Walk down Adams Street this month and you'll see a double yellow line running the length of Nonantum's main commercial block. It has been there before. It has also, more than once, not been there.
Before the St. Mary of Carmen Society's 90th anniversary Festa, the previous mayor ordered the street's longtime green-white-red stripe repainted as a standard double yellow line, citing traffic needs. Residents noticed almost immediately. Just before that year's festival began, the traditional colors reappeared, restored by hands the city never identified as "volunteers." After the festival ended, the yellow line went back down. It is the kind of détente that only makes sense if you already understand what Adams Street's stripe is actually standing in for, which is not traffic engineering. It is who gets the final word on what Nonantum looks like.
That question came up again this July, when the Festa marked its 91st year and the current mayor, Marc Laredo, opened his remarks on the festival's first night wearing the Society's Madonna-themed shirt over a shirt that simply read "Lake." Residents thanked him for reversing decisions made by his predecessor, decisions that had turned a neighborhood tradition into a citywide news story. The applause wasn't really about a paint color. It was about a village that has spent nine decades deciding its own symbols regardless of who currently sits at City Hall.
A Village That Answers To Itself First
Nonantum earned the nickname "The Lake" from Silver Lake, the pond that anchored the neighborhood until it was lost to landfill and development in the early 1900s, around the same years most of the area's original mills and factories shut down. Newton's own historical records describe Nonantum as the city's most densely populated village, built up fast between 1860 and 1910 as Irish, French Canadian, Italian, and Jewish millworkers settled in on top of one another. That density produced something most of Newton's thirteen villages don't have: a neighborhood dialect. Longtime residents still call it "Lake Talk," a way of speaking some trace in part to the Roma families who once ran the traveling carnivals that came through the area.
None of that shows up on a street sign. It shows up in things like the stripe, and in how a five-day Catholic festival became the year's clearest referendum on neighborhood identity.
What Actually Happens During Festa Week
The 91st annual Festa ran Wednesday, July 15, through Sunday, July 19, at Pellegrini Park, an event organizers say draws more than 10,000 people in a typical year. The society that runs it has been doing this since 1935, when eleven men started what began as a small neighborhood gathering. At this year's event, longtime Festa fan Marian Ryan reminded the Sunday-night crowd that those eleven founders could not have pictured the festival still running, let alone still growing, ninety-one years on.
Sunday is the day that carries the most weight. It opens with an 8 a.m. Mass at Our Lady Help of Christians Parish, with readings and music delivered in Italian. At 2 p.m., members of the Society's Men's and Women's groups carry the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel from the church through the streets of Nonantum toward Pellegrini Park.
The procession doesn't move in a straight line. It stops deliberately at the homes of Society members who died in the past year, where families come out to press money into the statue's sashes, and marchers hand back small pins struck for that year's anniversary.
That detail, more than the carnival rides or the beer garden, is why locals describe Festa as something closer to a family reunion that happens to be open to the public. The night closes with a candlelight procession back to Pellegrini Park around 10 p.m.
The politics around Festa this year underline the same identity question as the stripe. Newton's three state representatives spoke on Saturday night about what the festival means to the neighborhood, including Representative John Lawn, who represents Nonantum directly. City Council President and multiple councilors from Nonantum marched in the Sunday procession alongside Waltham's mayor, who attended three of the five nights. Frank Battista, the Society's president since 2013 and someone who was born and raised in Nonantum, has been direct about what keeps him doing the work: making sure newcomers to the neighborhood feel as welcome at Festa as anyone whose family has been marching for decades.
The Identity Doesn't Take The Rest Of The Year Off
Festa is the loudest week, but it isn't the only place Nonantum asserts itself. The Nonantum Neighborhood Association held its 15th Annual Village Day at Coletti-Magni Park in late June, a smaller, homegrown event where Nonantum Press Room and Uncle Joey's Cannolis served as the food-at-cost vendors, the same two names whose food footprint keeps them on residents' minds the rest of the year, Festa included. That repetition is worth sitting with. In a neighborhood this size, the same handful of businesses and volunteers keep reappearing at every gathering, which is part of why they stay fixed points on residents' mental maps well outside festival season.
The same park does double duty in December, when Coletti-Magni becomes the site of Nonantum's holiday lighting display, built around a fiberglass Santa that has become as much a neighborhood fixture as anything on Adams Street. Between the summer festival, an early-summer village day, and a winter lighting tradition, Nonantum has effectively built its own annual calendar, one that runs independent of anything Newton's other villages are doing.
A short version of that calendar, if you're new to the neighborhood or just haven't been paying attention:
- Late June — Nonantum Neighborhood Association's Village Day at Coletti-Magni Park, 391 Watertown Street
- Mid-July — St. Mary of Carmen Society Festa at Pellegrini Park, five days running Wednesday through Sunday
- December — Holiday lighting at Coletti-Magni Park, centered on the neighborhood's fiberglass Santa
Why The Stripe Keeps Winning
Adams Street is Nonantum's main street and the route the Sunday procession takes toward Pellegrini Park, lined with crowds who gather there every Festa to watch the statue pass. Watertown Street, a few blocks over, is the neighborhood's everyday commercial core, the strip where most of Nonantum's restaurants and small businesses actually sit. Adams Street doesn't carry the day-to-day foot traffic Watertown does, which is exactly why the fight over its stripe reads as symbolic rather than practical. When the city repainted it as a plain double yellow line, it wasn't erasing a traffic marking anyone relied on. It was overwriting the one piece of public infrastructure that visibly declared this stretch of pavement as Italian-American ground, in a village that doesn't have its own commuter rail stop and has watched its factories and its lake both disappear over the last century.
That's the part worth understanding if you live here, whether you've been in Nonantum for forty years or four months. The neighborhood doesn't wait for permission to restore what it thinks belongs on its own street. It didn't wait before the 90th anniversary in 2025, and city crews repainting yellow lines after the fact haven't changed the pattern. The stripe will likely come up again before the 95th anniversary, or the 100th. Betting against Nonantum putting its colors back is not a bet with a great track record.
If you're weighing what it actually means to live in a Newton village with this kind of self-defined identity, whether Nonantum or any of the city's other twelve, Judy A. Korzenowski has spent years working directly with families across Newton's neighborhoods and can talk through what makes each one distinct, on the ground and off the map. Request a complimentary consultation and market conversation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
