Newton Living magazine by Newton Living

VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1

FOOD

Breakfast Gone Wild! Huevos Tacos, Scotch Eggs, Ployes, and Shakshuka

Suffering from Years of Neglect—the Truth About Newton’s School Buildings

EDUCATION

PEOPLE

INTERVIEW

P. 14

P. 54

P.60

P. 64

EXPLORE

DISCOVER

C E LE BRAT E

Just How Jewish Is the Garden City? History and Culture Provide Insight

Forget Silicon Valley— TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer Leads the Field from Newton

THE HOME ISSUE MARCH/APRIL 2012

PLUS

2012 Boston Marathon Special

Newton Living

NEWTON HOME DESIGN

A Slate of Local Authors Storm the Best Seller List With MITCHELL ZUCKOFF CHRIS DALY ADAM MANSBACH AND MORE, P. 26

A WEST NEWTON HOME BLENDS CONTEMPORARY AND TRADITIONAL And HOME ACCESSORIES IN SPRING’S EYE-OPENING HUES

M A R C H /A P R I L 2 0 1 2

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family

In Newton, one Bank stands out among the rest.

Barry R. Sloane President & CEO

Linda Sloane Kay Executive Vice President

Marshall M. Sloane Chairman & Founder

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32 Langley Road Newton Centre, MA 02459

31 Boylston Street/Rt 9 West Newton, MA 02467

Our family’s bank. And yours. www.CenturyBank.com Allston • Andover (coming 2012) • Beverly • Boston • Braintree • Brookline • Burlington • Cambridge Everett • Lynn • Malden • Medford • Newton • Peabody • Quincy • Salem • Somerville • Winchester Equal Housing Lender/Member FDIC

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Ramie Merrill Administration

Caroline Washburne Marketing

George Kooyoomjian

Director Agent Development

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Jane Sherman Laurie Malcom Alla Iokheles Harold Klingsberg Helaine Blank Adam Shamus Viviana DeSimone Galina Laffer Yelena Matskevich

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Barbara Wales

Debra Weiss

Chana Meyer

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Newton Living contents

march/april 2012 Volume 2 Number 1

Features 40 | modern

in the middle

LDa Architecture merges shingle and glass to create a contemporary West Newton Hill home that’s steeped in tradition.

By Marni Elyse Katz. photos by greg premru

48 | home accents

A shock of color, bright patterns. Burst into spring with the season’s eye-opening hues.

Photos by sharon white. styling by dana moscardelli

54 | back to school

Suffering from years of neglect, Newton’s school buildings offer hard lessons in history and arithmetic. By jon marcus

60 | how jewish is

the garden city?

Since the 1950s, a strong Jewish community has thrived in Newton. Today, roughly a third of city residents are Jewish, but the real measure is more cultural than demographic. By kara baskin

64 | speed wins

TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer beats Silicon Valley with local talent. By doug hardy

laid back An LC4 cowhide lounge chair sits in a West Newton Hill home designed by LDA Architecture. “Modern in the Middle,” page 40.

Newton Living

mar/apr 2012

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photograph by

Greg Premru

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Newton Living contents

march/april 2012 Volume 2 Number 1

Departments 06 | publisher’s desk 10 | Contributors 72 | Old and

Newton West Newton,

circa 1911.

Village 14 | food

Local breakfast menus offer some tasty surprises; The Local’s fried pickles; Aquitaine’s recipe for roasted beet and aged chevre salad. 18 | DRINK

Artisanal beers. 20 | style

Legendary Newton Centre clothier Mr. Sid succeeds by making shopping fun; men’s fashions. 24 | places

Auburndale offers small-town convenience, eclectic stores, and tasty treats. 26 | arts

Best-selling author Mitchell Zuckoff; books; event listings. 28 | sports

The medical codirector of the Boston Marathon; local runners; squash. 32 | business

Garden City firms combine industry with sustainability. 36 | giving

Domestic-violence crisis shelter Second Step; Mindy Kaling. making a raquet Timmy Brownell joins the squash resurgence. “swing kids,” page 30.

Newton Living

mar/apr 2012

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38 | Affairs

Housing crisis for cultural groups; changing ownership; City Briefs.

photograph by

Jared Charney

2/2/12 8:41 PM

Put Your Hands in Ours Tamara D. Rozental, MD Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Arnold M. Savenor, MD Hand and Upper Extremity Surgery Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Needham

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publisher’s desk

Good Question

off the record five things i learned creating this issue

Massachusetts had 42 breweries operating in 2010. Across the U.S., more breweries are making beer now than at anytime since the late nineteenth century. Take that, recession! p.18

Auburndale is home to the city’s last independent drug store. p.24

Current discussions of modular classrooms may need to be put into an historical context. Archival photos at Historic Newton show “portables” at a half dozen public schools in the early 1920s. p.54

4 5

When I was teaching English composition courses years ago, I implored my students to ask questions, to inquire about the who-what-when-where-how-and-why of any topic they encountered, to analyze the arguments and evidence presented to them, and—perhaps the most difficult challenge—to discard the comfortable assumptions we carry with us about “the way things are.” Like most academic lectures, mine certainly bored more than a few undergraduates. I knew that. To reanimate my captive audience, I would often quote Big Bird. In case you’ve forgotten your Sesame Street, the large, yellow Muppet said, “Asking questions is a good way of finding something out.” Last year, when Bob Parsons helped me design this magazine from scratch, I told him each issue will have one feature story focused on a question: Why are Newton’s classrooms crowded? Why are there so many banks in village centers? And Bob’s done an amazing job finding artists to set these feature stories apart. The best illustration so far may be Edel Rodriguez’s (p. 60). For the story, writer Kara Baskin responds to the question How Jewish is Newton? Some will consider this question provocative, but that depends on the questioner’s intent. If one wants to rabblerouse, then, yes, the question is meant to provoke. But that’s not why we or many Newton visitors, househunters, and newcomers—both Jews and non-Jews—ask the question. And the answer we seek is not a number or a percentage. Instead, it is a better understanding of the culture of this community, its rich diversity, and how we—all of us—fit into it. My thanks go out to everyone who shared their thoughts with us for this issue. One of my original goals for Newton Living was to engage more people in civic discourse about the Garden City and its future. I’m thilled to be doing that, but I didn’t realize how much I’d also enjoy becoming more involved in the local business community. Independent merchants are a scrappy bunch. In economic times like these, they have to be. I would like to thank everyone who has advertised in Newton Living for their support. And I would like to ask our readers to support them. Shop local!

Speed wins. p.64

a Business category I did not expect to run across in a city directory from the 1870s: Saloons. p.72

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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john sisson Editor and Publisher

the cover photograph by greg premru. this West Newton Home marries contemporary space with New England charm. see “Modern in the middle,” page 40.

correction

In our December 2011/ January 2012 issue, the story on food stylist Denise Drower Swidey (“On the Set at Simply Ming,” page 14) omitted a credit for the image of Simply Ming’s star and crew members. The photo was taken by Nina Gallant, ninagallant.com.

portrait by

Keirnan Klosek

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John Sisson Robert F. Parsons Robert Parsons Design Betsy Blazar Clara Silverstein David Hill Annie M. Keller Adam DeTour Vivek Bajaj, Kara Baskin, John Bostwick, Alyssa Giacobbe, Doug Hardy, Marni Elyse Katz, Jon Marcus, Jeff Ousborne, Robin Regensburg, Don Seiffert, Tiffany Smith Robert Boyd, Jared Charney, Webb Chappell, Angela Coppola, Chris Churchill, Sadie Dayton, Adam DeTour, Conor Doherty, John Goodman, Ian Justice, Kate Kelley, Keller + Keller, Joel Laino, Joe McKendry, Dana Moscardelli, Mark Ostow, Bob Packert, Dana Smith, Anthony Tieuli, Carl Tremblay, Sharon White Newton Living is distributed to every business and residential address in the zip codes 02458, 02459, 02460, 02461, 02462, 02464, 02465, 02466, and 02468, and to thousands of addresses in 02467 (Chestnut Hill). If you did not receive a copy, would like to be removed from our mailing list, or would like copies for your business, please send an email to subscriptions@newtonlivingmag.com. calendar@newtonlivingmag.com news@newtonlivingmag.com Newton Living does not accept unsolicited editorial materials for publication and is not responsible for such submissions. events: news:

advertising

address

617-340-3668 ads@newtonlivingmag.com Newton Living P.O. Box 590718 Newton Centre, MA 02459 617-340-3668 617-299-3385 fax Newton Living is published bimonthly by Garden City Press LLC, P.O. Box 590718, Newton Centre, MA 02459, USA. Advertising rates available at newtonlivingmag.com. The editorial content of this magazine is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/. Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, CA 94041, USA. Member of Newton-Needham Chamber of Commerce.

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contributors

4 2

5 7 6

edel rodriguez illustrator “how jewish is the garden city,” p. 60

kara baskin writer “how jewish is the garden city?” p. 60

Born in Havana, Cuba, Rodriguez (drawger.com/edel) immigrated to Miami during the Mariel boatlift. His artwork has appeared in the New York Times, Time, the New Yorker, and on Broadway show posters and U.S. postage stamps. “I have some longtime family friends that live in Newton, so I’m familiar with the area. One of them runs the Boston Marathon, so we usually go to their home to watch the runners,” he wrote of this issue. “The patriarch of the family is a wonderful 90-year-old Jewish man that left Austria for England as part of the kindertransport during WWII, when he was a boy. He later came to America and started a new life, raised his entire family here. Three children, his wife, and grandchildren all gather in Newton often, so I thought of them when I was making the art.”

Baskin (karabaskin.com) is a Boston-based writer, editor, and speaker. She’s the Boston editor of New York Magazine’s food website, Grub Street, and writes Boston.com’s parenting blog, The 24-Hour Workday. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, the Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. She enjoyed exploring her own halfJewish roots while writing about Newton’s Jewish community: “Talking to impassioned Jewish civic leaders, rabbis, and Newton residents made me contemplate the role that religion plays in my own life,” she says. 3 john goodman photographer arts, p. 26

Goodman (goodmanphoto .com) works in editorial,

fine-art, and fashion photography. His work is in several museum’s permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. His editorial photographs have appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Outside, and Time. His advertising clients have included Gucci and IBM. 4 jon marcus writer “back to school,” p. 54

Marcus is a Boston-based author, freelance writer, and investigative journalist who writes about education for the Boston Globe Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today. The son of products of the Newton schools, he was astounded at the poor condition of the elementary schools. “’You’re not the first person who’s been surprised at what they look like, given

our great reputation,” one frustrated former schoolcommittee member told him. 5 sharon white photographer drink, p. 18; “home accents,” p. 60

White (sharonwhitestudio .com) specializes in food and product photography. Sharon said, “I wanted to use the large windows in my studio to create a soft, natural look for this issue’s home section. Window light has its own beauty as well as its limitations.” White’s editorial photos have been featured in Boston magazine, Boston Home, the Boston Globe Magazine, Gourmet America, and American Way. 6 webb chappell photographer “speed wins,” p. 64

A Boston-area photographer for the past 20 years,

Newton resident Chappell (webbchappellphotography .com) loves his job just for days like the one spent shooting Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor for this issue’s interview, talking scuba diving and trying to find beauty in the architecture of an office park. He makes pictures for editorial, corporate, and nonprofit clients, counting Boston magazine, Yankee, and Popular Science among them. 7 tiffany smith writer ”run, newton, run,” p. 28; places, p. 24

Originally from New York City, Smith (tiffanyiswrite .com) lives in Newton. She’s written for the Boston Globe, All You, Time for Kids, and others. Smith is more of a light stroller than a runner, but after interviewing the athletes training for the Boston Marathon, she has been inspired to push her walking regime up to an amble.

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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Explore

Discover

Celebrate

BEST SELLER: LOCAL AUTHOR MITCHELL ZUCKOFF’S LOST IN SHANGRI-LA RECOUNTS THE AFTERMATH OF A TRAGIC PLANE CRASH. SEE “THE NARRATOR,” PAGE 26.

PHOTOGRAPH BY

John Goodman

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VILLAGE

NEWTON LIVING

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village

Food

Dish, Unexpected

Local breakfast menus offer some tasty surprises. By Clara Silverstein

good yolk the scotch egg from the biltmore.

