Somerville, Massachusetts Somerville, Massachusetts Davis Square, Somerville Davis Square, Somerville Official seal of Somerville, Massachusetts Somerville, Massachusetts is positioned in the US Somerville, Massachusetts - Somerville, Massachusetts Somerville (/ s m rv l/ sum- r-vil) is a town/city located directly to the northwest of Boston, in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States.
As of 2010, the United States Enumeration has the town/city with a total populace of 75,754 citizens , and is the most densely populated municipality in New England.
Somerville was established as a town in 1842, when it was separated from Charlestown.
In 2006, the town was titled the best-run town/city in Massachusetts by the Boston Globe. In 1972, in 2009, and again in 2015, the town/city received the All-America City Award. 5.1.3 Somerville Museum See also: Timeline of Somerville, Massachusetts The territory now comprising the town/city of Somerville was first settled in 1629 as part of Charlestown.
The region of earliest settlement was based at City Square on the peninsula, though the territory of Charlestown officially encompassed all of what is now Somerville, as well as Melrose, Malden, Stoneham, Medford, Everett, Woburn, Burlington, and parts of Arlington and Cambridge. From that time until 1842, the region of present-day Somerville was referred to as "beyond the Neck" in reference to the thin spit of land, the Charlestown Neck, that connected it to the Charlestown Peninsula. The first European settler in Somerville of whom there is any record was John Woolrich, an Indian trader who came from the Charlestown Peninsula in 1630, and settled near Dane Street.
Named for the ten small knolls positioned on the property, Ten Hills Farm extended from the Craddock Bridge in present-day Medford Center to Convent Hill in East Somerville.
Laid out as early as the mid-1630s, the earliest highway in Somerville was probably what is now Washington Street, and led from present-day Sullivan Square to Harvard Square.
During the 1700s and early 1800s, Washington Street, together with Somerville Avenue, comprised "Milk Row," a route favored by Middlesex County dairy farmers as the best way to get to the markets of Charlestown and Boston.
Somerville was home to one of the first hostile acts of the American Revolutionary War.
That evening he set out from the North End through Charlestown towards East Somerville, where he encountered two British officers stationed on Washington Street.
As it was nearly high tide, East Cambridge was an island and the troops, skirting the marshes, were obliged to wade "thigh deep" to reach Somerville.
Defeated and in retreat, the British army passed again through Somerville en route back to Boston.
Somerville occupied a conspicuous position amid the entire Siege of Boston, which lasted nine months, and Prospect Hill became the central position of the Continental Army's chain of emplacements north of Boston.
With the Revolutionary War over, the inhabitants of Somerville were able once again to devote their energies wholeheartedly to the company of making a living.
From the 1780s until Somerville's separation from Charlestown in 1842, material progress was continuous, if a bit slow.
Transportation improvements in the early to mid-1800s factored decidedly in the expansion of a more urban residentiary form and Somerville's incorporation as a City in 1872.
These improvements encompassed the opening of the Middlesex Canal through Somerville in 1803, various turnpikes such as Medford and Beacon streets, assembled amid the 1810s and 1820s, and especially the introduction of rail lines.
In 1841, the Fitchburg Railroad was assembled between Boston and Fresh Pond in Cambridge, alongsideing the route of Somerville Avenue.
By the early 1840s, the populace of present-day Somerville topped 1,000 for the first time. It was not derived from any one person's name, and a report commissioned by the Somerville Historical Society found that Somerville was a "purely fanciful name". Before Somerville became a township in 1842 the region was primarily populated by British farmers and brick manufacturers who sold their wares in the markets of Boston, Cambridge and Charlestown.
As the markets grew, the populace of Somerville increased six-fold between the years of 1842 and 1870 to 14,685.
With the sharp influx of immigrants to the Somerville area, trade boomed and brick manufacturing became the dominant trade.
Before mechanical presses were invented, Somerville produced 1.3 million bricks a year.
Other Somerville factories came to produce steam engines, boilers, homehold appliances, glass, and iron.
Shortly after that Somerville incorporated as a town/city in 1872.
