Points of Interest

Newton doesn’t actually have a city center but is instead comprised of 13 villages with many boasting their own “downtown” feel. With that type of diversity, you bet each one of the villages should be explored for their individual merits. Beyond that exploration, consider the following points of interest as well:

• Crystal Lake is a 33-acre (130,000 m²) natural lake located in Newton Centre. Its shores, mostly lined with private homes, also host two small parks and a town beach and bath house. The name Crystal Lake was given to the pond by a nineteenth century commercial ice harvester that sold ice cut from the pond in winter. It had previously been called Baptist Pond.
• The Jackson Homestead, now the Newton History Museum at the Jackson Homestead, is best known for its history as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It was built in 1809 as a farmhouse designed in the Federal Style and is now a museum with paintings, costumes, photographs, manuscripts, maps and historical artifacts.
• Heartbreak Hill, a notably challenging stretch of the Boston Marathon, is found on Commonwealth Avenue between Centre Street and Boston College.
• Echo Bridge is a notable 19th-century masonry arch bridge with views of the river and Hemlock Gorge in Hemlock Gorge Reservation just off Route 9 in Newton Upper Falls.
• Chestnut Hill Reservoir s a very popular park with residents of Newton, Brookline, and the Brighton section of Boston. Although completely within the Boston city limits, it is directly contiguous to the Newton city limits. Designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead, the designer of Central Park in New York City and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, the park offers beautiful views of the Boston skyline, and is framed by stately homes and the campus of Boston College. Although not generally used to supply water to Boston, the reservoir was temporarily brought back online on May 1, 2010, during a failure of a connecting pipe at the end of the MetroWest Water Supply Tunnel.
• Bullough’s Pond is an old mill pond transformed into a landscape feature when Newton became a suburban community in the late nineteenth century. It has been the subject of two books, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England, by Diana Muir, and Once Around Bullough’s Pond: A Native American Epic, by Douglas Worth. It was long maintained by the city as an ice skating venue, but skating is no longer allowed. A scene from the 2008 remake of The Women was filmed there.

And while you’re exploring the local points of interest, you might want to be munching on a Fig Newton cookie since it was named after the city you’re looking at!