating subcontractors, no trainees learning on your dime. Just a handful of sweeps and installers who have worked together long enough to read each other’s hand signals from a ridge line in Nyack. When you call, you get one of us, and when we leave, the job is done the way we’d want it done at our own place.

Call (845) 599-0832

Our People

Wendell Pike, Owner and Lead Technician

Wendell started Top Hat Chimney in 1999 with a used van, a set of brushes, and a firm belief that chimney work should be explained in plain English. He is the one who answers the phone half the time, and he still runs a sweep route most weeks because, as he puts it, you learn things from the top of a chimney you’ll never learn from an office chair. Wendell has worked with everything from 18th-century stone fireplaces in Tappan to zero-clearance units in new construction in West Nyack, and he has fixed his share of mistakes other companies left behind. He writes the 90-Day Done Right Promise on every invoice himself, and he means it: if it’s not right, one call brings him back. Outside of work, you’ll find him at the Clarkstown hardware store debating the merits of different flue tile, or out on the water early in the morning with a fishing rod.

Carmen D., Senior Chimney Liner Specialist

Carmen has been with Top Hat Chimney for fourteen years, and she is the person Wendell sends when a liner needs to be measured, fitted, and installed without a single shortcut. She is certified in stainless steel liner systems and has done more DuraFlex and Copperfield installs than anyone else in the county, including several full relines in older Victorians in Haverstraw and Piermont where the original clay tile had long since given up. Carmen is methodical in a way that makes everything look easy: she measures twice, cuts once, and photographs her work before she closes up the firebox. When she isn’t on a job, she’s restoring a stubborn 1930s bungalow in Pearl River, which means she understands old houses better than most.

Rich F., Repair and Masonry Technician

Rich handles the work that keeps a chimney standing: crown repair, cap replacement, tuckpointing, and the occasional full rebuild. He came to Top Hat from a family of stone masons, and his attention on a deteriorating crown in Stony Point is the kind of thing you notice when you check the finished work with binoculars. Rich is the crew member who notices small cracks that most people would walk past, because he has seen what a hard winter on the Hudson does to a crown that wasn’t sealed right. He smokes a pipe, which the rest of the crew finds endlessly funny for a chimney guy, and he makes a decent pepper relish that he brings to the shop every August.

Benji R., Apprentice and Service Assistant

Benji joined the crew two years ago as the first apprentice Wendell has hired in nearly a decade. He grew up in Congers and came over from a carpentry background, which means he handles the scaffold setup, roof protection, and the kind of careful cleanup that makes a big difference when we’re working inside someone’s living room. Benji is working through his chimney technician training hours and is already running a brush by himself under Wendell’s eye on straightforward sweep jobs. He’s a dog person and a decent photographer, and he takes most of the camera footage we use for our before-and-after reports. Ask him about the time a squirrel got into a chimney in Nanuet and he’ll tell you the whole story, probably twice.

One Standard, Every Job

Every person on this crew works to the same standard, and that standard is not a slogan. It’s the 90-Day Done Right Promise, written on every single job, and it applies whether we’re doing a simple Level 1 sweep in Suffern or a heat shield installation in Orangeburg. Every technician is background-checked and uniformed, and when you get a quote on the phone, that is the number on the invoice. No surprises when the truck pulls away. Wendell has lived in Rockland County long enough to run into his customers at the grocery store, which he says keeps a man honest in a way no corporate training manual can. The brands we service, from HeatShield to Gelco, are the brands we believe in, and every chimney leaves the job with camera footage and a plain-English verdict from the person who actually did the work. If we wouldn’t sign our name to it, it doesn’t ship.

Call (845) 599-0832 to schedule a sweep or repair, and you’ll likely talk to Wendell or Carmen before you talk to anyone else. That’s the way it’s been since 1999, and that’s the way it stays.

Written by Wendell Pike, Owner at Top Hat Chimney, serving Rockland County since 1999.