Power pairs star on most brunch menus: eggs and bacon, pancakes and syrup, bagels and lox. Craving something more akin to divas or celebrity bad boys, we scrutinized a dozen menus and set out in search of atypical morning fare at Newton restaurants and bakeries. What we found should wake you up when you’re in the mood for something unpredictable. When you do order these dishes, there’s no need to leave less adventurous family or friends behind. Most of these restaurants serve an assortment of omelets and French toast, too. The huevos tacos ($12.50) at The Biltmore stack two corn tortillas with enough food for a complete meal. At the base of the plate, chef Dan Lane’s variation on hash browns combines julienned potatoes and bell peppers with bits of flavorful pork shoulder. Next come the tortillas topped with Colby cheese, chorizo, two fried

eggs, sautéed onions and more bell peppers. Deconstruct the layers, or eat it all together for a salty, hearty start to the day. For lighter appetites, the Scotch egg ($4.50) wraps a peeled, soft-boiled egg with flattened jalapeño pepper sausage meat and coats it in panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs). Fried until crisp, it’s served on salad greens with cucumbers and red onions, both pickled in-house. This makes a crunchy change from any poached or scrambled dish. Once considered a poor man’s lunch in Britain, Scotch eggs have become a trendy bar snack. The Biltmore Bar and Grille, 1205 Chestnut Street, 617-5272550, thebiltmoregrill.com. For another variation on eggs, try the shakshuka ($4.99) at Inna’s Kitchen. Here, the eggs cook sunny side up on top of a mixture of tomatoes, onion, peppers, and spices. The diced, simmered vegetables taste similar

and for a smart start…

For a quick and healthy alternative, pick up a breakfast bar at the Keltic Krust ($3.49 each). The vegan, glutenfree oat bars taste far more moist and flavorful than anything that comes in a foil package. Maybe that’s because Kathleen Rice, who owns the bakery with her husband, Chris, developed the recipe herself. Individual bars look homemade. The blueberry version contains dried cherries and walnuts. Pumpkin and sunflower seeds top the nut-free apricot-apple bars. One bar will easily fuel you raising the bar keltic krust’s for the next few hours whether you eat in the bakery with a cup of coffee or put it in your Gluten-free, Vegan Breakfast Bars. briefcase or gym bag. Keltic Krust, 1371 Washington St., 617-332-9343, keltickrust.com.

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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biltmore photograph by

Kate Kelley

2/2/12 9:12 PM

to ratatouille, minus the eggplant and zucchini. The bread that comes on the side helps mop up the egg yolk. Shakshuka typifies the mix of Jewish cooking traditions at Inna’s, run by the mother–son team of Inna and Alex Khitrik. The menu stays true to Inna’s Eastern European origins (she’s from Belarus) with knishes and stuffed cabbage, but also represents other parts of the world. You can order eggs scrambled with pastrami hash ($5), challah French toast ($6.99), and Israeli falafel ($6.99). Inna’s Kitchen, 19 Pelham St., 617-244-5345, innaskitchen.com. The Deluxe Station Diner serves an impressive assortment of pancakes all day (sour cream, blue corn, sweet potato, and Rhode Island johnnycakes). Next to those, the Acadian pancakes, named ployes ($5.95 or $7.95), look so plain on the plate that they might escape notice—until you take a bite. Made from buckwheat, they taste like overgrown blinis. Try them with just a little butter to enhance their subtle, nutty flavor. They contain no eggs, milk, or sugar, making them lighter than the usual griddle cakes. If that seems too plain, try the sweet potato pancakes or waffles with pecans. Just be prepared to wait. The large menu frequently keeps customers lined up out the door. Deluxe Station Diner, 70 Union St., 617, 244-2550, deluxestationdiner.com.

photograph by

Anthony Tieuli

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Quick Bite: fried pickles

Deep-fried pickles dot many a bar top in the land of Paula Deen, and by now they have migrated north for New Englanders to savor, too. Apparently, the owner of a drive-in restaurant across from the Atkins Pickle Plant in Arkansas developed the first recipe in the 1960s. That version, known as the Fatman’s Original, breads and fries an entire pickle spear. A variation, deep-fried slices, makes the snack easier to share. And that’s exactly what you’ll want to do with a waxed paper-lined tin of fried pickle slices at The Local in West Newton ($5). Individual pieces pack salt, vinegar, and crunch into each bite. A dip of lemon-juice mayo laced with crushed red pepper cools the temperature while adding spice. Co-owner Frank Santo says his eight-year-old daughter loves the pickles because they stay hot several minutes after they are served. “There is nothing worse than cold bar food,” he says. One order is likely to disappear long before that becomes a problem. The Local, 1391 Washington St., 617-340-2160, thelocalnewton.com. Clara Silverstein Newton Living

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village

Food

1/2 cup walnut pieces 8 ounces Boucheron (aged chèvre) or any available goat cheese 1 1/2 cup mache or arugula leaves Vinaigrette

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon Spanish sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar 1 tablespoon cold water 1/3 cup canola oil Salt and pepper, to taste salad Preheat

Beauty and the Beet Roasted Beet and Aged ChÈvre Salad

Serves 4

Slightly warm but still crunchy, this warm beet salad from Aquitaine straddles the season between root vegetables and the first spring greens. Chris Robins, chef de cuisine, counts it among the top five menu favorites at all three Aquitaine locations: Chestnut Hill, the South End, and Dedham. The first step to making the salad is getting past bad memories of canned school-cafeteria beets. The next is oven-roasting the beets in flavorful balsamic vinegar. After they

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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cool, slice them; top with toasted walnuts, goat cheese, and greens. Then heat just until the cheese melts. “It’s a good, refreshing salad.” says Robins. “It’s pretty, too, with the purple beets, the melted cheese, and green leaves.” Maybe even President Barack Obama, who is known to shun beets, might take a bite. SALAD

1 1 2 1 1/4

pound large red beets cup balsamic vinegar cups water tablespoon salt, preferably kosher teaspoon pepper

the oven to 350 degrees. Rinse the beets with cold water and thoroughly pat dry. Put the beets in a deep roasting pan. Add the balsamic vinegar, water, salt and pepper, making sure the all the beets are partially submerged. Cover with foil and cook until the beets are tender when poked gently with a fork, approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour. Cooking time will depend on the size of the beets. Remove from the oven, uncover and cool. Leave the oven on for the next step. Place the walnuts in a single layer on a sheet pan. Place in the oven and roast for 8-10 minutes until golden brown. Remove and cool. Turn off the oven. Grate the Boucheron or, if using a softer goat cheese, simply crumble. Set aside. Cut the mache leaves about 1/4-inch from their roots. If using arugula, tear it into small pieces. Wash and keep covered with a cool, moist towel so the leaves stay fresh and crisp. Strain the liquid from the cooled beets (you can save it for a vinaigrette or re-use it as a roasting liquid for other root vegetables). Remove the skin from the beets by rubbing them with a paper towel (you may want to wear rubber gloves and an apron to avoid stains). With a mandoline or sharp knife, carefully slice the beets into thin discs about 1/8-inch thick.

VINAIGRETTE In a bowl, whisk together the

mustard, lemon juice, vinegar, and water. While continuing to whisk, slowly drizzle in the canola oil. It is very important that you do this slowly and not pour all of the oil in at once. Add salt and pepper, then whisk again.

ASSEMBLY Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Place a folded, cloth napkin on top of each of four large plates. Arrange overlapping slices of beet on the center of a round, heatproof dinner plate. Sprinkle cheese and nuts over the top of the beets. Repeat to make four plates. Place each plate in the oven for 3 minutes or until the cheese is melted. Remove and place each warm plate on the napkin-lined one. Top the beets with the mache or arugula and lightly dress with the vinaigrette. Serve at once.

photograph by

Kate Kelley

2/2/12 9:12 PM

Stephen Lazarou, MD www.drlazarou.com

Specializing in the treatment of men with low testosterone, sexual dysfunction, and infertility. Dr. Stephen Lazarou is a board-certified urologist affiliated with: > Newton-Wellesley Hospital > Beth Israel Deaconess > Harvard Vanguard

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village

Drink

Artisanal Beer Glut

Less-filling is out; mouthfeel is in. For the casual beer drinker—at least, those of us who’ve had time to grow soft in the middle— microbrews were a phenomenon of the 1990s. Yet the universe continues to expand. Walk into nearly any Newton liquor store today, and you’ll find shelves overrun by lots of unfamiliar cans and large, corked bottles. Many of these beers are made in old Belgian styles that are relatively new to the American palate: saisons, tripels, quadrupels. A few are actually brewed in abbeys. Others hail from small outfits in New England, the Midwest—even Utah. Some very good ones come from Mass-

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achusetts breweries in Cambridge, Worcester, Westport, and Millers Falls. None of these beers is marketed with Clydesdales, mountain water, or low caloric content, but with aroma, taste, and “mouthfeel.” To learn more, visit a local store and—as you might when buying wine—ask for suggestions. We did and headed home overflowing with new beer knowledge. John Sisson 1. St. Bernardus Abt 12, a popular quadrupel Abbey beer from Belgium: $12 (25 oz.) at Mr. K’s Discount Wine and Spirits, 980 Boylston St., 617-964-5551, mrksliquors.com. 2. Wyld, an organic

extra pale ale from Uinta Brewing: $10 (six pack) at Upper Falls Discount Liquors, 150 Needham St., 617-969-9200, thepostscript.com. 3. Extra Special Oak from Element Brewing Co. in Millers Falls: $14 (25 oz.) at Lower Falls Wine, 2366 Washington St., 617-332-3000, lowerfallswine.com. 4. Be Hoppy, an India Pale Ale for bitter beer fans from Worcester’s Wormtown Brewery: $8 (22 oz.) at The Urban Grape, 7 Boylston St., 617-232-4831, theurbangrape. com. 5. Tripel Threat, a Belgian-style tripel from Cambridge Brewing Co.: $8 (22 oz.) at Marty’s Fine Wines, 675 Washington St., 617-332-1230, martysfine wine.com. 6. Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale, a popular saison from Boulevard Brewing Co.: $10 (25 oz.), $11 four packs (12 oz.) at Murray’s, 747 Beacon St., 617-964-1550, murraysliquors.com. 7. Baby Tree, a quadrupel by Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project, brewed in Westport, Mass., $10 (22 oz.) at Walnut Market, 20 Lincoln St., 617-965-1170.

photograph by

Sharon White

2/3/12 8:09 AM

A Fresh Look at Consignment... High End Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Designer Clothing, Handbags and Accessories On Consignment One-of-a-Kind Jewelry by Kiki D. Design Uniquely Combined With Your Style in Mind!

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village

Style

Snappy Hour

Legendary Newton Centre clothier Mr. Sid succeeds by making shopping fun. (Really!) By Alyssa Giacobbe

When it comes to fashion, men can be a tough sell. Newton Centre men’s clothing stalwart Mr. Sid sees

the whole range of reluctant types, says company vice president Barry Segal, from those who “kvetch” about the price of a dress shirt (“then come back once they realize how comfortable quality feels,” says Segal) to husbands who need to be dragged in by wives complaining of an overstock of pilly sweaters back home. But it’s a myth, Segal says, that most men—or, specifically, most men in Newton— don’t care what they look like. “Newton is quite sophisticated,” says Segal, who runs the business with his brother, Stuart. (Dad, and company founder, Ira semi-retired a few years back, though he pops in often and calls every day.) “For most guys, convenience is the issue. They want to look nice, but don’t have a lot of time. They want to take care of their wardrobe, but then they want to have a cocktail.” Mr. Sid’s ability to cater to discerning men—while keeping the experi-

oh, man! From left, dapper sportcoats, shoes, shirts—and a billiards table—await customers. At right, Barry Segal tends to a client.

ence from being intimidating, overly precious, or just plain boring—has helped business stay strong in the same Newton Centre space since 1967. From the beginning, Ira—who named the store after his own father, who at one time ran a tuxedo rental shop on Langley Road—set out to bring upscale suiting from Europe and the U.S. to an increasingly affluent Newton. But it was the atmosphere that had customers coming back. With a welcoming, neighborhood vibe, daily in-store happy hour, and a convivial sales staff, shopping became something of a social activity. These days, Mr. Sid’s clubhouse feel remains: in addition to a fullystocked bar, there’s also a pool table that doubles as a display for sweaters and a flat-screen TV tuned to ESPN.

sharp dressed men

Newton has a longstanding tradition of making men look good.

Alan Bilzerian

Alan Bilzerian’s has been outfitting fashion forward men since 1967. It’s pricey, sure, but spot-on service and exclusive brands like Rick Owens, Alexander McQueen, and Christopher Kane mean your money’s well spent. 1217 Centre St., 617-630-9988, alanbilzerian.com.

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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Mosher’s

Run by the Mosher family since 1921, the shop offers custom tailoring as well as upscale suits, shirts, and ties by American and European brands that include Oxxford Clothes, Hickey Freeman, and Lucciano Barberra. 1221 Centre St., 617-527-3121, moshersfineclothing.com.