At its height, Somerville was served by eight passenger rail stations.
Somerville's buoyant economy amid this reconstructionwas tied to industries that tended to locate at the periphery of the residentiary core, near freight rail corridors.
The Late Industrial Period (1870-1915) was a time of phenomenal expansion for Somerville in all spheres including civic and commercial ventures.
While brickmaking had taken a hold in the region after the barns s first appeared in the 1830s, Somerville's brickyards boomed through 1870.
Additionally, Somerville's locale adjoining to Boston and adjacency to rail and road transit made it an ideal locale for distribution facilities.
Between 1915 and 1930 populace growth slowed slightly as Somerville's industries merged clean water expanded, and the period's most meaningful enterprises were meat packing, dairy processing, ice and food distribution.
Construction of the Mc - Grath Highway in 1925 marked the turning point of Somerville as an industrialized city, which accelerated when the Ford Motor Company assembled a plant in Assembly Square in 1926.
In the years that followed, Somerville would see itself transformed into a primary industrial center as automobile assembly surpassed meat packing as Somerville's most meaningful industry. Although Union Square and Davis Square continued to be the biggest commercial areas amid the first decades of the 20th century, smaller, less-developed squares interval as well.
Ball Square, Magoun Square and Teele Square were advanced with one- or two-story masonry commercial buildings.
During this time of industrialized prosperity, closing through World War II, the town/city of Somerville reached its populace apex at 105,883 inhabitants in 1940.
The postwar reconstructionwas characterized by the ascent of the private automobile, which carried momentous implications for Somerville.
Streetcar lines that had crisscrossed the town/city since 1890 were systematically ripped out and commuter rail service was discontinued at the city's eight stockyards stations, one by one.
The number of cars on Somerville's streets continued to rise, and road assembly projects proliferated.
By 1976, Assembly Square was becoming a ghost town: Finast Stores, the Boston and Maine Railroad, and Ford Motor Company, which had each paid the town/city over $1 million in annual taxes, were gone.
By the late 1970s, Somerville was losing population, revenue and jobs. In the last years of the 20th century, the situation in Somerville stabilized and expansion returned first to West Somerville, and then the rest of the city.
Almost thirty years after passenger rail service to Somerville was halted, the Red Line Northwest Extension reached Davis Square in 1984.
The town/city and improve used the creation of the new station as a catalyst for revitalizing the faded square, promoting new commercial evolution and sponsoring other physical and infrastructural improvements.
The telecommunication and biotechnology booms of the mid-to-late 1990s decidedly contributed to Somerville's revitalization.
As with the housing boom a century earlier, the sudden increase in the number of jobs available in the metros/cities of Somerville, Boston, and especially Cambridge as well in as the other communities immediately encircling Somerville led to a new surge in the demand for housing. Additionally, the end of rent control in Cambridge coincided with the economic recovery in 1995, increasing demand for Somerville's affordable housing options. Until the 1990s, Somerville was known for its blue-collar inhabitants and its reputation for crime, especially in the city's east, where the Winter Hill Gang was based.
The town/city also had a very high car theft rate, once being the car theft capital of the country, and its Assembly Square region was especially continuing for this. However, after the gentrification reconstructionthe town/city went through in the 1990s, and an influx of artists to the area, this name has mostly faded from use and the town/city has instead attained a reputation for its active arts improve and effective government, including being titled the best-run town/city in Massachusetts in 2006. Nowadays lobbying by grassroots organizations is attempting to revive and preserve Somerville's "small town" neighborhood surroundings by supporting small-town business, enhance transit and plant nurseries.
1884 map of Somerville demarcating each of the wards inside the town/city According to the United States Enumeration Bureau, Somerville has a total region of 4.2 square miles (11 km2), of which 4.1 square miles (11 km2) is territory and 0.1 square miles (0.26 km2) (2.61%) is water. Somerville is bordered by the metros/cities of Cambridge, Arlington, Medford, Everett, and the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown.
Millennia ago, glaciation left a series of drumlins running west to east athwart the landscape of what would turn into Somerville.
