Photogravure |
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... a little bit about our small town
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Getting ready for the Memorial Day Parade ... For those of you not familiar with our small town -- actually we are a city, but of only five square miles -- here are a few interesting facts. We print this for we have been told by our sponsor, the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that by far most of our circulation comes from beyond our borders -- as many as some 40,000 hits per issue, of which we believe that only 2,000 originate in Melrose homes. The photo above is of our downtown at the Memorial Day Parade. By mid-May all the trees along main street are in bloom, and our 'bedroom of Boston' look comes out in full blossom. The commercial center is two long blocks long and features some 50 stores, a nice Veterans' Hall, a beautiful 1890's YMCA, three stoplights and three banks. Our 1887 city hall was renewed by 1937 architects, is functional but hardly not the outstanding Victorian building it was from the 19th century. There are three other commercial centers in the city, each of which has perhaps a half- to a dozen stores or service centers. We have some 14 houses of worship, a dynamite library, a modern high school, a recently-built junior high with a huge auditorium and an immense new gymnasium, numerous civic organizations, two new athletic parks, a 20-acre kettlepond left over from the most recent ice age, some 65 miles of streets (in our five square miles), a great hundred-year-old granite memorial hall, a nine-hole private golf course and (best of all) a huge park called Mount Hood that also features three more kettleponds and an absolutely beautiful and challenging 18-hole golf course. Our population is around 27,000, most of whom live in attractive single-family homes. There is little industry in town -- hence, we are nicknamed the bedroom of Boston. We have several 250-foot hills, from which we have excellent views of Boston, the Atlantic Ocean, and the ridge that surrounds what is called the Boston Basin. A small slice of the 22,000-acre Lynn Fells Reservation -- a really lovely forest with numerous small ponds -- is within our borders. We believe such proximity jacks the price of our homes up somewhat -- that and our three railway stations that provide easy commuting the six miles into the city. The railway reached Melrose in 1845. We are an island city in suburbia, for we have no highways going through town, we have no major shopping-cities in our borders, and we dwell on our image as the Bedroom of Boston. Yes, there are ritzier towns -- Winchester, Lexington, Concord -- but none that provide the close proximity to the intellectual centers of Boston, none that have missed the explosion of trafficky shopping centers, and none that maintain their feeling of being a residential home town -- as Melrose. June 1, 2012
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