Newton, MA

Appears on

• Top 6 Suburbs of Boston

  Currently #1 · score 0

Reviews

Log in to leave a review.

Barks

Log in to bark.

Similar places

• Brookline, MA

  Brookline is almost entirely surrounded by the city of Boston itself, an unusual geography that's left it as one of the largest incorporated towns in Massachusetts never to have been formally annexed into the city it borders on nearly every side — a distinction Brookline residents and town officials have actively defended across more than a century of periodic annexation proposals. John F. Kennedy was born in Brookline in 1917, and his childhood home on Beals Street has been preserved by the National Park Service as the John F. Kennedy National Historic Site, a modest suburban house that stands in deliberate contrast to the more famous Kennedy estates in Hyannis Port and elsewhere. Coolidge Corner, Brookline's best-known commercial district, centers on the historic Coolidge Corner Theatre, an art-house cinema operating continuously (aside from a brief 1980s closure) since 1933, anchoring a walkable strip of independent shops and restaurants that's kept the neighborhood one of the more urban-feeling suburban commercial districts in the entire Boston area. Served directly by the MBTA Green Line's C and D branches along with several bus routes, Brookline's combination of near-total encirclement by Boston proper, a genuine walkable town-center feel at Coolidge Corner, and a direct connection to Kennedy family history has made it one of the most distinctive and consistently sought-after close-in suburbs anywhere in the metro area.

  BattleCompare
• Wellesley, MA

  Wellesley is best known nationally as the home of Wellesley College, a highly selective women's liberal arts college founded in 1870 whose alumnae include Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, and the campus's lake-and-woodland setting has made it one of the more scenic private-college grounds in the entire Boston area, open to the public for walking and running along Lake Waban. The town sits along the Massachusetts Turnpike roughly twelve miles west of Boston, and both the Framingham/Worcester commuter rail line and highway access have made it a genuinely practical commute for residents working downtown, even as much of the town's character has stayed oriented around large, architecturally varied single-family homes on generous lots. Wellesley Square, the town's compact downtown commercial district built directly around the commuter rail station, has kept a concentration of independent boutiques and restaurants that's stood in deliberate contrast to the larger chain-retail shopping centers found in some neighboring suburbs. Wellesley's public schools have consistently ranked among the very highest performing in Massachusetts on state assessments, and that reputation, combined with the town's direct association with one of the country's most prestigious women's colleges, has made Wellesley one of the most consistently expensive and sought-after suburban housing markets west of Boston.

  BattleCompare
• Cambridge, MA

  Cambridge sits directly across the Charles River from Boston, and its status as home to both Harvard University and MIT — two of the most academically prestigious universities in the world, situated within roughly a mile and a half of each other — has given the city an economic and cultural identity built substantially around research, biotech, and higher education rather than a purely residential commuter-suburb character. Harvard Square, the commercial district immediately surrounding Harvard's main campus, has functioned for well over a century as one of the most recognized college-town centers in the country, historically home to independent bookstores, theaters, and cafés that have drawn visitors and academics well beyond the university community itself. The city's Kendall Square neighborhood, adjacent to MIT, has transformed over the past two decades into one of the densest concentrations of biotech and pharmaceutical research facilities anywhere in the world, drawing major life-sciences employers specifically to be near MIT's research output and talent pipeline. Served by the MBTA Red Line with multiple stops throughout the city, Cambridge's combination of two world-class research universities, a historic and still-active college-town commercial core, and a genuinely globally significant biotech corridor has made it one of the most economically and academically significant small cities anywhere in the United States, despite a footprint of barely six square miles.