Land in early Somerville was used primarily as grazing commons and small farms.
Somerville's commercial property is not concentrated in a recognized downtown central company precinct but instead is spread over many different nodes or corridors of company activity.
The various hills making up Somerville's landscape determined where road networks would allow neighborhood commercial development. Somerville has a number of squares that are centers for company and entertainment, as well as a number of other neighborhoods: Davis Square (considered West Somerville) East Somerville (East of Mc - Grath Highway, between Washington and Broadway Streets) Wilson Square (Elm Street and Somerville Avenue) Sullivan Square, in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, is just over the border from East Somerville; Inman Square and Lechmere Square, both in Cambridge, are also just outside Somerville.
Porter Square is in both Somerville and Cambridge.
Somerville has a humid continental climate with warm summers, cold winters and high humidity year-round.
More inland than Boston, conditions in Somerville are less likely to be moderated by the Atlantic Ocean, and temperatures are typically a several degrees warmer or colder than Boston depending on the season.
Somerville is the 21st windiest town/city in the United States, with an average wind speed of 12.4 mph. Climate data for Somerville, MA Somerville has experienced dramatic gentrification since the Red Line of Boston's MBTA subway fitness was extended through Somerville in 1985, especially in the region between Harvard and Tufts.
The economic clash between a several areas of the town/city of Somerville and its neighboring metros/cities of Boston, and in particular Cambridge, has created a culture of anti-intellectualism and anti-gentry sentiment that has spanned many generations.[non-primary origin needed] Symptoms of this include petty crime, and in some cases, violence against outsiders. Due to Somerville's close adjacency to various establishments of higher education, the town/city has a constant influx of college students and young professionals, who reside in sections near Cambridge where Harvard University, Lesley University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are positioned and near Tufts University, which straddles the Somerville-Medford town/city line.
The town/city is inhabited by blue collar Irish American, Italian American, and to a slightly lesser extent Portuguese American families, who are spread throughout the city.
Immigrant families from Brazil, Haiti and El Salvador live primarily in East Somerville, while those from South Korea, Nepal, and India, tend to reside in the Union Square area..
In November 1997, the Utne Reader titled Davis Square in Somerville one of the 15 hippest places to live in the U.S. Somerville is home to a grow arts improve and boasts the second highest number of artists per capita in America. According to Somerville's 2013 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the town/city are: 4 Somerville School Department 854 5 City of Somerville 695 Entrance of the Somerville Theatre Somerville's industrialized past left behind many legacies, including the invention of Fluff by Archibald Query.
Davis Square is home to the Somerville Theatre, which homes the Somerville branch of the Museum of Bad Art and plays host to the Independent Film Festival of Boston each spring.
The Brickbottom Artists Association has been hosting annual open studio affairs in the fall since 1987. Starlab Studios, a multimedia artist studio space and the host of Somerville's annual Starlabfest, opened in Union Square in 2009. Additionally, Artisan's Asylum on Tyler Street between Union and Porter squares is a hackerspace, where 150 members and 200 students have been participating in the manufacturer culture since 2011. The Somerville Arts Council and Somerville Open Studios both host annual affairs involving the improve in homegrown arts.
The Boston chapter of the Dorkbot improve meets in Somerville at the Willoughby & Baltic studio,in the Brickbottom district.
Starting in 2006, an annual Fluff Festival has been held to jubilate the invention of Fluff in Somerville.
Somerville has eighty-three sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Somerville Museum preserves memorabilia chronicling the city's roots, with historical and creative exhibits. It is positioned at 1 Westwood Road, on the corner of Central Street. The Somerville Community Path is a tree-lined rail trail that runs from Lowell Street to the Cambridge border near Davis Square.
Somerville has a mayor-city council form of municipal government.
There were candlelit processions with thousands marching in rallies in the middle of Union Square and other squares in the city.
The current mayor of Somerville is Joseph Curtatone.
Somerville is part of Massachusetts's 7th congressional precinct for purposes of elections to the United States House of Representatives.
