IT'S NOT THAT NEWTON.

The Other Newton, MA.

Newton, Massachusetts has a glowing reputation for its lavish public schools, gracious architecture, colleges, chic villages, accessibility to Boston, liberalism and a green environment. Our U.S. Senator is Elizabeth Warren, social justice advocate and icon of Leftist feminism. She does not live in Newton, but she has a large support base in the city. That isn’t our Newton.

Our 2017 downsizing search after selling a large house in Dorchester, a huge and diverse section of Boston, was humbling. Small places in “nice” neighborhoods were selling above asking through bidding wars, encouraged by the usual suspects, real estate agents. Our first enthusiastic bid for a tiny place near Watertown Square was squelched when “friends of the sellers” offered an outlandishly inflated price in a bidding war. Why they hadn’t just bought it directly from the sellers at a fair price I will never know.

We were getting desperate to find a place by midsummer. Our short-term rental was breaking our bank month by month. Then I saw an open house advertised in Nonantum, which claims to be a village of Newton. The price was at the top of our range, but the property seemed decent enough. Another bidding war led to us purchasing our modest older condo on Adams Street.

Moving brings many adjustments no matter where you go. Our first months were spent getting unpacked and settled. The street was undergoing the second of an eventual three repavings. The dirt and noise were familiar. Our Dorchester street had gone through two years of sewer replacement and repaving. We knew it would pass.

Then came the thumping. The street contractor had rushed the paving in late November. Outside our new home are two manhole covers. They were left surrounded by uneven pavement. The thump-thump of fast-moving SUV tires penetrated closed double-glazed windows. One manhole cover was actually loose. Eventually that was fixed. The noise was lowered, but not eliminated, after the third repaving of the street in Spring 2018.

We got our first real feel for the neighborhood when we went to the local park for the annual Christmas celebration in 2017. The village center filled with families on a mild evening in early December. A local (self-identified "Italian") MC with a Boston accent, who seemed to fancy himself both comic and crooner, belted out bad jokes and corny ballads. He courted small children in the front of the crowd. "What's your name? What do you want Santa to bring you?"

Politicians attended. “Gentrification” was forcefully denounced over the loudspeakers. Nostalgia for a time four decades past was in the air. Fireworks were unleashed in the small park, all too close to tightly grouped buildings for my taste. Our reactions were mixed as we shared them on the short walk home.

I recalled a similar feeling. In 1974, my partner at the time found an ad for a newly renovated apartment in Boston’s North End. We wanted the apartment after seeing it until we were greeted by a gang of Italian-American men outside the building. The real estate agent quickly fled after shoving a card into my hand.

The gang said nothing. They came up close to us and followed us as we walked out of the North End. They mumbled things in Italian to each other as we walked. We felt we had barely escaped with our lives when we reached Haymarket Square, and the gangsters trailed off. We knew we could not live in that neighborhood.

The politically condoned public denouncement of “gentrification” in the park here bothered me. We had heard it many times before. I was attacked once on my front stoop across from the now-fashionable Boston Ballet headquarters on Tremont Street in Boston’s South End in 1986. A middle-aged Black man, wildly swinging a whisky bottle in broad daylight, came at me and yelled “Goddamn you! Gentrification! Faggots! Get the hell outta my ‘hood!”. And I eventually did.

My partner and his companion were stabbed, beaten and left for dead in broad daylight  in the South End in the summer of 1990. A teenage Latino street gang were responsible, but the many witnesses who knew the perpetrators refused to furnish the police with any testimony. The Boston Police subsequently interrogated my partner after he came out of a coma. They asked him what he had done to “provoke” the attack. They had been attacked while walking home from buying ice cream from a neighborhood market. My partner was asked later to discuss the well covered event on TV talk shows.

In 1999, I bought and remodeled a shabby three-unit tenement in East Boston. The street hosted an Italian-American hit squad of sorts, or so I was told in cautioning whispers by other neighbors. The gang of middle-aged men hung out on the sidewalk down the street from my house.

Whenever I walked home from the subway stop, they would yell, “Here comes the fag! Gentrification! Get the f*** outta here.” I laughed sardonically and shook my head. This gay Chelsea boy was not intimidated by the all-too-familiar cat-calls of troglodytes. Three years after I bought the building I had enough equity to leave behind those stalwarts of “family values”.

