Winter Hill is a State of Mind. @wintervillain
Get em while they're hot (these links will surely break soon).| Excerpted from the Somerville News 11/5/2008 6:01:00 AM | |||
Jimmy Del Ponte On The Silly Side This week's column was a breeze to write - a gentleman who reads my ramblings every week sent me an email about growing up on Winter Hill. I asked him if I could share his memoirs with the readers here and he said yes. This is basically his story - as he told it to me. I guess you could call this week's column "On The Hilly Side." He's not the kid whose mother hung out the window and yelled "Anthony..." on Wednesday afternoon in the North End; however, this Anthony has a lot of stories to tell about his childhood in the 'Ville. He went to the Arthur D. Healey School and then Northeastern Junior High School - which was condemned at the time, but still operated as a learning institution. Anthony then graduated from Somerville High School in 1981. Read more... | |||
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Winter Hill is a neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts. Located roughly north of Highland Avenue and west of the McGrath Highway, Winter Hill is home to a mix of restored homes and aluminium-sided fixer-uppers, replete with china gnomes and bath-tub Virgin Marys. Once known as the home base of Irish gangsters Whitey Bulger (currently on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list), James "Buddy" McLean, Howie Winter and the notorious Winter Hill Gang, Winter Hill is now, like much of the rest of Somerville, experiencing gentrification and a resulting rise in property values and rents. Despite these changes, the area continues to hang onto its neighborhood flavor and is home to a large community of Irish, Italians, Brazilians, Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, and other ethnic groups.
The area once had a gang problem with MS13 members attempting to take over the area. On January 30, 2003, several MS13 members raped a young deaf girl. [1]
The Theater Coop, one of the Boston area's few new repertory live theaters, is located between Foss Park and the local supermarket. There is also a community pottery studio called Mudflat in East Somerville, adjacent to Winter Hill, and a collective of stained glass artists called Daniel Maher Stained Glass.
Winter Hill also has many old Somerville favorites such as The Paddock restaurant on Pearl Street, Mama Lisa's, Leone's, and Primo's pizza establishments, the Winter Hill Bakery, and Maria's Italian Cold Cuts. Soccer is a popular pastime, and it is not uncommon to see leagues complete with matching uniforms, as well as many of the new immigrants from Brazil and Latin America in shirts-against-skins games, playing in Foss park next to Interstate 93, at the base of Winter Hill. The park also has a large, colorful mural painted behind the public swimming pool.
A planned extension of the Green Line to the Winter Hill area is possible, specifically with stations at Medford Street (Gilman Square) and Lowell Street, though estimated completion has been pushed back to 2014 and no final path has been agreed upon. [2]