It is represented by Representative Mike Capuano, formerly mayor of Somerville from 1990 to 1999. For representation to the Massachusetts Senate, Somerville is entirely inside the "Second Middlesex" district. For representation to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Somerville is part of the 26th, 27th, and 34th Middlesex districts. The 26th Middlesex precinct includes East Somerville, Brickbottom, and a portion of the Union Square area, as well as portions of Cambridge, The 34th Middlesex precinct includes Winter Hill and Teele Square, as well as portions of Medford.
The remainder of the city, just over half, comprises the 27th Middlesex district, which does not extend outside Somerville.
Somerville City Hall The town/city of Somerville is protected by the 152 paid, experienced firefighters of the town/city of Somerville Fire Department (SFD).
The Somerville Fire Department presently operates out of 5 firehouses, positioned throughout the city, and operates 5 engine companies, 3 ladder companies, and 1 rescue company, commanded by an on-duty precinct chief and deputy chief per shift. Facade of Somerville High School Somerville Public Schools operates eleven schools from pre-kindergarten to secondary schools. The East Somerville Community School, which was temporarily closed after a fire in 2007, had undergone demolition and ongoing standard and has now reopened as of the Fall 2013.
Also encompassed in the school precinct is the Somerville Center for Adult Learning Experiences.
Although formally listed as being positioned in Medford, Tufts University is also positioned in Somerville.
The Somerville Medford line runs through the Tufts campus, splitting the university's Tisch Library.
Somerville Public Library The historic Somerville Journal Building in 2009 Somerville Neighborhood News Somerville Community Access Television The Boston Globe (specifically its small-town version Your Town Somerville) Somerville Journal The Somerville News Somerville Beat Somerville Patch Somerville Scout Somerville Voices In addition, Candlewick Press, a primary children's book printing company, is directed in Somerville.
1907 postcard of Somerville Highlands Station Somerville, originally assembled as a streetcar suburb of Boston, has a framework and layout ideal for enhance transit.
Transit systems shrunk and all but disappeared as automobiles became the major mode of transportation, however, and streetcars left the town/city several decades ago. The City of Somerville is serviced by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) transit service.
Somerville is served by two rapid transit stations, a Red Line station at Davis Square in the northwestern part of the town/city and an Orange Line station at Assembly Square in the easterly part of the city.
Additionally, rail transit serves periphery points of Somerville.
To the southwest, Porter Square station, positioned just over the Cambridge border in Porter Square, is a transfer station serving the Red Line and the commuter rail Fitchburg Line.
Although the Orange Line had for decades passed through the Assembly Square neighborhood in easterly Somerville, it never stopped.
However, assembly on a new station between the existing Sullivan Square and Wellington stations broke ground in 2012 as part of the massive $1.5 billion Assembly Square redevelopment project.
In September 2013, the state secured funding to move forward on the assembly of two new Green line rapid transit stations in Somerville.
As part of the long-delayed Green Line Extension project, new stations are expected to open in the Union Square and Brickbottom neighborhoods by 2017. The Green Line Extension's proposed service consists of two distinct chapters: a "mainline" branch, which will operate inside the existing right-of-way of the MBTA Lowell Line commuter rail, beginning at a relocated Lechmere station in East Cambridge and traveling north through the Somerville neighborhood of Winter Hill all the way to College Avenue in Medford, near Tufts University; and a branch line operating inside the existing right-of-way of the MBTA Fitchburg Line to Union Square in Somerville.
However, it was in 1990 when Massachusetts agreed to a legally binding resolution to extend the line through Somerville to offset the additional burdens in traffic and pollution inside the town/city due to culmination of the Big Dig infrastructure.
Even with this legal commitment, however, the Green Line Extension universal lagged far behind schedule, prompting the City of Somerville and the Conservation Law Foundation to file a lawsuit to keep the universal moving.