Simon & Son’s

In a welcoming Upper Falls space, the shop’s business and casual clothing, with their well-appointed offspring (since 1905!), includes suits, blazers, and shoes by largely American designers, like Joseph Abboud, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein. 210 Needham St., 617-969-8844, simonandsons.com.

Milton’s

A Chestnut Hill favorite since 1947, Milton’s makes upscale fashion accessible—familiar labels include Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Kenneth Cole, and DKNY—with competitive prices and a friendly (but never pushy) sales staff. 176 Boylston St., 617-969-4547, miltons.com. Alyssa Giacobbe

photographs by

Sadie Dayton

2/3/12 10:58 AM

(617) 332-2872

Parisa Safaei, DMD General Dentist

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But it’s not just suits—not anymore. In recent years, the store has expanded its selection of casual wear to accommodate a more laid-back workplace, as well as a clientele that wants to look snappy on the weekends, too. Popular brands include imports like Zegna, Brioni, Corneliani, and Isaia. The store also offers made-to-measure from a number of labels, which Segal says has been a favorite among men who are hard to fit or who want something special. “A custom-made dress shirt or suit can arrive in just four to six weeks, and you’ve got something literally made for you,” says Segal. “You choose the fabric, the model, the style. Customers do pay more but they get exactly what they want.” And as many reluctant shoppers as he sees, Segal says there are just as many regulars who stop in every Saturday to see what’s new—men who like to dress well, and who appreciate the ease of doing so at Mr. Sid, which offers in-house tailoring, a barber shop, and a sales staff with no shortage of opinions. “We’ve got clients who run multi-million dollar companies, but can’t decide whether they want cuffs or no cuffs on their pants,” says Segal. “Many men want some guidance. And that’s why we’re here. Otherwise, you might as well buy your clothes from vending machines.” 1211 Centre St., Newton Centre, 617-969-4540, mrsid.com.

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b arbara H einrich Trunk show april 15 - may 20 personal appearance thursday, april 12

a distinctive collection of artist’s jewelry

The Mall at Chestnut Hill 617 965-5555 QuadrumGallery.com

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2/3/12 10:58 AM

village

Style

Man, You Look Good!

Update your wardrobe with a few easy pieces. 1. Corneliani reversible wool and suede vest: $695, Mr. Sid, 1211 Centre St., 617-969-4540. 2. Lorenzini blue check shirt: $395, Mosher’s Men Store, 1221 Centre St., 617527-3121. 3. Alan Paine Sweater: $235, Mr. Sid. 4. Paige Doheny jeans: $185, National Jean Company, 34 Langley Rd., 617-9692888. 5. Stewart/Stand stainless steel wallet: $68, Stoddard’s, 360 Watertown St., 617-244-4187. 6. Socks, $35: Alan Bilzerian, 1217 Centre St., 617-630-9988. 7. Suede “Macalister” boots: $135, J.Crew, 300 Boylston St., 617-3320122. dana moscardelli

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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photograph by

Sharon White

2/3/12 8:13 AM

Art Classes

for Adults, Teens & Children

30years

Celebrating

• Over 90 Art Classes per Week • Exhibitions & Outreach Programs • Week-long Summer Programs for Children & Teens

New Art Center in Newton 61 Washington Park, Newtonville, MA 02460 EST. 1982

The New ArT CeNTer supports the development of visual artists and cultivates a community that appreciates art.

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400 Arsenal Street | Watertown t: 617.926.5800 | www.romatile.com

Join us for our Community Seminar and Luncheon! March 8th, 2012 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

Karoun’s Restaurant 839 Washington St. Newton, MA 02460

Proud provider of Phonak hearing aids

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Toll Free (877) 533-7603 West Newton Hearing Center

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Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the latest advancements in hearing aid technology. As an added benefit, we have invited special guest and Phonak Technology Expert Dr. Melissa Pacey-Mahaffey.

2/3/12 8:23 AM

village

Places

the sweet life left to right, auburndale community library; bocca bella café & bistro; silk road fine fabrics; and new breadsong corner bakery.

Discover: Auburndale

Just off Commonwealth Ave., this walkable village offers small-town convenience, eclectic stores, and memorable treats. By tiffany smith

EAT

Auburndale is all about casual dining, all day long. Perk up your morning coffee with some sticky buns or manteca (a Guatemalan sweet bread) from the New Breadsong Corner Bakery (349 Auburn St., 617-964-4004, breadsongbakery.com). Owners Edgar Zavala and Rumyana Gizdova offer lunch options in addition to their homemade bread. Head to local favorite the Knotty Pine Lunch (295 Auburn St., 617-527-9864, knottypinelunch.com) for mom-and-pop charm and dietbusting specials. Stop in for a no-frills, all-flavor slice or sub at Tom’s Pizza and Sandwich Shop (423 Lexington

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St., 617-969-4979, toms-pizza.com), or cross the street for sit-down service at Bocca Bella Café & Bistro (442 Lexington St., 617-928-1200, boccabellacafe.com) and chef Mario Bocca Bella’s ever-changing menu. On March 16, celebrate the spring reopening of Wally’s Wicked Good Ice Cream & Treats (419 Lexington St., 617-2443555, wallyswickedgood.com) with some Graham Central Station, Coffee Oreo treats, or ice cream “cake pops.”

SHOP

Need a baby shower present or a house-warming gift? Solve gift-giving needs by picking up a bouquet at

Ken’s Flower Cafe (2111 Commonwealth Ave., 617-965-5069), a bottle of vino at the Auburndale Wine & Spirits (2102 Commonwealth Ave., 617-244-2772, thepostscript.com), or a small toy or chachka at Just Next Door Cards and Gifts (327 Auburn St., 617-965-6797). Please tea lovers with loose leaf varieties from Virtuous Teas (425 Lexington St., 617928-0577, virtuousteas.com), such as Pigeonville Special—Auburndale’s original name. Owner Eo McNeil and manager Jenny Anckorn offer accessories, free samples, and vintage tea cups. Get a print framed at Abraxis Framing Co. (279 Auburn St., photographs by

Robert Boyd

2/3/12 8:25 AM

village people clockwise from top left, the commuter rail stop; auburndale wine & spirits; the auburndale burger at the knotty pine; virtuous teas; Eric Blomster of Abraxis Framing co.; and just next door cards and gifts.

617-818-6968, abraxisdesign.com). Check out the eclectic mix of clothes and jewelry at the Dressing Room (293 Auburn St., 617-965-3442), or design your own fashions with vintage fabrics and textiles from around the world at Newton native Gay Appleby Rogers’ Silk Road Fine Fabrics (281 Auburn St., 617244-7455, tsrfinefabrics.com).

Spring pollen season is coming, so stock up on antihistamines at Ray Dinno’s Keyes Drug (2090 Commonwealth Ave., 617-244-2794, keyesdrug.com). It is the last independent pharmacy in Newton, dating back to the nineteenth century—

although not in its present location. Around the corner, the cozy Turtle Lane Playhouse (283 Melrose St., 617-2440169, turtlelane.org) has been delighting theatergoers for more than thirty years. (See event listings on page 27.) Need quiet time or a toddler-friendly zone? Stop by the historic Auburndale Community Library (375 Auburn St., 617-552-7158, auburndalelibrary.org), where you can curl up with a bestseller or a picture book. Sure, Auburndale offers many conveniences: a supermarket, filling stations, and bank branches. But, the next time you visit, park the car. Walk around the block and discover the village of Auburndale.

Michael Huller Architects Listening Collaborating Creating Before

After

Family Room New Homes, Additions, Renovations

www.michaelhullerarchitects.com 6 1 7 - 9 6 5 - 4 6 1 8

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2/3/12 11:06 AM

VILLAGE

Arts

The Narrator

From Ponzi schemes to Shangri-La, Waban author listens for the untold story. BY JEFF OUSBORNE While Mitchell Zuckoff ’s Lost in Shangri-La recounts the aftermath of a tragic plane crash, the creative inception of the book began with a happier accident. “I was working on another project that wasn’t coming together,” says the author, a Waban resident. “So I started reading old

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newspaper archives to relax and saw a headline: glider rescue in shangri-la delayed by clouds. It was all laid out for me: World War II, Stone Age people, gliders, a lost valley…” He had stumbled upon a great lost story. In May 1945, 24 American service members and WACs (Women’s

Army Corps) stationed in remote Dutch New Guinea took a sightseeing flight to a remote valley. The trip was a lark: a morale FLYING HIGH MITCHELL ZUCKOFF booster for flagIN HIS HOME OFFICE; LOST IN SHANGRI-LA, HIS ging spirits on NEWEST BOOK, INSET. a dreary Pacific outpost. When the plane crashed, however, the three survivors faced grief, life-threatening injuries, and a slim chance of rescue beneath the dense jungle canopy. To make things worse, the valley natives were rumored to be seven-foot-tall cannibals who “practiced human sacrifice on stone altars.” As fiction, the plot would snap credulity. So would the quirky cast of characters, including a beautiful and adventurous WAC, Margaret Hastings (“I just fell in love with her,” says Zuckoff ); a battle-hungry bear of a paratrooper, Earl Warren, who leads the make-it-up-as-we-go-along mission; a mélange of friendly indigenous people who believe the Americans are tribal spirits; and even civilian Alexander Cann, a shady Hollywood actor and drinking buddy of Humphrey Bogart who parachutes into the story—“drunk as a hoot owl”—to document the improbable rescue on film. It’s one of those tales that seems to write itself, but Zuckoff ’s artfulness conceals his storyteller’s art as well as his hard work. The book led him all the way to New Guinea, where he spoke to natives and their relatives who remember the event, nearly 70 years later. “It was easier than I expected,” says the affable author. “Every old person I talked to knew of the story. Or they’d say: ‘Go to this village and talk to that person.’ Go to Newton Centre and ask, ‘What was World War II like around here?’ and you’d probably have a hard time finding out much. But

PHOTOGRAPH BY

John Goodman

2/3/12 8:31 AM

for the native people in Dutch New Guinea, it’s all part of their historical cycles. Things don’t change much.” Zuckoff came to long-form journalism after years of working for newspapers and wire services, including a hitch as special-projects editor at the Boston Globe. He now teaches investigative reporting and feature writing at Boston University—when he’s not writing books like Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend (2005) or Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (2009). “I totally lucked into that one,” he says of working with the legendary director of MASH and Gosford Park. “An agent called and

said, ‘Altman’s looking to put together a book on the art and craft of the filmmaker.’ I said, ‘I am totally unqualified for the job, but if you don’t get me on that list, you’re fired.’” Zuckoff proved a good match for the renegade auteur (“He hated the Yankees, just like I do”), and the result is a portrait as engaging and multilayered as an Altman movie. Zuckoff ’s next project will focus on a character usually absent from his books: himself. It’s the story of three plane crashes in Greenland at the end of World War II, interwoven with the personal narrative of his own trip to the crash sites. “After this one,” he says. “I’m all done with plane crashes.”

THE EMERALD FILE SELECTED PIECES FROM RURAL IRELAND AT THE MCMULLEN MUSEUM OF ART.

THE LISTINGS

NOT-TO-BE-MISSED MARCH AND APRIL EVENTS.

Exhibits

RURAL IRELAND. An exhibition of household objects, architectural shards, and works of art depicts how Irish country people lived, conducted business, worshipped, and educated and entertained themselves. The exhibit runs through June 3 at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art, Devlin Hall. Free admission. 617-552-8100, bc.edu/artmuseum.

Music

THE WORD

ESSENTIAL READING FROM FOUR NEWTON AUTHORS. BY ROBIN REGENSBURG DEFENDING JACOB BY WILLIAM LANDAY FICTION. 432 PAGES. DELACORTE PRESS, $26 HARDCOVER, $13 KINDLE.

This third crime novel from Newton author William Landay (williamlanday.com) was published in January to starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist. Unlike his first two thrillers, Defending Jacob moves beyond the urban world of cops and criminals into the suburban landscape. Landay will appear at 7 p.m., March 1, at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., 617-244-6619, newtonvillebooks.com. COVERING AMERICA: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF A NATION’S JOURNALISM BY CHRISTOPHER B. DALY NONFICTION. 576 PAGES. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS, $50 HARDCOVER.

Is American journalism really a failing business model? In his latest book, Newton resident, journalist and

Boston University associate professor Christopher B. Daly (journalismprofessor .com) traces the evolution of journalism in America from the early 1700s through today’s digital revolution. Drawing from his own research and synthesizing the latest scholarship, Daly presents today’s journalism within a broad historical context, showing it in a state of transition, rather than “crisis.” Read more at umass.edu/umpress/ title/covering-america. SERIOUSLY, JUST GO TO SLEEP BY ADAM MANSBACH. ILLUSTRATIONS BY RICARDO CORTÉS. CHILDREN’S. 32 PAGES. AKASHIC BOOKS, $16 HARDCOVER.