  BattleCompare
• Concord, MA

  Concord holds a foundational place in American history as the site, alongside neighboring Lexington, of the opening battle of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775 — commemorated today at Minute Man National Historical Park, where the reconstructed Old North Bridge marks the spot Ralph Waldo Emerson later immortalized as the site of "the shot heard round the world." The town's literary history is nearly as significant as its military one: Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, just south of the town center, for two years in the 1840s while writing what became Walden, and Concord was also home to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, making it one of the most concentrated hubs of 19th-century American literary and transcendentalist thought anywhere in the country. Walden Pond itself is preserved today as a Massachusetts state reservation, open to the public for swimming and hiking around the same shoreline Thoreau once walked, a rare case of a location this literarily significant remaining genuinely accessible to ordinary visitors rather than being cordoned off as a purely historical site. Served by the MBTA Fitchburg Line commuter rail with a roughly 45-minute ride into Boston's North Station, Concord's combination of foundational Revolutionary War history, an outsized 19th-century literary legacy, and well-preserved historic architecture has made it one of the most culturally significant small towns in the entire Boston suburban ring.

  BattleCompare
• Lexington, MA

  Lexington is where the Revolutionary War's first shots were fired on the morning of April 19, 1775, when British regulars marching toward Concord encountered a small company of colonial militia on Lexington Green — an event commemorated today at the same town common, still referred to locally as the Battle Green, with a statue of militia captain John Parker marking the site. That Revolutionary War history is preserved and actively presented to visitors through Minute Man National Historical Park, which spans both Lexington and Concord and includes the historic Battle Road trail connecting sites from that first day of fighting, making Lexington one of the most visited historic small towns in the entire Boston area. The town's public school system has consistently ranked among the very top in Massachusetts, a reputation that's made Lexington one of the more competitive suburban housing markets along the Route 128 technology corridor, an area that's drawn substantial biotech and technology employment over the past several decades. Roughly eleven miles northwest of downtown Boston with commuter access via bus connections to the Red Line, Lexington's combination of foundational Revolutionary War significance, well-preserved historic sites open to the public, and consistently top-ranked schools has made it one of the most historically important and educationally competitive suburbs anywhere in Massachusetts.

  BattleCompare

More in Where to Live

• Portland, OR

  Portland's unofficial civic slogan, "Keep Portland Weird," reflects a genuine and long-cultivated civic identity built around independent business, eccentric public art, and a resistance to homogenized national chain culture — one the city has largely succeeded in preserving even as it's grown substantially over the past three decades. The city was among the first in the country to adopt a formal urban growth boundary, established in 1979 under Oregon's statewide land-use planning law, deliberately limiting suburban sprawl and concentrating development within a defined area — a policy choice credited with helping preserve the region's surrounding farmland and forest while also being blamed, by some critics, for contributing to rising in-city housing costs over subsequent decades. Portland has built one of the most bike-friendly infrastructure networks of any major American city, with an extensive network of dedicated bike lanes and one of the highest rates of bicycle commuting in the country, complementing a food-cart culture so extensive that entire city blocks are sometimes organized as semi-permanent food-cart "pods" rather than traditional storefronts. Powell's City of Books, occupying an entire city block downtown, is one of the largest independent bookstores in the world by inventory, and its continued success alongside a broader culture of independent coffee shops, breweries, and record stores has made Portland one of the most frequently cited examples nationally of a mid-sized American city building an identity deliberately around independent, small-scale local business rather than national chains.

• Raleigh, NC

  Raleigh, named directly for English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, was founded in 1792 specifically to serve as North Carolina's state capital, and it forms one corner of the Research Triangle alongside Durham and Chapel Hill — a name coined in the 1950s around the deliberate creation of Research Triangle Park, a large research and technology campus built specifically to anchor the region's universities to private-sector employers. That triangle of institutions — North Carolina State University in Raleigh itself, Duke University in Durham, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — has fed a sustained, decades-long pipeline of research talent into the technology, biotech, and pharmaceutical firms clustered in and around Research Triangle Park, giving the metro area an economic base built substantially around higher education and applied research. That foundation has translated into consistently strong job growth over the past two decades, with Raleigh regularly appearing near the top of national rankings for tech-sector and biotech employment growth, and rankings, drawing a steady wave of relocating professionals from higher cost-of-living metro areas along both coasts. Raleigh's combination of a genuine research-university economic base, comparatively lower cost of living than many coastal tech hubs, and a growing downtown restaurant and arts scene has made it one of the more consistently recommended mid-sized American cities for movers specifically seeking Sun Belt job growth without the highest-tier housing costs of Austin or Denver.

