The trucks came up Adams Street after dark on June 26, 2025, and the dogs felt it before anyone else did. Then came the grinding sound, then the dust, then residents standing in their doorways watching a machine strip the red, green, and white paint off the center of their street, the tricolor lines that had marked Nonantum's main road for as long as anyone's grandmother could remember. City crews called it a safety fix. Then-Mayor Ruthanne Fuller had ordered the tricolor stripes replaced with standard double-yellow lines. Nonantum heard it as something closer to an eviction notice for its own identity.
Just over ten months later, the stripes were back. Not quite the same way they left, but back, repainted overnight between May 4 and May 5, 2026, in time for the neighborhood's Memorial Day parade.
The gap between those two nights, the one where the paint disappeared and the one where it returned, is the actual story here. It is not really about traffic markings. It is about what a village government has to do to hand back something a neighborhood had been running on its own terms for decades, and what that neighborhood keeps doing without waiting for anyone's approval in the meantime.
The workaround the city needed
Getting the stripes back legally required a piece of engineering, not just a change of heart. Mayor Marc Laredo had city crews add parking spaces to Adams Street, which narrowed the effective traffic lanes enough that the road no longer needed a standard double-yellow center line under state road rules. That opened the door to paint a white reflective strip down the middle instead, with a red line on one side and a green line on the other, close enough to the original to read as the same symbol from a moving car.
State Representative John Lawn secured a $50,000 grant in the state's supplemental budget to maintain the lines going forward, so the upkeep no longer falls on residents repainting it themselves the way it had for years before the removal.
Linda de Valpine, who owns Greentail Table on Watertown Street, called the lines a sense of pride in the neighborhood. Kristin Magni, who works at Nonantum Press Room on Adams Street, said people still stop in months later just to say how glad they are the lines came back. Teresa Gentile Saura, who chairs the Nonantum Neighborhood Association, described driving down Adams Street the first time and crying.
None of that required a vote of the city council to feel true. It required the city to figure out how to legally permit something the neighborhood had already decided was non-negotiable.
A neighborhood that already runs itself
While that fight played out over the better part of a year, the rest of Nonantum's calendar did not pause to wait for a resolution. On June 28, 2026, the Nonantum Neighborhood Association held its 15th annual Village Day at Coletti-Magni Park, the same volunteer-run event it has staged every year regardless of what was happening with city paint crews down the street.
This year's Village Day honored longtime Newton activist Martina Jackson, who told the crowd she started covering Nonantum a half century ago for a paper called The Newton Times, and that nothing she'd seen anywhere else compared to what Nonantum calls Festa. The association also awarded scholarships to three graduating seniors, Caitlyn Wheeler, Sylvia Wagner, and Melanie Burke. Nonantum Press and Uncle Joey's Cannolis ran the food tables. The Watch City Cadillacs played doo-wop while a trackless train carried kids through the crowd, weaving around the line for cannoli.
None of that needed a permit fight or a mayoral workaround. It needed the same neighborhood association that has run the event for fifteen years straight, on a schedule it sets itself, at a park it has used since the tradition began.
The 91-year-old institution three blocks away
A few weeks after Village Day, the older and larger of Nonantum's self-run traditions took over Pellegrini Park. The St. Mary of Carmen Society has organized Newton's Italian-American festival since 1935, which makes it 91 years old this summer and older than most of the zoning rules that now govern how the city can paint a street. The five-day event, known locally as Festa, ran July 15 through 19, 2026, and drew a crowd the society says regularly tops 10,000 people, a scale most Newton events never approach.
The nightly lineup gives a sense of how much ground the festival covers on its own:
- Wednesday: Watch City Cadillacs, then Dan Fontaine, then Memphis Sun Mafia
- Thursday: Back to the 80s, then The Breeze
- Sunday: a 2 p.m. Mass at Our Lady Help of Christians Church, followed by a procession of the statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel through the streets of Nonantum, then a 10 p.m. candlelight procession back to Pellegrini Park
The Sunday procession has its own quiet tradition inside the larger one. It stops at the homes of community members who died in the past year, where mourners can pin donations to the statue's sashes as it passes. Fabrizia Beer and Wine Garden and Fatty's Raw Bar handle food and drink at the park, and the festival has run this way, more or less unchanged in structure, since before Nonantum's paved streets existed in their current form.
The society is a nonprofit that has quietly funded scholarships and community assistance in Nonantum for nine decades, entirely on its own initiative. It never needed the city's permission to become a fixture. It became one because the neighborhood kept showing up.
What the stripes actually prove
Put the three threads next to each other and the pattern gets hard to miss. Village Day just turned 15. Festa just turned 91. Both run every year because a neighborhood association and a religious society decided they would, and neither has ever needed a city workaround to exist. The street stripes are different only because they involve a literal city-owned road, which meant Nonantum needed Laredo's parking-lane trick and Lawn's grant to get back something residents had already decided belonged to them.
Saura's phrase for the neighborhood, the village of tradition, is one of thirteen villages that make up Newton, and Nonantum carries a second nickname too: The Lake, a reference to Silver Lake, which dried up long before most current residents were born but left its name behind anyway. That is the same instinct running through all three stories this summer. A body of water disappears and the name survives. A tradition gets removed by a road crew and the neighborhood association keeps holding Village Day like nothing happened, then the city eventually has to build a legal path back to what the residents never stopped insisting was theirs.
If you live in Nonantum, none of this is news to you. You already know which end of Adams Street the stripes start at, and you probably have an opinion about whether the new ones look exactly right. What this summer confirmed, more than anything else, is that the neighborhood's traditions do not wait on city hall to keep running. The paint just finally caught up.
If you are watching Nonantum from the outside and wondering what a village with this much institutional memory actually looks like street by street, the Demeo Team has spent decades working blocks like Adams Street and knows which corners hold their value because a neighborhood insists on it. Reach out when you are ready to talk about what a home here is actually worth.
