Page 2 - Laundry Brook News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Joe Hunter/Special to the Tab I am a map nerd. I will gladly spend an hour or two poring over a map, absorbing its details and imagining what it would be like to visit the place depicted. And the place doesn’t much matter - I’ll just as gladly study a chart of Afghanistan as Auburndale. But my favorite map, the one I’ve spent countless hours scrutinizing, is a historic map of Newton from 1875. It’s a fascinating key to Newton’s development. It shows a city that is at once markedly different from our current municipality, but at the same time a preview of what the city would become.

Kathleen Kouril Grieser/Special to the Tab Covid restrictions have made simply going outdoors for a change of scenery a treat, so even more people than usual have been enjoying Bullough’s Pond, located at Walnut Street and Commonwealth Avenue, this past year. The pond is a pandemic respite, but it’s been a precious resource for residents for more than three and a half centuries. In 1664, Capt. John Spring built an earthen dam across Laundry Brook to power his gristmill. The brook spread across an area almost twice the size of today’s pond. City Hall and the Newton Free Library sit on la...