Meet the Team - Top Hat Chimney

Meet the Westchester County Team Behind Top Hat Chimney

Most chimney companies send whoever’s available. We send the same faces, year after year, and that matters when someone’s walking through your living room with soot on their boots. The crew that works Westchester County has spent a combined four decades looking down flues from Yorktown to Yonkers. They know which 1960s split-levels in White Plains hide cracked terra cotta liners, and which Victorians in Peekskill have flues that bend in ways the original builders never drew on paper. Wendell Pike hired every one of them himself, and he still rides along on the tricky jobs. Ask anyone on your street.

Our People

Wendell Pike, Owner

Wendell founded Top Hat Chimney in 1999 after spending his twenties apprenticing under an old mason who refused to work on any flue he couldn’t see with his own eyes. That habit stuck. Wendell still runs the camera on every liner inspection and won’t quote a rebuild until he’s watched the footage twice. He’s the one answering the phone at odd hours, and he’ll tell you straight if a chimney can wait another season. When he’s not on a roof, he’s tinkering with a 1972 Ford pickup that runs about as reliably as a third-degree creosote fire. His rule on every job: if it’s not right, it’s not done.

Marcus T., Lead Technician

Marcus has been with Top Hat for 16 years, longer than anyone except Wendell. He’s certified through the Chimney Safety Institute of America and handles the bulk of our Westchester repair work, from flue tile replacement to full crown rebuilds. Marcus is the guy who can tell by tapping a brick whether the mortar behind it is still holding. He keeps a small notebook in his truck with sketches of unusual flue layouts he’s encountered over the years, some of them in houses that date back to the 1800s. On weekends he coaches youth soccer up in Ossining, and he will absolutely talk your ear off about drainage fields if you let him.

DeSean B., Senior Installer

DeSean leads our liner installation crew and has been with Top Hat for 11 years. He’s our go-to for HeatShield and DuraFlex systems, and he has a reputation for fitting liners into flues that other companies said were too tight to work on. DeSean grew up in Mount Vernon and knows the older housing stock there better than most inspectors. He’s famously precise about cleanup: the drop cloths go down before the tools come off the truck, and the living room looks the same when he leaves as it did when he walked in. He restores old radios, the kind with actual tubes in them, and claims the patience transfers to chimney work. It shows.

Sofia R., Service Coordinator

Sofia is the voice you’ll hear most often when you call Top Hat during business hours. She’s been answering our phones for 8 years and has a mental map of every neighborhood in Westchester County, so she knows which side of the county a call is coming from before she asks. Sofia schedules every sweep and repair, gives real arrival windows, and calls if the crew is running late, which is rare. Before this, she worked dispatch for a plumbing company in New Rochelle, and she’ll tell you flat out that scheduling a chimney job is harder: everyone wants the same three weeks in September. Outside of work, she’s rebuilding a house in Sleepy Hollow with her husband, one room at a time.

One Standard, Every Job

Every sweep who shows up at your door in Westchester County answers to Wendell. That’s not a corporate line, it’s how we’re built. The 90-Day Done Right Promise is printed on every job ticket, and it means what it says: if the work isn’t right, one call brings us back. Background checks, uniforms, real arrival windows – those aren’t extras, they’re the baseline. Upfront pricing happens before a single tool comes off the truck. The number you hear on the phone is the number on the invoice. Wendell puts his name on the work because he still runs into customers at the hardware store on Saturdays. It’s easier to do it right the first time.

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