In 2006, this litigation, with the help of improve support and advocacy groups such as Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership (STEP) and the Union Square Task Force, finally brought about a multimillion-dollar state investment in planning for the Green Line Extension with mandated culmination date of December 2014. Mc - Grath Highway (Route 28) in Somerville, Massachusetts Although only 43.6% of Somerville commuters drove alone to work in 2013, a several major arteries pass through the city. Mc - Grath Highway is a primary north-south route that represents the portion of Massachusetts Route 28 through the town/city of Somerville.
Mc - Grath is the continuation of Monsignor O'Brien Highway in Cambridge to the southeast and is known as the Fellsway north of the junction with Mystic Avenue and Interstate 93 in Medford. The highway has a long and complex history that hints to the changing nature of transit throughout Somerville and the greater Boston urbane region.
The result was to cut off East Somerville and the Inner Belt District from Winter Hill and the rest of the city.
Today, the transit framework of the two raised portions (the Mc - Carthy Overpass, running from Somerville Avenue to Medford Street, and the Squires Bridge, running above the MBTA Fitchburg line near Twin City Plaza) are decaying and decrepit.
In 2013, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation recommended that the Mc - Carthy Overpass that crosses over a several streets in Somerville be torn down, and proposed a boulevard-syle ongoing standard with bike lanes and sidewalks for pedestrians.
Northern Expressway (Massachusetts) runs northwest and southeast through Somerville, separating Ten Hills and Assembly Square from the rest of the city.
The massive elevated "Northern Expressway" was instead of in the early 1970s and passes directly through Somerville running alongside and/or above Mystic Avenue (Massachusetts Route 38).
The highway also serves to cut off East Somerville from Charlestown. Somerville is considered to be both a highly walkable and bikeable city.
In 2013, 7.8% of all commutes were made by bicycle, making Somerville the 5th town/city in the nation for its share of bicycling. In 2013, 49.8% of Somerville commuters either walked, biked or used enhance transit. Somerville launched its first Hubway stations amid the summer of 2012 and hosts 12 stations. The Somerville Community Path is a mixed-use path that runs along the old Boston and Lowell Railroad right-of-way from Davis Square athwart Somerville to the Cambridge border near Lechmere Square.
The City of Somerville has among the highest bus ridership in the Boston metro area.
Nearly 40,000 passengers board the buses that pass through Somerville each day, and 15 MBTA bus routes operate in Somerville. With the establishment of the Playground Association of America in 1906, many cities, including Somerville, began to sponsor supervised playgrounds for the kids of the town/city during the summer months.
Although the Recreation Department was not formally established in Somerville until 1917, supervised play, sponsored in part by the town/city and the Playground Association of America, began in 1909.
See also People from Somerville, Massachusetts Mike Capuano, member of the House of Representatives and mayor of Somerville Paul Ryan, born in Somerville; comic artist on Fantastic Four and The Phantom Somerville is a sister town/city with: "Somerville Named All America City".
"Introduction to Early Somerville: 1600-1865" (PDF).
Somerville Historic Preservation Commission (1 May 2011).
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City of Somerville Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development.
City of Somerville Office of Strategic Planning & Community Development.
"Time to remember Paul Revere's Somerville ties".
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City of Somerville Office of Strategic Planning & Community Development.
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City of Somerville Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development.
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Community Path-overview.pdf Somerville Community Path briefing, p.
"Top 101 metros/cities with the highest average wind speeds (population 50,000+)".
Average weather for Somerville Weather Channel'.' "1990 Enumeration of Population, General Population Characteristics: Massachusetts" (PDF).
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"1 Westwood Rd, Somerville, MA".
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City of Somerville Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development.
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Street map from City of Somerville website "Somerville - Neighborhoods, Photos, and Maps".
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City of Somerville Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development.
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Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City: Somerville, MA (Temple University Press; 2013) 190 pages; study of tensions between immigrants and a new middle class in politics and improve activism Images of America: Somerville.
Samuels, Edward Augustus; Kimball, Henry Hastings, "Somerville, past and present: an illustrated historical souvenir", Boston : Samuels & Kimball, 1897 Somerville, Arlington and Belmont Directory.
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Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Somerville, Massachusetts.
Somerville Chamber of Commerce Somerville Community Corporation
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