Not long after, another developer (or perhaps the same one) bought the house next to our old one, where an elderly shut-in lived, as well as the house beyond that. He leveled it, blew up the ledge that was impeding expansion and built a side-by-side duplex that squeezed onto the lot like a potbelly pig on a postage stamp. It took a while, but eventually a developer paid not much more than we had offered for La Casita Flatita. He rejected our offer, so we looked elsewhere and bought a house about 15 minutes away in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood. When the landlord told us he was going to sell the house, we talked it over and made an offer. We liked living there the street was quiet, there was a conservation area just steps away, and we could walk to Newton Centre for breakfast or dinner and drinks. There was ledge protruding into the basement, which his father had chipped away at, so as you walked from the bottom of the stairs toward the back of the basement, you had to gradually lower your head until you were barely stooping when you found the old wine barrels. The basement was also where our landlord's father had mashed his own grapes to make wine. The house had just two bedrooms and one bathroom, unless you counted the disgusting, outhouse-level loo in the basement. Our Italian-American landlord, who had grown up in the house but lived elsewhere in Newton, called the place La Casita Flatita, which he translated as "the tall skinny house," although if you look it up in Italian or Spanish there's no such word as "flatita." We rented a small house on a dead-end street off the busy Langley Road, which connects Newton Centre to Route 9. My wife and I lived in Thompsonville from late 1997 to the summer of 2000. So although T'ville has a pretty small footprint, get ready for a long post with tons of pictures. With each successive post about the villages of Newton, I dig deeper and take more photos. For links to the previous six parts, see the bottom of this post. Welcome to the seventh part of my ongoing series about the backside of Newton, Mass., my adopted hometown. Other parts of the backside of T'ville exist only on old maps, and in memories and rumors, which make them more intriguing. The smallest of the city's 13 villages, T'ville, as some call it, for many people functions as little more than a pass-through between the shopping centers of Route 9 in Chestnut Hill and the boutiques, restaurants, coffee shops and banks of Newton Centre.īut there's more, of course, some of it still standing or at least possible to find by poking around the bushes and woods. I would wager that a significant portion of the residents of Newton, Mass., have never heard of Thompsonville. Is there silver in them thar' hills? Or remnants of a Baptist mission on a street corner? Or even radical Italian political literature socked away in the woods?
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