Brookline: Boston's Streetcar Suburb

Brookline: Boston's Streetcar Suburb

This article relates to Honeydew

Many of the stories in Honeydew are set in the town of Godolphin, an imaginary suburb of Boston that bears a great deal of resemblance to Pearlman's home town of Brookline.

Brookline, first settled in 1638 and incorporated as an independent town in 1705, is what's commonly known as a "streetcar suburb," a residential community whose historical development is strongly linked to the rise of public transit. In this case, the streetcars still persist as trolleys on Boston's Green Line, one branch of which runs down a boulevard at the center of Beacon Street, a broad avenue at the heart of Brookline.

Once known as the "richest town in the world," Brookline became known in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as the home of significant figures in the worlds of arts and culture: architect Henry Hobson Richardson, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, poet Amy Lowell, and novelist Saul Bellow all called Brookline home. The Kennedy family also has strong Brookline roots, and John F. Kennedy's Brookline birthplace is now an official National Historic Site. The town's proximity to Boston's Longwood Medical Area has made Brookline attractive to generations of physicians—one historic neighborhood is known as "Pill Hill" for that reason. More recently, Brookline has been the home of other luminaries, from supermodel Gisele Bündchen and her husband, NFL quarterback Tom Brady, to comedian Conan O'Brien, who grew up in the town.

Although Brookline is best known as the home of wealthy and upper-middle-class residents, it also has a long association with working-class Irish families and, more recently, with Asian families and with other immigrant groups drawn to the town for the high quality of its public schools. In the 2010 census, more than 15% of the population of Brookline identified as Asian. Of the town's 58,732 residents in the 2010 census, 15,174 (26%) were foreign born. Obviously the demographics and culture of this historic suburban town are rich and complex—much like the stories of one of its other notable residents, Edith Pearlman.

Picture of Beacon Street Green Line from Chestnut Hill Realty
Picture of JFK birth home from National Park Service

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Honeydew. It originally ran in February 2015 and has been updated for the September 2015 paperback edition. Go to magazine.