Adam Mansbach (adammansbach.com) struck a chord last year with his R-rated send-up of the bedtime story, Go the F*** to Sleep. His G-rated version of the book comes out in April. Mansbach grew up in Waban, graduating from

Newton South High School in 1994, and today resides in Berkeley, California. FLATSCREEN BY ADAM WILSON FICTION. 336 PAGES. HARPER PERENNIAL, $15 PAPERBACK.

Adam Wilson’s debut novel is set in “Quinosset,” the fictional name for Newton, where the author grew up. In the book, the narrator describes a local temple: “Beth Shalom might appear to be part of the Pine Hill Mall, sometimes referred to as the Mall at Pine Hill… High Holidays: front lot like a rap video removed of black people. Mercedes, Lexus, Beamers. This is where we used to park until Dad left. Then we drove a Camry, and they stuck us out back.” Wilson (adamzwilson.com) will appear at 7 p.m., March 8, at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., 617-244-6619, newtonvillebooks.com.

SUZUKI SCHOOL FACULTY CONCERT. Members of the music school’s faculty will perform classical works at 3 p.m. on March 4, in Wilson Chapel, Andover Newton Theological School, 210 Herrick Rd. Tickets $8–20: 617-964-4522, suzukinewton.org. MISTRESS BRADSTREET. Boston’s Cappalla Clausura celebrates the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Anne Bradstreet, one of New England’s earliest poets, with music composed by Hilary Tann. The Newton performance will be at 8 p.m. on March 17, Parish of the Messiah, 1900 Commonwealth Ave. Tickets $15–25: clausura.org. PLAY BALL! The New Philharmonia Orchestra celebrates baseball season with a family concert featuring “Casey at the Bat” and a sing-along! Baseball attire encouraged. (No cleats.) Performance at 3 p.m. on April 1, First Baptist Church, 848 Beacon St. Tickets $10–15: 617-527-9717, newphil.org.

Theatre

Theatre Ink will perform the musical comedy based on the popular movie of the same name. Performances at 7:30 p.m. on March 15–17 and at 2 p.m. on March 18 in the Performing Arts Center at Newton North High School, 457 Walnut St. Ticket information: 617-559-6406, theatreink.net.

LEGALLY BLONDE.

THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING

BEE. The Turtle Lane Players take on this comic musical. Performances at 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays, 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. on Sundays, April 13–29, at Turtle Lane Playhouse, 283 Melrose St. Tickets $27–32: 617-244-0169, turtlelane.org.

NEWTON LIVING

MAR/APR 2012

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village

Sports

Running on Healthy This Newton physician helps ensure that Heartbreak Hill ain’t heart attack hill. By john bostwick

Newton Highlands’ Pierre d’Hemecourt is a keen runner who began jogging in 1977 during his first year of medical school. Since then, he has competed in an impressive seven Boston marathons. “I still try to run a marathon a year,” he says, “it just can’t be Boston.” That’s because, as co-medical director of the Boston Marathon, d’Hemecourt has other concerns on race day. He and another physician direct a large medical staff who look after the well being of more than 20,000 registered marathon runners. It’s a job d’Hemecourt has been doing for the past decade. D’Hemecourt and his co-director work to ensure that participants have access to medical care all along the marathon route. This massive effort includes working with representatives marathon man: co-medical director of the boston marathon, pierre d’hemecourt, m.d.

run, newton, run

Local runners and volunteers set goals for the Boston Marathon. By Tiffany Smith

was the fastest kid on his block growing up. Now the 45-year-old is one of the fastest runners in Newton— winning the 2011 Katie Lynch half marathon and Doyle’s Emerald Necklace Road Race.

Greg Picklesimer

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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Corey Smetana, only 24,

is already a four-time veteran. “People are always amazed at how young I am, but I just want to go out there and have fun,” says the Boston College graduate student and author of the Runners Cookie blog (runnerscookie.com).

Larry Aller’s first marathon may have been as an unregistered bandit runner who landed in a medical tent, but the 32-year-old Ironman triathlete is now a seasoned pro who competes to raise breast cancer awareness.

Christine Spira, 46, will be running on a team to raise awareness for the John M. Barry Boys & Girls Club of Newton. A Newton-Wellesley Hospital team is running to raising money for its cancer center. Both are official charities of the 2012 marathon.

Alvin Silverstein, 75, is

proof you don’t need running shoes to be involved. Silverstein has been manning security at the finish line for more than two decades, and is motivated by the volunteers “who return year-after-year.”

portrait by

Joel Laino

2/3/12 8:33 AM

training day

Race day helps hospital workers flirt with disaster.

Every Patriot’s Day, Newton-Wellesley Hospital staff members are preparing for the worst. The hospital uses the racing event as a test run for its emergency command center, during which a hospital executive oversees operations, keeping in touch with fire, police and the media via a virtual computer network from a room off the cafeteria. The annual exercise stems from the marathon on April 19, 2004—remembered by some as “the 85 day.” “We had about 85 patients in 85 minutes, and it was an 85 degree day,” said Charlotte Roy, emergency preparedness coordinator. ER doctor Barry Tils says, “In recent years, the volume has not even come close.... but we’re better prepared because of it.” Don Seiffert

from eight municipalities, staffing medical tents, appointing team leaders, and strategically positioning defibrillators and other medical equipment. D’Hemecourt likens the result to a “mini M.A.S.H. unit.” In addition to these duties and manning a medical tent on race days, his job involves educating registrants in the months leading up to the event. While regular running generally decreases one’s health risks, he says, the stresses of running a full marathon can result in hypothermia, heat cramps, stress fractures, and other complications. Education is critical to reducing these risks. The gravest health concern on race day is the possibility of cardiac arrest, which most commonly strike victims during the final mile of the race or in the half hour following it. D’Hemecourt instructs runners to train intelligently, to pay attention to symptoms that may indicate heart disease, and to discuss marathon preparation and participation with a doctor. While the field of running medicine is sometimes sobering, d’Hemecourt is enthusiastic about the sport. When asked to speak about some of the Boston marathon’s triumphs and tragedies, he mentions only triumphs. D’Hemecourt says he derives inspiration from watching the many people who participate in the marathon for charities and family, “You see people start with a lot of energy, and then they go through this grueling race, and at the end, there’s a tremendous feeling of joy at having finished. It’s amazing to watch.”

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For all of your real estate needs. ©2012 Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. Coldwell Banker is a registered trademark licensed to Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. An Equal Opportunity Employer. Equal Housing Opportunity. Owned and operated by NRT, LLC .

2/3/12 8:33 AM

village

Sports

Swing Kids

Squash, an old Newton pastime, picks up popularity. By Don Seiffert

Four tennis courts are the first tipoff that an unassuming house off Commonwealth Avenue is actually the Newton Squash and Tennis Club. The club didn’t even have a sign until a few years ago, although it’s the oldest continuously run squash club in the U.S. “We’ve always been an incredibly wellkept secret. Nobody knows who we are,” said club President Jonathon Katz. For those who don’t know the sport, it’s played on a 32-by-21-foot court walled in on all four sides. Games last about 45 minutes, in which two to four players try and hit a black ball that’s a little bigger than a golf ball and not as bouncy as a racquetball. That makes it hard to return and is one reason a 2003 Forbes magazine article named squash the “fittest of all sports.” “It’s intense,” said Nat Lovell, president of Massachusetts Squash. “You’re hitting a lot of balls, as opposed to say, tennis, where you’re standing on the baseline a lot of the time.” With 22 clubs, the Boston area is one of the most active squash centers in the U.S. And Massachusetts Squash, he said, runs the most active junior programs in the country. Katz, 59, joined the club 11 years ago when it was an older crowd, but a rehab project a few years ago brought new squash courts and facilities. “That breathed a lot of life into the club,” he says. Now the club has a waiting list. Among the longest-term members is Bill Horwitz, 80, a member for 50 years. He started playing when he first moved to Newton Centre because, with young kids, it was a good way to exercise in the evening. He now plays about four times a week against opponents often half his age, but admits, “I don’t win so much anymore.”

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ahead of the game Timmy Brownell prepares to play. Below, left to right, Alex Cohen, Timmy’s sister Jesse Brownell, and Timmy knock the ball around.

photographs by

Jared Charney

2/3/12 8:38 AM

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Business leading the way chapman construction/ design ceo john hall.

by the numbers

3rd

2011 rank of Massachusetts—behind California and Oregon—in the strength of its green economy, according to research firm Clean Edge, Inc.

Percentage of its electricity that Chapman Construction/Design generates itself.

57 1984

Number of Chapman employees.

Year Mark Kalin opened his architectural specifications firm.

thousand

Number of Big Belly Solar trash cans sold since 2003.

20 $450 Number of them in Newton.

thousand

Gross sales of sustainable building materials by Terrene of New England last year.

600

LED bulbs replacing flood lights on the campus of Lasell College.

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The Green Lines

Garden city firms combine industry with sustainability. By Don Seiffert Chapman Construction/Design CEO John Hall’s interest in environmentalism dates back more than thirty years, long before sustainability became an environmental buzzword. Hall’s forward thinking construction management firm has become a leader on sustainable practices in that industry. Today, the firm applies those practices to more than two hundred commercial projects each year. Its Newton Highlands headquarters is one of just three Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum-certified buildings in the state, incorporating environmental design from the first floor’s kitchen counters to the rooftop garden. The office generates much of its own power through rooftop solar panels, an accomplishment that can be monitored in real time on the company website (chap-con.com).

While the past three years have been particularly tough on the construction industry, Hall has maintained the company’s emphasis on environmentalism. “I was taking the recession time to invest in being a leader in sustainability,” he said. “Everyone else was taking time just to survive.” That leadership is evident in Chapman’s role as an approved provider of professional education programs to architects and LEEDaccredited professionals, and its designation in 2011 as one of the five best architecture, engineering, and construction firms to work for by Building Design+Construction magazine. Last year, the firm also founded annual scholarships for Wentworth Institute of Technology students to encourage the study of sustainable construction and design.

photographs by

Ian Justice

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The Garden City is, in fact, home to many green firms. Kalin Associates (spec-net.com) was one of the first architectural specifications firms to focus on “green specs”—helping builders choose local, recycled and non-toxic materials. Kalin’s foresight has become common knowledge today. “We knew we had a contributing role as to decisions about what products to put in a building,” he says. Terrene of New England (terreneofne.com) has been selling green building materials since its Newton Corner showroom opened in 2008. Owner Bob LeFond says the demand for products like bamboo flooring, formaldehyde-free cabinets and whey-based polyurethane has helped the firm weather the recession. And he forecasts more growth: “People think that green is mainstream, but it’s not. It’s in its infancy,” he said. “We’re in a part of the country that’s more environmentally aware.” Big Belly Solar (bigbellysolar.com) designs and sells solar-powered trash cans that reduce the cost and pollution of trash collection, automatically compacting trash, and alerting a manager when the trash needs emptying. Newton became one of the Wells Avenue company’s early clients when former mayor David Cohen bought six units with grant money. Since then, units have spread all the way to Europe. General Compression in Nonantum solves one of the biggest problems with wind power: its natural fluctuation. The company has developed technology to pack air into underground salt caverns so that, when the wind dies down, the compressed air can be released to power wind turbines. Marc Fournier, who oversees green efforts at Lasell College in Auburndale, has worked to replace floodlights on campus with LED bulbs and, in 2010, recycled an old barn on campus. Fournier, a father of two, says he’s driven by a sense of duty to make up for wasteful behavior. “Our kids are going to inherit all the mistakes we’ve made,” he said.

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Join us! To learn more about our day and overnight summer camps, meet staff, get questions answered—attend a Camp Information Night at our YMCA on Tuesday, March 13th from 6:30 - 8:00 pm.

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Giving

LEAD COUNSEL SECOND STEP’S EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR ROBERTA ROSENBERG.

Giant Steps

For twenty years, this Newton nonprofit has provided a different path for victims of domestic violence. BY ROBIN REGENSBURG

When Amalah would no longer engage in verbal arguments with her husband, he began to physically abuse her. When she finally managed to leave, with two children and no money, they stayed temporarily in a Boston-area domestic violence crisis shelter. Many victims of domestic abuse lack further options. But some, like Amalah and her children, find their way to The Second Step. The organization was founded in 1982 by four Boston-area women who met while volunteering at a crisis shelter in Waltham. They observed that many victims returned to abusive situations because they lacked housing and economic independence. When the founders were seeking a Boston-area location to house the new organization, they met with the enthusiastic support of Theodore Mann, mayor of Newton at the time, who helped them procure space. The nonprofit has been based in Newton ever since. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank helped the group secure its first federal grant in 1992.