Spring 2018 here revealed that I had not traveled that far in nearly twenty years. We went into a local antiques store and chatted with one of the sellers who inferred that our status in the neighborhood might be tentative, especially since neither of us is of Italian descent. The local tailor asked us if either of us is Italian. The temperature dropped when we said “No".

We heard that a building near us had been sold and was slated for development. I sniffed around a bit and found we had a neighborhood council. I attended a planning meeting about the development and realized newness, of any kind, in that room was not the sort of thing that gained any positive notice. I kept a low profile. “Unwelcoming” may be too strong a word for the vibe. I felt more or less invisible, while also feeling I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was less hospitable than my Dorchester neighborhood association had been, by far.

The development seemed to coalesce all the venom the generational locals feel toward change of any kind. I had been involved with a lot of civic planning for four years in my previous Dorchester neighborhood. I was familiar with “not in my backyard” reactionaries. But what I saw here was more tribal, more ethnocentric, less about the architecture and traffic than about losing a cultural dominance over the neighborhood.

My hometown, Chelsea, Massachusetts, was many things, but it was never mono-cultural. Revere and East Boston were staunchly Italian-American in many parts. There were neighborhoods in those places where, as children, my friends and I would not venture on our bikes. But Chelsea never felt that way. My childhood friends were genetically and ethnically varied. We acknowledged those differences, joked about them and that was that. Friendship or enmity always trumped race or ethnicity.

So, in Spring of 2018, as the denizens of the area emerged into warmer temperatures, the building which was slated for development here turned out to be a local street hangout for older Italian-American men. The sidewalk is still graced with random lawn chairs. We were told by some outsiders like ourselves that they had some positive contacts with the gang. All we experienced were the open-mouthed stares, accompanied by occasional pointing in our direction as they spoke to each other. Our previous experiences with male gangs of this sort led to our avoiding that side of our own street altogether.

Some mornings in late Spring I would hear a loud yell coming from the small group in front of the clubhouse when I came out my front door. The sound, usually in the same raspy voice, had a strong resemblance to my first name. When I looked over, I was greeted by the blank stares of the men in my direction. Then laughter would often erupt among them as they looked away.

The annual Italian Festival came in July. A carnival appeared in another local park a block away. It was the kind of carnival which came to Chelsea every summer in my youth, over half century ago. Somewhat shabby and definitely retro. We found it charming at first.

Then the nightly explosions began. Five nights of deafening and unremitting private fireworks from yards all over the densely populated neighborhood went on past midnight. No apparent attempt was made by the city authorities to curtail them.

This culminated in someone aiming several large exploding rockets at my bedroom windows at 1:30 AM. The explosions caused me to jump from my bed. The room was illuminated by white light, even though my light-blocking shades were drawn. I more strongly empathize now with civilians in war zones.

I wrote to the Mayor’s office and Archbishop’s office, since the event was sponsored by a local men’s Catholic fraternity. Up until that rocket barrage, I was willing to shrug off the vibe here as simply the behavior of uneducated townies. Now I was convinced it was something much more sinister. And I do not mean “gentrification” phobia.

The Mayor’s office did not respond. The Catholic pastor of the nearby church, which hosts the festival-sponsoring group, did reach out. We had a friendly correspondence. However, he implied that he would have little or no influence on the group who sponsored the event. I had suspected as much. In other words, outsiders will take what they get whether they like it or not.

Since then, we have met city councilors and other neighbors who have been genuinely welcoming. We do not feel angry or estranged. My partner and I have lived too long and been through too much to let ignorance and bad manners faze us. We are here because this place meets many of our needs. Besides, we bought it, so we own it. No place is perfect.

But this is not really Newton, though it may lie within the geographic boundaries of that city.

We travel around the real Newton regularly, where we see quiet tree-lined streets which are clean and manicured. We walk into friendly shops in the villages of that Newton. We see the well-groomed runners and other pedestrians greeting each other civilly, even though they appear to be of diverse backgrounds. We see an astounding number of Newton police cruisers patrolling the streets.

We don’t see cars and trucks parked on sidewalks in the real Newton. The constant din of car stereos, ghetto exhaust systems, truck horns, loud leaf blowers and motorcycles is missing over there.  The colors of another nation’s flag are not painted on public property everywhere. We are not ogled by suspicious stares there. It must be wonderful to be able to afford to live comfortably in that Newton.

What They Call Newton in Our Neighborhood.