• Minneapolis, MN

  Minneapolis is known as the "City of Lakes," with thirteen lakes located within the city limits itself, and the Chain of Lakes park system connecting several of the largest of them via a continuous public trail has made lake access — for swimming, running, biking, and paddling — a defining part of daily life for residents in a way few other major American cities can match. The city built one of the most extensive enclosed pedestrian skyway systems in the world beginning in the 1960s, connecting dozens of downtown buildings via climate-controlled second-story walkways specifically to make the notoriously cold Minnesota winters more livable for downtown workers and residents — a practical piece of urban infrastructure that's become one of the city's most distinctive physical features. Minneapolis's arts and music scene has produced an outsized cultural footprint relative to the city's size — the Guthrie Theater is one of the most respected regional theater companies in the country, and First Avenue, the downtown nightclub where Prince recorded much of the concert footage for Purple Rain, remains an active and celebrated music venue decades after the film's 1984 release. Functioning as one half of the Twin Cities alongside neighboring Saint Paul across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis's combination of extensive lake access, genuinely functional cold-weather urban design, and a music and theater scene with real national reach has made it a consistent presence on "best cities to live" rankings despite a climate that's, by most measures, among the coldest of any major US metro area.

• Charleston, SC

  Charleston occupies a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers on South Carolina's coast, and its historic district — one of the largest and best-preserved collections of pre-Civil War architecture in the country, including the iconic pastel row houses of Rainbow Row — has made it one of the most photographed and visited historic city centers in the United States. The city has topped Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler readers' polls for "best city in the United States" more times than almost any other American city over the past two decades, a sustained run of recognition built substantially on that historic architecture, a nationally regarded restaurant and culinary scene, and a walkable, cobblestone-street downtown scaled for pedestrians rather than cars. Charleston's history is genuinely complex and increasingly reckoned with directly rather than glossed over — the city was a major point of entry for the transatlantic slave trade, and the International African American Museum, which opened on the Charleston waterfront in 2023 at the site of a former slave-trading wharf, has become a significant addition to how the city presents its own history to visitors. The College of Charleston, founded in 1770, is among the oldest institutions of higher education in the country, and the city's combination of deep colonial and antebellum history, an increasingly candid public reckoning with that history's darker chapters, and a consistently top-ranked culinary and hospitality scene has kept Charleston one of the most nationally celebrated mid-sized cities in the United States.

• Denver, CO

  Denver's nickname, "the Mile High City," is precise rather than approximate — the fifteenth step of the Colorado State Capitol building is marked at exactly 5,280 feet above sea level, a detail the city has embraced as a literal point of civic identity rather than just a loose figure of speech. The city functions as the primary gateway to the Rocky Mountains for both residents and visitors, and that proximity to world-class skiing, hiking, and outdoor recreation within roughly an hour or two's drive has become one of Denver's single biggest draws for the wave of remote workers and outdoor-recreation-focused movers who relocated there in significant numbers through the 2010s and early 2020s. Denver's economy has diversified substantially beyond its historical roots in mining and energy, building genuine strength in aerospace, technology, and craft brewing — the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of breweries per capita of any major American city, anchored by the annual Great American Beer Festival, one of the largest beer competitions and festivals in the country. That rapid growth and diversification have made Denver one of the most consistently cited "best cities to live" picks in national rankings over the past decade, even as the city, like Austin, has faced real housing-affordability pressure and rising cost of living as a direct consequence of that same sustained population growth.