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Today, The Second Step offers an array of services for families moving away from abuse: legal advocacy, transitional housing, financial assistance, and services for children, including mentoring and afterschool care. The Second Step differs from crisis shelters in many respects. For those who are admitted, the organization provides transitional housing in communal residences for up to two years. These residences are in a sububan location where children can attend local schools. Survivors work with professional staff members and mentors and must find employment, participate in job training or volunteer work, or be enrolled in school. The transitional housing program serves 30 families annually, while the community program serves 120 families every year. Executive director Roberta Rosenberg said The Second Step is preparing to celebrate its 20th anniversary at an April 26 event. She also summarized the concerns that will shape the organization’s work as it heads into its third decade. They include the prevention of abuse through counseling and education; time for victims of abuse to regain self-esteem, physical and emotional health and financial stability; and resources to help children. The Second Step, 617-965-3999, thesecondstep.org.

OUT OF THE OFFICE

LIBRARY FUNDRAISER GETS A CELEBRITY TOUCH.

The Office star—and Cambridge native— Mindy Kaling headlines Newton Free Library’s Spring Fling on March 31. This year’s fundraising event celebrates the achievements of four regional authors. Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me (and Other Concerns), has been a fixture on the best seller lists of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The four other authors being honored are Leah Hager Cohen, whose The Grief of Others was designated a notable book of 2011 by the New York Times; Edith Pearlman for her short story collection Binocular Vision; music critic Tim Riley, author of the new biography Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music—The Definitive Life; and memoir writer Lou Ureneck for Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine. The evening will be hosted by NPR’s Tom Ashbrook and local author William Novak, who will introduce the authors and read excerpts. Proceeds from the event go toward the purchase of library materials. Tickets: $125, newtonfreelibrary.net.

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Affairs

The Squeeze Cultural organizations struggle to find office space and places to rehearse. By Don Seiffert

A lack of space for offices, rehearsals, and performances by Newton’s arts and cultural organizations has already driven at least one chorus and a theater group out of the city. Next year, ten groups—including a music school and a theatre company—will have to leave the spaces they rent at the Newton Cultural Center in Nonantum because that building, the former Carr School, is being reclaimed for the school system. This issue does not affect only people who like art exhibits or classical concerts. Accord-

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ing to the New England Foundation for the Arts, the arts have a very tangible effect on the city’s economy. The foundation estimates that average home values in Newton get a $71,845 boost thanks to the 200-plus arts and cultural organizations in the city. “People don’t move into a community for jobs anymore. People move in for cultural organizations,” said former mayor Tom Concannon, president of the Newton Cultural Alliance (NCA). Formed in 2007, The NCA is charged with promoting arts in the city, and Concannon’s priority is solving the current space jam. Nearly eight years ago, Linda Plaut moved the Mayor’s Office on Cultural Affairs into the then-vacant Carr School, establishing the city’s first cultural center. “We had an immediate response,” said Plaut. Arts groups took advantage of the low rent—around $8 a square foot—for offices and classrooms, but they still had few choices for large performance halls. Adrienne Hartzell, executive director of the New Philharmonia Orchestra, says churches are really the only option available since the high schools are too busy. The New Phil performs and rehearses at the First Baptist Church in Newton Centre, and keeps its offices at Andover Newton. “We’ve been around this city more times than I want to say, banging our heads against the wall trying to find a space,” she said. The Suzuki School of Newton, which offers music lessons to students of all ages, rents more than a dozen rooms at the Cultural Center, and books performance space at Day Middle School. The school has spent all of its 26 years in Newton, and Sachiko Isihara, the school’s executive director, hopes to stay. But the nonprofit organization has grown from 200 to 300 students in the last six years. Isihara says it’s difficult to find a big enough space. Housed in the city-owned Jackson Homestead, Historic Newton pays no rent for its space, but there’s no room for storage. Items are stuffed in “every nook and cranny.” Director Cynthia Stone says, “My office closet is full of quilts.” The group hopes to collaborate with other organizations on a solution. “We just need to find a space, and figure out how to pay for it,” she said.

dress rehearsal tom concannon, president of the newton cultural alliance, standing in Wilson Chapel at the Andover Newton Theological School.

home is where the art is More than 20 community-based or nonprofit arts and culture groups call Newton home. Art New Art Center Newton Art Association Newton Open Studios Dance American Chinese Art Society Boston Ballet School Music Boston Artists Ensemble Cappella Clausura Highland Glee Club Highland Jazz New Philharmonia Orchestra Newton Choral Society Newton Community Chorus Newton Family Singers Newton Symphony Orchestra Suzuki School of Newton Youth Pro Musica Zamir Chorale of Boston Theatre Circuit Theatre Company Jewish Theatre of New England Newton Country Players The Turtle Lane Playhouse History Historic Newton

photograph by

Angela Coppola

2/3/12 9:00 AM

Change in Ownership

This map provides a macro view of the turnover of residential and commercial properties citywide over many decades. Properties are colored according to the decade of their last sale date. At a glance, one can see how quickly the city evolves. Around half of the city’s residential properties have changed hands over the past two decades. According to five-year estimates made by the U.S. Census, 48% of Newton householders moved in since 2000, 22% date to the 1990s, 12% to the 1980s, and 17% predate 1980. john sisson The map was developed by Doug Greenfield of Newton’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) office for the city’s Community Preservation Program. Most city departments depend on GIS information, and residents can browse the GIS database online at newtonma.gov/MIS/gis/gispage.htm.

legend Last sale date since 2001 last sale date 1991-2000 last sale date 1980-1990 last sale date prior to 1980

city briefs

map, City of Newton GIS office

more cutthrough traffic?

City leaders and the Public Safety & Transportation Committee have been discussing how planned changes to Interstate 95/Route 128 will affect traffic on city streets. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s project, which has included changes all the way south to Route 24, will widen the interstate to four travel lanes along 3.3 miles near Newton. The construction will affect three interchanges: Route 9, Kendrick Street and Highland Street. Design work is to be completed this year, with construction starting in

2013. Because Newton is conveniently located between that traffic artery and the Massachusetts Turnpike, commuter traffic does affect travel on local roads.

Community Preservation survey

Because Newton participates in the state community preservation program, the city will generate nearly $20 million to fund preservation projects over the next five years. Newton officials want residents to weigh in on the types of projects that should be supported in the community. Funding for projects is limited

to affordable housing, historic resources, open space, and recreational land. Take the survey online: newtonma.gov/cpa.

Leaky pipes

Since 2010, the Massachussetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA) has estimated that 56.3% of Newton’s average daily sewage flow was not sewage but clean water—such as runoff from rainstorms— that infiltrates the system through leaks in the city’s underground sewage pipes. According to estimates made by alderman Ruthanne Fuller, the city is spending as much as $11.1 million annually for the MWRA to process

clean water. City officials estimate that repairing the leaks will cost more than $50 million.

Text the library

Since midwinter, the Newton Free Library has allowed patrons to ask reference questions and request information by sending text messages. Library staff use a web interface to respond. The system sends answers back to users’ devices while protecting the patrons’ anonymity. Text NewLib to 66746 for instructions. Message and data rates may apply, and, until further notice, War and Peace can still be enjoyed in print.

Beautify Newtonville

A new grassroots organization called Beautiful Newtonville seeks to revitalize that village center through volunteer projects. Organizers have held meetings with residents, village businesses and city officials and received a $5,000 donation from Cambridge Savings Bank, which recently opened a branch on Walnut Street. Last year, the village of Upper Falls organized a neighborhood area council to build civic engagement in that part of the city. It was the second such city-chartered group in Newton. The development of area councils has been a priority of Newton mayor Setti Warren.

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HOME DESIGN

“The glass walls make it feel like you’re outside; it’s wonderful when it’s snowing. All the natural sunlight makes winter really manageable.” SUZI WILDER, WEST NEWTON HILL HOMEOWNER AND GLASS ARTIST

40 / Home Design: Modern in the Middle 48 / Style: Home Accents 54 / Back to School 60 / Q: How Jewish is the Garden City? 64 / Stephen Kaufer Interview: Speed Wins PHOTOGRAPH BY

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the home design issue

in the Middle

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LDa Architecture merges shingle and glass to create a contemporary West Newton Hill home thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s steeped in tradition. text by marni elyse katz photographs by greg premru

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the home design issue

Having renovated Suzi and Tom Wilder’s West Newton home three times, Treff LaFleche, principal at LDa Architecture & Interiors in Cambridge, was well qualified to design a new house for the family of five, this time from scratch. In 2005, the Wilders purchased three-quarters of an acre on a cul-de-sac in West Newton Hill. Although just around the corner from where they lived, the neighborhood, which was carved out of an estate that was subdivided in the 1960s, had a decidedly more contemporary feel. The couple, who both grew up in New England, commissioned LaFleche. “They wanted a contemporary home, but not one that would seem disconnected from the area’s traditional houses,” LaFleche says. While Tom, a commercial real estate guy, was a tad hesitant, Suzi, a glass artist who creates colorful pieces under the label Wilder Glass (wilderglassworks.com), relished the chance to go light and airy. It took two years to plan and build (“It was a very organized process… everything was nailed down before we started,” says Suzi), but the result is spectacular. The 5,200-square-foot residence, built by GF Rhode Construction, harmoniously blends vernacular New England architecture with that of the modern day. Two traditional New England buildings, clad in natural red-cedar shingles and set on a foundation of local stone, are connected by a boxy form of storefront-like windows constructed from extruded aluminum and glass. It’s an exquisite juxtaposition in which LaFleche marries eras and seamlessly integrates commercial conventions, like exposed raw-steel beams. He says, “We turned the house inside out a bit, allowing structural elements to also serve as decorative ones.” The family loves it. Suzi says, “It’s very cozy. We use all of it, and even once the children leave, it will still be perfect.”

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This page: In the living room, sofas from B&B Italia and a pair of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs cluster around the fireplace with Absolute Black granite surround. An oil painting by New England artist (and family friend) Peter Poskas hangs above. Suzi rotates the sofas seasonally so those lounging face the fire in winter and the sunny room and verdant yard in summer. Previous spread: Two traditional New England forms with peaked roofs are connected by a contemporary component of extruded aluminum and glass. The glass wraps the home’s public spaces—living room, dining room, and kitchen—imbuing them with an abundance of sunlight year-round. Doors in all three rooms open onto the terrace and deck, which give way to the bi-level yard, designed by landscape architect Gregory Lombardi.

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the home design issue

Light from the front faรงade filters through the spare, open-riser steel staircase. Its design echoes other industrial features in the house, including the structural-steel column and beams seen here. Throughout, prosaic elements become artistic, like the bolt heads on the rail post. Woodworker Michael Humphries built the sideboards, which provide space for art and screening from the street. Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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Top: The family pug Milo blends with the neutral décor of Suzi’s home office, with its custom maple cabinetry. Bottom: The casual seating area in front of the glass wall, just across from the kitchen island, enjoys warmth from a freestanding gas fireplace and a woodsy view. The family calls the cozy spot their own personal Starbucks. Modern track lighting is suspended from the structural-steel beams so family members can enjoy a cup of cocoa and a book on winter evenings.

An LC4 cowhide lounge chair designed by mid-century modern masters Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand is tucked into a sunny corner of the glass-encased, sunken living room. The floor is made of a gray-stained concrete, which provides a contrast to the bamboo flooring in the rest of the house.

The “mudroom” resembles a gym locker room, complete with wall-mounted water fountain and polymer-resin floor. The red lockers came from a school-supply company, as did the bench. Suzi says, “It’s great. I throw whatever junk the kids leave around into their lockers.” The design of the back staircase, which leads down to the basement and up to the children’s bedrooms, echoes that of the main one.

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Instead of building a breakfast room, the Wilders opted for a centrally located dining room, positioned smack in the middle of the house between the kitchen and living room, so that it would get plenty of use. Indeed, this is where the family meals are eaten. LaFleche brought the ceiling down in this space, to lend a sense of intimacy in the otherwise open layout. Although there’s space all around it, the room feels appropriately intimate. The dark-wood dining table, which matches the partition-cum-sideboards, was purchased at Montage in Boston, and the redupholstered chairs from BoConcept in Cambridge.

