Day: October 29, 2005

Old Arlington maps

arlington 1898

Speaking of the Arlington list, someone just posted a fantastic find: a working map of the town dating from 1898. What is most interesting about this map is that it sets some theories of our neighborhood’s development on their head. I have been told by my neighbors, and even by the folks we bought our house from, that our land originally belonged to the folks who built the house next to ours on the corner, which dates to the 1920s. In fact, the map of our neighborhood not only shows Grand View Road, but shows the plots for our house and the house on either side, in more or less the places they are today. The house next to ours may have been built first, but it never owned our land.

Interesting what you can dig up if you look.

Snow? In October??

I figured that since most of the leaves in our neighborhood were still firmly in place, we were safe from winter weather a while longer. No such luck. As I was leaving my barber’s shop in Arlington Heights, there were honest-to-goodness flakes of snow. Small, still, but getting bigger. By the time I picked up a few light fixtures that had come in at Wolfer’s in Waltham, the flakes were pretty big, and they stayed that way all afternoon. I think we got close to an inch, though it only accumulated on the grass and a few parked cars.

One of my neighbors on the Arlington List got some great photos of the storm, which he dubbed “Hall-snow-een.”