While at the stove, Suzi, who’s an avid cook, can both chat with guests at the counter and see through to the other end of the house. She says, “I love the kitchen. It’s very spacious, with so much counter space.” Refrigerated beverage drawers at the end of the island come in handy with three kids. Gas fireplace by RAIS. The stainless-steel double sink, in front of a wall of extruded-aluminum windows, faces the woods. The home abuts a tract of land that’s never been developed. The family spies some amazing wildlife, including foxes, turkeys, and coyotes. The countertops are a honed quartz CaesarStone in Lagos Blue. Suzi says, “I wanted a uniform and modern look.” A structural-steel column, like those in the dining room, complete with chunky hardware, pokes up through the counter. Playing off the industrial theme, electrical outlets line the countertop as though it were a laboratory. The bottom row of awning windows, a style found in manufacturing plants and schools built between the 1920s and 1950s, can be cranked open for crossventilation. The simple stainless-steel handle adds to the utilitarian, yet sleek, vibe.

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the home design issue

Next to the main entry, a glass wall spans two stories—the dining room on the first floor, and a children’s lounge on the second. LaTreffe added a breeze soleil to filter the light and control the solar gain on the glass, since it’s a southern exposure. Steel beams and posts identical to those inside also appear as exterior elements.

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THE HOME DESIGN ISSUE

A SHOCK OF COLOR, MIX-NMATCH PATTERNS. BRIGHTEN UP YOUR HOME AND BURST INTO SPRING WITH THE SEASONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S EYE-OPENING HUES. THIS PAGE

Sunflower chair, $129, TJ Maxx. OPPOSITE

Clockwise from top right: Papertowel holder, $12.99, TJ Maxx. Ceramic berry basket, $14, Anthropologie. Lemons, Whole Foods. Thermo wine cooler, $7.99; dish towels, $3.99 (set of two), TJ Maxx. Alexandra von Furstenberg soulmate tray, $209, Elizabeth Caan Interiors. Mug, $5.95, Crate & Barrel. Grapefruit sugar bowl, $18, Anthropologie. Carafe, $12.99, TJ Maxx. Pre de Provence lemongrass soap, $9; John Derian dish, $74, Portobello Road. Tulips, Whole Foods. Komachi knife, $3.99, TJ Maxx. Bisley drawers, $79.99, The Container Store. Magnetic timer, $12, Anthropologie.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHARON WHITE STYLING BY DANA MOSCARDELLI

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THE HOME DESIGN ISSUE

THIS PAGE

Owl cookie jar, $98, Anthropologie.

OPPOSITE Clockwise from top right: Ziggy pillow, $195, Elizabeth Caan Interiors. Topiary candlestick holders, $14.95-18.95 each, Crate & Barrel. Table cloth, $78,

Anthropologie. Alexandra von Furstenberg chicklet dish, $150, Elizabeth Caan Interiors. Succulent plant, $15, Portobello Road. Paper-pot tissue holder, $39.99, The Container Store. Towels, $16.50-$75, Bloomingdaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Capri Blue citrine candle, $28, Anthropologie. Candles, $5.99 (set of 4), TJ Maxx. Schumacher fabrics, $162-$82 per yard, IKAT Interiors. Cynthia Rowley frame, $9.99, TJ Maxx. Ceramic bowls, $2.50 each, Anthropologie. Green beads, $38, Anthropologie.

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THE HOME DESIGN ISSUE

THIS PAGE

Bird and bubble lamp, $298; peacock shade, $108, Anthropologie. OPPOSITE

Clockwise from top right: Chinoiserie vase, $365, Home on Sumner. GP & J Baker fabric (rainbow stripe), $278 per yard; Brunschwig & Fils fabric (floral), $314 per yard, IKAT Interiors. Matelasse bed spread, $39.99, TJ Maxx. Piggy bank, $5.99, The Container Store. Whimsy Designs truck nightlight, $29, Portobello Road. IKAT Design pillow, $145, Home on Sumner. Espresso cup, $90 (set of 6), Elizabeth Caan Interiors. Cerrant soap, $16.95, Stoddard’s. Le Creuset 3.5 qt cassarole, $129.95, Sur La Table. Chantal tea bag holder, $4.99 (set of 4), TJ Maxx. Robin’s egg crate, $14, Anthropologie. Eggs, Whole Foods. Oven mitt, $8.95; Vic Firth pepper mill, $39.95; Swiss vegetable peeler, $3.95, Stoddard’s. Notebook, $11, Elizabeth Caan Interiors. Design Legacy bird linen pillow, $180, Portobello Road.

FOR RETAIL LOCATIONS, SEE PAGE 68.

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to School Suffering from years of neglect, Newton’s school buildings stand in stark contrast to the district’s reputation for excellence. For today’s elected officials, who face millions of dollars of unfunded maintenance, these buildings offer hard lessons in history and arithmetic. by Jon Marcus photographs by Bob O’Connor

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problem solver newtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Superintendent of Schools David A. Fleishman.

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I am broken.

An arrow points from the handdrawn letters on a Scotch-taped sheet of paper to a child-sized water fountain jutting from the glazed-brick wall in the hallway of a busy elementary school. “It’s always broken,” the principal says with a sigh. If only that was the worst of her problems. Named for a local man who died in World War I, this school was built in 1919, less than a year after that war ended, and was last renovated during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration—his first term, that is, in 1936. This year, 395 students crowd into an area that should hold no more than 340; another 40 are expected in the next five years, pushing the building further beyond capacity. All but two of the classrooms, including one that was converted from a nurse’s office, are already much, much smaller than state guidelines recommend. There aren’t

enough electrical outlets for such 21st-century essentials as computer monitors. Children whose native language is not English—and their number more than doubled this year alone—are tutored behind a lopsided partition on the stage of the one-time auditorium that serves as the library. Counselors meet with students in the hallways, or in former closets five feet deep with no windows or ventilation under stained and sagging ceilings. The cafeteria consists of a few tables salvaged from another school. They’re lined up in a hallway in the basement, just outside the art room, where the teacher has to yell to be heard above the din at lunchtimes. There are eight toilets for the nearly 400 students, and three for the 80 adults who work here, most of whom prefer to use the bathroom at a nearby Starbucks. That, like much else in this school, violates health and build-

ing codes. The plumbing is 86 years old. So is the boiler. The cast-iron radiators are covered with rotting pegboard. One had to be removed from high up on the wall of the gym, because it was threatening to fall. When the gym floods—which has happened three times in the last five years—gym class has to be taught in the library and the hallways while a garden hose carries the water from a makeshift pump through a fourthgrade classroom and out a window. This is not some chronically neglected inner-city school. It’s the Albert Edgar Angier Elementary School in Waban. And it’s part of Newton’s dirty little secret: elementary schools in Dickensian condition after years of political foot-dragging and red tape. Twelve of Newton’s elementary schools are more than 50 years old, four are more than 80 years old, and Angier is more than 90 years old. Ten are now or soon will be crowded beyond capacity. They already provide just 89 to 150 square feet of space per student, when state guidelines call for a minimum of 157 square feet. This despite the stopgap additions of modular classrooms that were meant to be temporary, but some of which have been in use for 20 years. “As a principal, you don’t want to embarrass the city of Newton,” says Loreta Lamberti, who has worked at Angier for two decades and now is in charge of holding it together. “But it’s not just Angier, and it’s not just overcrowding. There are many school buildings that, forget renovating, they should tear them down.” Newton may be known for the quality of its public education system, but 87 percent of schools statewide are in better condition than its Angier and Cabot elementary schools, according to the Massachusetts School Building Authority. Cabot is among the barely 2 percent whose overall physical environment the state considers bad enough to affect the quality of education. Other towns have taken far better care of their schools. Every

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building knowledge: the modern interiors of newton north (top three photos) contrast with spaces in the former carr school (below), which is to be renovated and put back into service.

school in rival Brookline and the Dover-Sherborn district rates in the top category for building condition, and all the schools in Concord-Carlisle, Lexington, Lincoln-Sudbury, Wayland, Wellesley, and Weston score in the first and second ranks. “Towns all over the place in Massachusetts have been redoing their elementary schools,” says Jonathan Yeo, the school committee’s facilities chairman. “It’s a normal part of municipal business, making these kinds of infrastructure decisions and getting funding to get them done.” In Newton, meanwhile, in the time since discussion began about repairing or replacing Angier Elementary, an entire class of students went from kindergarten to fifth grade in these conditions, and on to middle school. Then another class of kindergarteners started and finished. Under the best of circumstances, yet another class will go through, in increasingly crowded conditions, before the problem is close to being solved. “This should have begun six years ago,” when the school committee voted to proceed with improvements after spending $300,000 on a consultant’s study of what needed to be done, Yeo says. But, when the consultants presented their recommendations in 2007, there wasn’t any money. “It was tremendously frustrating to me to do that report in 2007 and leave the school committee in 2010, and now it’s 2012 and we still haven’t done anything,” says Susie Heyman, a former school-committee member whose children went to Angier. Now things finally appear to be crawling forward. City officials are making a list of projects that need attention, and Angier, at least, is high on that list. The proposal is to spend $30 million to tear it down and replace it altogether. But a legacy of delays and procrastination mean

that any plans to make significant improvements to the schools will now have to compete with a backlog of 380 other projects worth a collective quarter of a billion dollars, including fixing crumbling city roads, parks, and sewer and water pipes. It will be the fall before officials take up the difficult question of how to pay for all of this—and how to win support from residents. That’s because, among other problems, there’s a nearly $200 million elephant in the room: no matter how bad the condition of the elementary schools, taxpayers can’t have forgotten the embarrassment of huge cost overruns in the construction of Newton North High School, the most expensive school ever built in Massachusetts, whose final price was almost double the original estimate. “North sucked up so much oxygen in the city that it was impossible for anyone to move forward on anything else,” Yeo says. It still may be, Lamberti worries. “I hope we don’t always have to pay for the sins of Newton North, but we may,” she says. “Our fear is that we’re going to be paying for that for the rest of our lives.” Adds Steve Siegel, a newly elected member of the school committee and a structural engineer who campaigned on a platform of fixing the deteriorating schools: “The chickens have come home to roost.” Now, he says, repairing Newton’s elementary schools “will take a generation to get done. How did the community allow this to happen? How did it get this far?” The steps to the mayor’s office in City Hall are well worn, and the clock in the tower doesn’t work, and the mayor’s director of community relations works in a small office converted from a bathroom. Public infrastructure all over America is in bad shape. More than $2.2 trillion in repairs is needed in the next five years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Newton has 298 miles of roadways, 600 miles of water, sewer, and stormNewton Living

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water pipes, 78 public buildings, 58 parks and playgrounds, and more than 200 heavy vehicles. After years of neglect, these assets need an estimated $241 million worth of work, including $159 million for buildings, $45 million for sewer and water, $12 million for roads, almost $10 million for heavy equipment, and $6.5 million for parks. And those are only the projects considered the most urgent. “All over the city you see failing infrastructure,” Mayor Setti Warren says. “We haven’t invested in the infrastructure, and we’re all paying for it.” That’s largely because a succession of previous mayors and aldermen didn’t like to borrow. Many boasted of the city’s comparatively low debt and high bond rating. Paying interest on its debt cost Newton only around 3 percent of its budget at the turn of the millennium, while towns including Brookline and Wellesley took out loans for needed buildings and repairs and set aside 7 and 6.3 percent of their respective budgets for debt service. “There was a whole mindset [in Newton] that you didn’t borrow,” says Heyman. “So unfortunately the schools eroded without getting the kind of attention they needed, and the attention they did get was more emergency attention. If a boiler failed, we fixed it. And now it’s just going to cost us more because we waited.” These expensive problems have piled up precisely at a time when there’s a nationwide aversion to taxes and suspicion of government spending. In Newton, that surfaced when voters weary of the escalating cost of Newton North defeated a proposal in 2008 that would have let the city increase taxes more than the usual limit of 2 ½ percent to close a $12 million budget gap. “We’re at a difficult time of deep partisanship and cynicism about government,” says Warren. Nor, he says, is fixing sewer pipes something that gets politicians reelected. “In cities and towns across the commonwealth, it’s been easier to say, let’s invest in protecting that teacher, let’s invest in

school work: this page, jonathan yeo says it will take time to renovate newton’s schools. opposite page, a play space in the old carr school.

protecting that firefighter, and not in the school or the firehouse.” Marc Laredo watched this as a member of the school committee and as its chairman. Now he’s an alderman. “The tension is, services tend to come out ahead, because they’re more immediate,” Laredo says. “It’s no different from a homeowner who says, this year I’m not going to do repairs; I’ll be okay. It catches up with you over time. There has to be a political will among elected officials, there have to be some tough choices, and you have to fund this stuff.” Warren has been slowly building a case for that. He’s negotiated new contracts with most city employees, for example, that slow the rate of growth of salaries and benefits—which suck up two-thirds of the city budget— from 4.4 percent a year to 2.5 percent, saving a projected $20 million to $30 million a year over the next five years. He cut the number of capital projects from 1,000 nominees to 380 considered the most urgent. He hired people who could manage spending to avoid another Newton North fiasco. Of course, this all took time, too. Improvements have had to wait, first for the new mayor and his team to settle in, and now until the capitalimprovement plan is finished in the fall. And the budget problems haven’t all been solved. Revenues from fees and new development are coming in more slowly than hoped, thanks to the economic slowdown. The city’s long-avoided debt will have tripled by 2017, when annual interest payments will rise to $17.3 million—more than half of that for Newton North— accounting for about 5 percent of the operating budget. The city’s bond rating has fallen. And the cost of benefits and pensions for retired employees rises by 4.5 percent a year. The schools? They’re still in line for some attention. But it’s a long line.

To solve a problem, you need to know it’s there. And some people in Newton aren’t quite sure they want to advertise the poor condition of its elementary schools. “People are buying milliondollar houses. Then they come here,” Angier’s principal, Lamberti, says. Their reaction is surprise, she says. “The teachers and the parents have been very, very patient and we make it work, so there hasn’t been that big push to make people realize how much we need to fix this.” Siegel says some parents started putting together a video dramatizing how bad the building is, but changed their minds. “They were afraid it would lower their property values,” he says. (An Angier PTO copresident says plans for a video are on track.) Even principals, who have to live with these inadequate facilities, are wary of rocking the boat. “Instruction in the halls is not something I want too publicly broadcasted,” one wrote in what she intended to be a private email to her colleagues over how much to | continued on page 68

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Q:how Jewish is the garden city Since the 1950s, a strong Jewish community has thrived in the garden city, where, as one wisecrack goes, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a Rosenbloom on every corner. Today, a third of city residents are Jewish, but the real measure is more cultural than demographic. By kara baskin Illustration by edel rodriguez

A:Depends who you ask. Newton Living

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When Pam Pistiner relocated from New York to Massachusetts with her husband and two young children, she had priorities. “We wanted to find a great Jewish community,” she says. Of course, that’s not the only reason the family fell in love with the place—“We would have access to the T, we could drive 20 minutes and go apple picking or hiking” —but it was a deciding factor. Pistiner had lived in Brookline and Brighton while her husband was completing his medical residency, so she knew the area. “When you’re Jewish, you know where the communities are. I knew from word of mouth. I didn’t do any formal research, but I knew that there was a thriving population,” she says. Pistiner was right. Newton has a strong Jewish community that dates back more than 50 years. In fact, the city’s first synagogue, known today as the Adams Street Shul, celebrates its one hundredth anniversary this year. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the fabric of the city changed, as many middleclass Jews left urban neighborhoods in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan for more suburban environs. The Jews of Boston, a history edited by Jonathon D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, provides a window into those decades,

as Jewish communities blossomed here and in Brookline, Brighton, and Sharon. The Jewish population in Newton quadrupled in the 1950s, reaching 31,000 in the 1960s and becoming the largest Jewish community in Greater Boston. Temples and schools followed. In 1995, when the book was written, “the suburban Jewish presence in Newton ha[d] already existed as long as the entire period of Jewish settlement in Dorchester and Roxbury.” Which brings us to today: Research from the Jewish Data Bank

puts the number of Jews in Newton at about 28,000, roughly one-third of the city’s population. It’s a sizeable number—but what does it mean to the average resident, or someone thinking about moving here? “If you look at what’s Jewish about Newton, it’s important to look at the values that Jews prioritize,” says Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center CEO Mark Sokoll. “The value of education is really important to the Jewish community, the value of inclusion and attention to the specialneeds population, the attention to differences. There’s a Jewish value, tikkun olam, which means helping others, whether it’s other Jews or the world… Those values run throughout this city,” not just within the city’s Jewish population, he says. Brad Szathmary’s family has deep roots in Newton. His says that his synagogue, Mishkan Tefila, mirrors the 1950s exodus. The synagogue relocated from Boston to Newton to accommodate members who had settled here. Szathmary graduated nearly 20 years ago from Newton South High School, and his parents still reside in the city. “There was a very large Jewish population growing up. We had Rosh Hashanah off and Yom Kippur off. There was a high level of recognition. But I had a very wide friend circle. A lot of those kids were Christian. It was nice to see that they were always very accepting and eager to learn about different customs. That’s one of the greatest things about Newton. There are so many cultures and ethnicities, and [people] are always very interested to hear about the different sides. I regularly had lunch with a kid who was Muslim. Nobody ever said, ‘Oh that’s wrong.’ There was more of an inquisitive nature.”

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Rabbi Wesley Gardenswartz of the city’s 75-year-old synagogue, Temple Emanuel, agrees. “I love Newton. There’s no other city I’d rather live in. Over the weekend, we were celebrating my wife’s birthday in rural Connecticut, and I saw a sign on a church door. It said ‘Open hearts, open minds, open doors.’” He thinks the entire city embodies that spirit. Laura Perlman was brought up in West Newton in the 1980s. Though her family didn’t routinely attend synagogue, her religious education blossomed just the same. “We had a Christian next-door neighbor, and I didn’t know anything about it. She got to hunt for these Easter eggs, and I was kind of jealous. I went to her house and we were playing. She was going to make up an Easter basket. I found it the next morning.” Her parents helpfully explained to her why she didn’t celebrate Easter. “One of the signature sayings taught in Newton is ‘Respect Difference,’” says Gardenswartz. “Diversity is good, and that applies to all of God’s children. That is a value that comes with the oxygen in Newton.” While diversity is important, many Jews grapple with how to retain their identity in a shifting environment. The dating site JBoston ( jboston .com) launched recently. Its mission is to connect Jewish singles to keep the Jewish flame alive as intermarriage becomes more common. Potential couples are paired and followed by a matchmaker, lending a personal and somewhat quaint touch to an industry that now flourishes online.

Chabad of Newton Centre’s Rabbi Moshe Lieberman helps to advise JBoston. “A third of Newton are Jews. A lot of people like to talk about how saturated it is,” he tells me. “I am absolutely convinced that the Newton community is shortchanged. There is not enough going on… How many are actively engaged in Jewish life on a regular basis? Even if you have a few temples, that’s only getting a small portion of the community. Not everyone goes to temple or to religious services. Are the children engaged? If you’re not getting the young kids in, what about the future? [Chabad of Newton Centre] is a relatively new and small organization, but we are interested in expanding and more opportunities, especially for young people,” he says. Gardenswartz also struggles with how to keep Judaism relevant to everyday life. He’s discovered that socialization is key: His Temple Emanuel now hosts a program called Shabbat Alive on Friday evenings. Complete with musical instruments, the event attracts roughly three hundred people on any given weekend. “There’s an old Jewish saying,” he tells me. “‘My friend Garfinkle goes to temple to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.’ If you were to come on a Friday night, even in the depths of winter, there are three hundred people, maybe more. A couple of different services, and afterwards there is a Shabbat and people have a glass of wine and a little bit to eat. It is about the conversation and the connection. This is a trend line.”

our big fat jewish wedding

Brad Szathmary recalls an anecdote from his teenage years: “The most popular mayor in Newton history was a man named Theodore Mann. He was very spirited. He attended services at my temple, and he’d high-five everyone. Around that time, there was some kind of push for a cranberry Fig Newton cookie. To showcase the city’s progressiveness, he officiated over the wedding of the cookie and a cranberry.” He laughs at the memory. “It was great. It was just so Newton.”

This community push is evident at the JCC, too. Sokoll began working there in 1988 and took over as CEO 11 years ago. “There have been changes in family, changes in Jews marrying non-Jews, same-sex parents raising children. [The most dramatic change] is the issue of choice. In this generation of 2012, my kids are in their twenties, and they have the opportunity not just to inherit their Jewish identity, but to build for themselves a Jewish identity. They move much more fluidly in and out of communities.” Times change, and so the city’s religious and cultural organizations must change along with it, he says. “In 1988, the expectation was: we built it, and they will come. Now the expectation is, how do we design programs and services that are relevant to the choices that people are making in their lives?” Back then, Sokoll says, “The working situation was different. Family incomes were different.” The Jewish community today, he says, “is not monolithic.” And, by most accounts, that’s a huge selling point for Newton’s Jewish community and for the city as a whole. While cultural and religious demographics drew Pistinerto Newton, what keeps them here is the city’s vibe. “When I told a friend that we were moving to Newton, she said, ‘Really?’ The perception from some people is that it’s a little snobby here. But what I have found is that people are really down to earth, really progressive, really open-minded, and really friendly.” Her children attend the Newton public schools. “In looking at my kids’ classes, you don’t know everyone’s religion, and it doesn’t seem overwhelmingly Jewish at all. It’s more diverse, and I appreciate that,” she says.

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SPEED

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Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s president and CEO, beats Silicon Valley with local talent. By Doug Hardy Photographs by Webb Chappell

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Stephen Kaufer, president and CEO,

cofounded Newton-based TripAdvisor in 2000 and has guided the company to dominance in its category, merging two volatile fields—travel and Internet services—with the contemporary phenomenon of crowdsourcing. TripAdvisor offers reviews of hotels, restaurants, destinations, and more written by travelers themselves, and then delivers these visitors as leads and advertising audience to travel businesses such as resorts and airlines. It’s a simple concept brought to a huge scale—between 50 and 65 million people visit TripAdvisor and its affiliates around the world every month. Kaufer spoke to Newton Living about his entrepreneurial path at TripAdvisor’s Highland Avenue headquarters shortly after TripAdvisor’s spinoff from Expedia and its subsequent $3.5 billion valuation. We asked how he keeps a tech firm on top without relying on the talent-capital-relationship scrum of Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurial Path TripAdvisor is not your first company. Tell us about the entrepreneurial path that led you this far. I was a senior in college, a computer science major. As a senior project, some friends and I wrote a software-development tool. That became our first business, called Centerline Software, and I ran engineering. From 1985 to 1998, I saw how a company was born and grew to 160 people. Then the market turned and I learned a lot more on the way down the curve than on the way up. While we were succeeding, we made mistakes that we thought were brilliant business decisions.

What mistakes? We didn’t listen to our customers closely enough. We got into the habit of what I call “more of the same” thinking. I remember saying, “Hey, let’s build this additional product. People love us! They’ll pay thousands for it!” I was a huge champion of the product. And it turned out to be a theoretical need. Everybody was talking about the idea, but nobody wanted to pay for it. We didn’t move quickly enough in the downturn. When I started TripAd-

visor I said, “Every single year, every quarter, we’re going to make a conscious decision between doing more of the same and reinventing this process.” PRESSURE TO INNOVATE Your management theme now is…? “Speed Wins.” It’s a sign on my door. I talk about it at every company meeting. We’re in an industry where being nimble is both possible and beneficial. TripAdvisor is a product-focused company. We live, eat, and breathe the questions, “How are we helping our visitors every day? How can we do more?” If we make our visitors happy as they plan their trip, the advertising dollars (which is how we fund the business) will come.

How does “Speed Wins” work in practice? We release new functionality to the website every single week. Six-month projects just don’t exist in TripAdvisor. We ask, “How do we deliver incremental and even revolutionary improvements every week, every quarter?” If we’re not innovating fast enough, consumers will find what they’re looking for somewhere else.

If we have two reviews of a hotel in a faraway part of the world, we’re not impressing anyone. How do we get it to 50? How do we get 100 local language reviews? What’s a recent example of innovation? We have a great partnership with Facebook that highlights what your Facebook friends think of a destination. We’re replicating those times when your friends share travel information at the kid’s soccer game, and organizing it online via Facebook so that you get a personal level of recommendation. If your buddy Joe has actually stayed at a resort that I’m looking at, you can read his review and I can go talk to him or text with him about it. People don’t expect it. They’re delighted when they see it, and we think it’s the next revolution in travel reviews. MANAGING What do you tell new employees about working at TripAdvisor? When you come to work at TripAdvisor, you need to unlearn some things school taught you. Take the example of writing a term paper: (1)You have to work alone. (2) The work has to be original. If you borrow from someone else, that’s cheating. (3) You can’t reuse your old work. (4) You get no credit if you hand it in early, but get knocked down a grade if you’re one day late. (5) Typos cost you points because you’re “sloppy.” Now, compare that to our business: (1) You must work with other people. (2) I want you to learn from the best work out there—if you see someone else’s great idea, use it! (3) If as an engineer you can reuse a massive chunk of code you wrote to do something else new, that’s all good, good, good! (4) Deliver your work even if it’s not perfect and we’ll decide whether it’s worth doubling the project length to get that last 20 percent. I’d much rather have 80 percent of what you can do, delivered early. We’ll get it out early and please more customers.

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Now look at the quality of the teams here, the quality of the managers. You will learn so much from the people around you, doing something, building something that’s really cool for consumers. Great focus—people love to travel (and you probably love to travel too). And now the question is, “Hey! What other companies are there that offer all of that as a package?” If you’re looking to work at Google you’re a cog in the wheel. Pretty good company but what kind of impact are you going to have versus TripAdvisor? It’s the same with Facebook, and the same with Amazon.

in the driver’s seat kaufer was photographed on january 6, at TripAdvisor’s corporate headquarters on Needham Street.

(5) And we can fix typos on the fly. If your “error” message isn’t in red type like the others, it’s not a big deal. Also, we foster a culture of teamwork so some of our highest ratings in our employee survey are around teamwork. You have to hash out issues in a meeting and not dread the meeting because you don’t actually want to work with that idiot. [Finally,] you can get the perfect resume, and hire a person who just kind of plods along, does what they’re

told, doesn’t really give a hoot. I don’t want those people in my company. BOSTON VS. SILICON VALLEY Tell me something about TripAdvisor that will make me want to work here. Look, you want to find the right company for what your career goals are. Is an employer going to let you do something that’s meaningful to the business? Will they mentor your career growth for the time you’re at that company or beyond?

In October, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said, “If I were starting now, I would have just stayed in Boston.” How do you compete with Silicon Valley for the best talent? I grew up in California, but I love being in the Boston area. We can recruit talent from top, top universities all up and down the east coast. Okay, we do lose some folks to the weather in Silicon Valley, and some to its aura of hot, new, innovative things going on. But if you ask me, “If you could magically pick up TripAdvisor, replant the company and everyone in Silicon Valley, would you prefer that?” I’d say, “Hell, no!” The competition for talent there is way harder. I’m stunned by the number of people I meet who assume that we’re one of those California Internet companies. We’re really big and we have more traffic than any other travel site in the world. And when you look at the fact that that we’re based in little Newton, its kind of fun. I’m not going anywhere.

The Stats

Year founded: 2000, sold in 2004 to the Expedia unit of IAC, spun off into a public corporation in December 2011. Initial valuation: approximately $3.5 billion. Number of TripAdvisor travel sites: 18 sites, 30 countries, 21 languages. Members: 20 million. Monthly unique visitors: 50 million (65 million unique visitors including all subsidiary sites). Number of reviews and opinions: 60 million.

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Back to School continued from page 59

cooperate for this story. “I am a little worried about exposing so publicly some of the violations of special ed regulations that we continue to live with,” responded another. It’s a catch-22, says Mike Zilles, president of the teachers’ union. “On the one hand, if we are going to get the community’s support to pay for the improvements we need, we need people to believe the schools are firstrate, excellent, nationally recognized,” Zilles says. “If you start broadcasting how bad of a condition the schools are in, people might say, ‘Then where are my tax dollars going?’” Various academic measures show they’re going to a public school system that, by in many respects is very, very good. Newton offers far more advanced-placement courses than any other Massachusetts school district, for example. It’s seventh in the state, out of 393 districts, in class size. Five Newton elementary schools and two middle schools score in the top 25 in the MCAS tests in math and English language arts. The students at Newton’s two high schools come in fourth and sixth in the state on the SAT test of reading, seventh and ninth in writing, and eighth and ninth in math. And all of these outcomes are higher than those of school systems far, far smaller. “What’s surprising is how well people do in spite of the conditions,” Zilles says. Newton’s schools superintendent, David Fleishman, says, “The investments in Newton have been around keeping teachers in classrooms, not on renovating or replacing schools.” Still, says Fleishman, who came to the district two years ago, “It does have an effect on teaching when you can’t accommodate technology and there are problems with the heating systems and the classrooms are too small. The most important thing is the quality of the teaching and the education, but the physical environment does make a difference.”

And the conditions are becoming hard to keep secret. At the Cabot Elementary School, built in 1929, the boiler leaks. Water pipes are corroded and jury-rigged with clamps. There’s no hot water. The electrical system is more than 50 years old. So are the desks. Two of the modular classrooms are more than 20 years old; their wooden siding, painted red to match the brick, is rotting. So many first graders showed up unexpected in September that a lunchroom had to be put back into service as a classroom and some of the cafeteria tables moved into what had been a staff room. “What will we do if we get another class? We’ll probably end up eating in the classrooms,” the principal, MaryLou DiBella, says. Crowding is only compounding the crisis. Cabot has 420 students, well over its capacity of 385. Burr, Countryside, Franklin, Horace Mann, and Mason-Rice also have worsening space problems. Elementary-school enrollment citywide has gone up 14 percent in the last six years and is projected to increase another 3 percent in the next five, while the population of kids with special needs is rising even faster. The number of students in special education has risen 13 percent since 2005, and the number of nonnative speakers of English jumped 42 percent. They need small teaching spaces, but most of Newton’s elementary schools weren’t built with any. At the Zervas Elementary School, which dates to 1954, a psychologist works out of a converted girls’ bathroom behind the gym. The auditorium has been divided into two fifthgrade classrooms, the stage made into a music room, and an art room carved out of former storage closets. Classes are held in the teachers’ lounge, the principal’s office, and the hallways. “A school needs an auditorium,” says the principal, Stephen Griffin. “A school needs a cafeteria.” These things affect the quality of education, Griffin says. “I’m afraid to say it, but, yes,” he

says. Back at Angier, “We use every nook for teaching occupational therapy, for teaching speech, for teaching English-language learners,” says an exasperated Loreta Lamberti. “But when you don’t have enough square footage, legally, for classrooms, it does affect learning. The environment has a huge impact on children.” Lamberti wonders how much longer this is likely to continue. Under the mayor’s plan, a new Angier School—assuming voters approve the override that will likely be needed to pay for it—wouldn’t even begin to be designed until January of 2014. Construction wouldn’t be finished until the beginning of 2017, and the renovation or replacement of the Cabot School wouldn’t start until after that. The city also hopes to persuade the Massachusetts School Building Authority to pick up some of the costs, a two- to three-year process, and 317 other schools statewide are in line ahead of Angier. “The budgetary limitations are real, and the most we can even hope for is to work on one or maybe two schools every few years,” says Sandy Guryan, the school department’s deputy superintendent and chief administrative officer. “It will take quite a long time to complete the circuit.”

retail locations

Anthropologie, Atrium Mall, 300 Boylston St., 617-559-9995, anthropologie.com. Bloomingdale’s, The Mall at Chestnut Hill, 225 Boylston St., 617-244-3432, bloomingdales.com. The Container Store, 27 Boylston St., 617-566-7400, containerstore.com. Crate & Barrel, The Mall at Chestnut Hill, 199 Boylston St., 617-964-8400, crateandbarrel.com. Elizabeth Caan Interiors, 1066 Centre St., 617-244-0424, lizcaan.com. Home on Sumner, 211 Sumner St., 617-916-5540. IKAT Interiors, 66 Needham St., 617-965-5500, ikatinteriors .com. Portobello Road, 23 Boylston St., 617-264-2020, portobelloroadusa.com. Stoddard’s, 360 Watertown St., 617-244-4187. Sur la Table, The Mall at Chestnut Hill, 199 Boylston St., 617-244-0213, surlatable.com. TJ Maxx, 260 Needham St., 617-527-0401, tjmaxx.com. Whole Foods, 647 Washington St., 617-965-2070, wholefoods.com.

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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interior

Newton Living

design

studio

marketplace 617-332-8364 273-275 Auburn Street Auburndale, MA

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For The Perfect Holiday Gift

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gentlegiant.com

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FARM-FRESH MILK HOME DELIVERY (617) 696-6000

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Cutlery, Personal Grooming & more.

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Newton Decorative Hardware & Lockworks Our boutique showroom offers a very concise selection of architectural elements to beautify your surroundings.

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Fine Home Builders and Remodelers Residential and Commercial Since 1975

617-323-2323

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Newton Living

SUMMER CAMP DIRECTORY Summer Cooking Camp

Create a Cook Summer Programs are perfect for your aspiring young chef. Themes Include: Italian Classics, Foods Across America, Bostonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s North End, French Cuisine, Baking, Celebrity Chefs & more.

Ages 7-10 (9:30am start or 2pm start) Ages 11+ (9:30am - 3:30pm) Call 617-795-2223 or register online at www.createacook.com

Create a Cook :: 53 Winchester Street, Newton

Summer Fun at

Fessenden www.fessenden.org/summer

American Red Cross Lifeguard Training 6/18-21 & 8/20-23, co-ed ages 15+ dsartanowicz@fessenden.org

Lunch and bus transportation INCLUDED! Spring Open House April 1

To register, call 339-686-2293. Rivers Day Camp, 333 Winter Street, Weston, MA 02493 www.riversdaycamp.org

Summer Term High School Programs Find out what lies ahead at college, with four programs for motivated high school students. bu.edu/summer/highschool

An equal opportunity, affirmative action institution.

6/25-8/17, co-ed ages 4-13 daycamp@fessenden.org, 617-630-2373

Sports Camps & Clinics

Baseball, Tennis, LAX, Soccer, Football sportscamps@fessenden.org 617-630-2309

Academic Summer Program 7/9-27, co-ed grades 4-9 academicsummer@fessenden.org 617-630-2342

The Fessenden School 250 Waltham St., West Newton

www.fessenden.org/summer

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S U M M E R 2012: J U N E 25 – J U LY 27 A G E S 6 – 15

Creativity and Community

Summer Arts at The Cambridge School of Weston is a dynamic multi-arts program where students explore their imaginations and develop their creativity.

Summer Programs 2012 JCCs of Greater Boston Give your child a summer filled with fun experiences and new adventures! JCC Grossman Camp JCC Maccabi Camp Kingswood ■ JCC Maccabi Camp Kingswood Zohar Program (special needs) ■ Summer Programs at the JCC Early Learning Centers ■ JCC Kaleidoscope Creative Arts & Science Camp ■ iCamp Children’s Technology Workshop ■ JCC Summer Sports Camps ■ ■

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Ohana Family Camp

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BOSTON

Learn more about JCC camps and school vacation programs at bostonjcc.org/camp Open to all

CAPE COD SEA CAMPS BREWSTER, MA

www.OhanaCamp.org .OhanaC

Learn about our summer programs in Creative Writing, Dance, Opera, and Theater.

summer12.walnuthillarts.org or call 508.650.5020

New Art Center in Newton

Create lifetime memories for your family this summer on peaceful Lake Fairlee in Vermont. Cozy cabins with fireplaces. Farm-fresh meals. Swimming, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, fishing, hiking, biking, tennis, crafts, and more. Delighting generations of families since 1905. Imagine your family right here.

What is your young artist doing this summer?

• Both Day and Resident Camp Programs • Located Directly on Cape Cod Bay • Operated by the same family for 87 years 508-896-3451 • www.capecodseacamps.com

Week-long Summer

ART PROGRAMS for Children

& Teens

NewArtCenter.org 617-964-3424

Join our mailing list! The NEW ART CENTER supports the development of visual artists and cultivates a community that appreciates art.

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old and newton

West newton commercial district in 1911

grocers, plus two fish markets, and one baker

3 8 2 1 1 2

hardware stores

dressmakers

restaurants

billiards hall

telegraph office

news dealers (newton had four newspapers then.)

West Newton, circa 1911 The first-floor facade of West Newton’s CVS disguises one of that village’s oldest surviving commercial buildings, a three-story brick structure called the Robinson Block. With its elaborate Victorian brickwork and arched windows, the building has presided over the intersection of Watertown and Waltham streets since 1878. In 1911, around the time this photograph was taken, the Robinson Block housed as many as 14 residential units above the stores. The storefronts were occupied by a printer, a grocer, and a dry goods store. The apothecary Ingraham & Paine Co.—shown with the horse and carriage before it—operated for three decades in the corner storefront. It was one of four druggists in West Newton. One of its principals, G.H. Ingraham, first opened a drug store nearby in the early 1870s and moved into this building around 1888. The company disappears from the city directory after 1923. Nearly 90 years later, the storefront is no longer recognizable, although the space is still occupied by a pharmacy, one of more than 7,000 retail locations operated by Rhode Island’s CVS Caremark Corp. john sisson

Newton Living mar/apr 2012

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teamster

blacksmiths

hay dealers

carriage makers

automobile garages

about the photo This image is a detail from a photograph found in the archives of Historic Newton. the name of the photographer and date of the image have been lost. If you have information, contact Acting curator Sara Goldberg, 617-796-1450, historicnewton.org.

photograph by

Adam DeTour

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