"It's like they came home," Teresa Gentile Saura said, describing the morning she first drove down Adams Street and saw the colors back where they belonged. She had to pull over. "When I drove down Adams Street, I started crying."
She was talking about paint. Three stripes, maybe eighteen inches wide, running down the center of a half-mile of road in Nonantum: red, white, green, the colors of the Italian flag, laid down instead of the double yellow line most Massachusetts streets carry. For most of a century nobody outside the neighborhood gave them a second thought. Then, for ten months between the summer of 2025 and the spring of 2026, those stripes became the most argued-about piece of infrastructure in Newton, and the way the fight actually ended tells you more about how this city works than the paint itself ever could.
The Night The Grinding Started
On the night of June 26, 2025, while windows stood open after a heat wave, Adams Street residents woke to a sound Boston Magazine described as a truck grinding up the road toward Our Lady Help of Christians church, "unleashing clouds of billowing dust." City crews were removing the tricolor lines and replacing them with standard double yellow lines, the kind federal guidance requires on roads of a certain width and traffic volume.
Then-Mayor Ruthanne Fuller framed it as an overdue safety fix. Her administration pointed to a traffic analysis that had placed Adams Street among the city's top five crash locations, and to Massachusetts Department of Transportation crash data showing the street's crash rate running more than twice as high as comparable roads elsewhere in the state, according to reporting at the time. The timing landed badly. Crews had done the work three weeks before the annual St. Mary of Carmen Society Festival, the five-day celebration that has closed out Nonantum's summer since 1935 and ends with a procession carrying a statue of the Madonna down that exact stretch of road.
Longtime resident and Nonantum Press Room owner Jimmy Donovan put it plainly to the Globe at the time: it felt like "a real kick in the [privates]." "It's like the veins of the festival," he said, "that's how deep this cuts." Festival chairman Chuck Proia, who has run Festa for two decades, backed him up. Within days, more than 2,000 people had signed a petition demanding the city restore the lines before the procession.
A Compromise Nobody Wanted
The city's offer was to let Festa volunteers repaint the tricolor stripes a foot or so beside the new yellow lines, not over them. Proia rejected it outright, arguing organizers should get the Italian colors for the one month that mattered and yellow the rest of the year, not a permanent asterisk next to someone else's paint job.
Volunteers repainted the colors anyway, over the yellow lines, in the days before the 2025 Festa. One resident was charged with vandalism for it. The stripes held through the festival weekend, matching flags on utility poles and painted fire hydrants along the route. Then, in August 2025, the city removed them again.
That second removal is the part of the story that got buried under the holiday coverage of Festa itself, and it is the reason the standoff stretched into 2026 rather than resolving that summer. For roughly ten months, Adams Street ran double yellow.
The Fix Nobody Expected
New Mayor Marc Laredo took office in January 2026 and, by his own account, spent his first weeks looking for a way through a problem his predecessor had framed as a binary: federal safety standard on one side, neighborhood tradition on the other. He didn't relitigate the crash data or challenge the federal guidance. He changed what the guidance applied to.
In early March 2026, Newton's Department of Public Works painted new lines marking designated parking spaces on both sides of Adams Street. That narrowed what counted as the travel lane. Once the roadway no longer met the width and traffic threshold that triggers the double yellow requirement, the city was free to paint something else down the center. GBH reported Laredo calling his own solution "a little creative," and it was: he didn't win an argument about whether the safety rule mattered. He made it stop applying.
By May 4 and 5, 2026, city crews were back on Adams Street overnight, this time sanding out yellow paint to make room for a white reflective stripe flanked by red and green. The lines that returned aren't pixel-identical to the ones removed in 2025. Longtime Adams Street resident Sam Davis noticed the difference immediately. "That's the straightest I've seen it," he said. Saura agreed the shade had shifted slightly: "the green's a little bit darker," she said, "but it's OK."
Paid For, Not Repainted Every July
What makes this restoration different from every repaint before it isn't the color match. It's who's paying for it going forward. State Representative John Lawn secured $50,000 in the state's supplemental budget for what officials are calling the Nonantum Cultural Corridor Project, money intended to fund crosswalks, signage, and safety improvements around Pellegrini Park in addition to maintaining the Adams Street lines themselves. Lawn described the funding as a way to keep the tradition alive "instead of residents" having to repaint it by hand every year before Festa, as volunteers had done for generations.
That detail matters more than the color. For ninety years, the tricolor stripes existed at the pleasure of whoever held the paintbrush and, implicitly, whoever ran City Hall. Now they exist as a funded line item in a state budget. The next mayor who wants to strip them out again has to unwind an appropriation, not just issue a work order at night.
What The Corridor Looks Like In Practice
Nonantum's own name for itself, "The Lake," has nothing to do with actual water. Silver Lake, the pond the nickname refers to, was filled in and developed over a century ago. Residents kept the name anyway, along with the painted fire hydrants, the flag-colored crosswalks, and driveways like Michael Panza's on Adams Street, painted red, white, and green for the twenty years he's lived there. Michaela Carrieri, visiting from Brookline for the 2025 procession, pointed out something worth remembering: Adams Street isn't the only street in Nonantum carrying the stripe. Several do. The Adams Street fight got the headlines because it sits on the Festa parade route, but the tradition itself is bigger than any one road.
This year's Festa, the 91st, ran Pellegrini Park to Our Lady Help of Christians from Wednesday, July 15 through Sunday, July 19, 2026, with the Society's scholarship raffle bringing in nearly $7,000 for next year's graduating seniors. City Council President John Oliver, who has lived in Nonantum for twenty-four years, told Fig City News that Festa has been part of his routine his entire time there. Mayor Laredo joined the procession into the church, calling it one of the traditions "that makes Newton so special." Nonantum Neighborhood Association president Saura, whom Fig City News called the neighborhood's unofficial mayor, organized the earlier Village Day at Coletti-Magni Park in June, where Nonantum Press Room and other Adams Street businesses sold food while the community awarded student scholarships.
The Part Worth Remembering
Drive Adams Street today and the lines look almost like they never left: a white reflective stripe, red on one side, green on the other, running past the same painted hydrants and the same flags hanging from utility poles. What's actually different is invisible from the driver's seat. The street is legally narrower than it was in 2025, on paper, because of the parking spaces painted along both curbs. The tradition is funded by a state grant instead of a volunteer with a paint can. And the fix that ended a ten-month standoff wasn't a change of heart. It was a change in what the rule was measuring.
That's the part of the Nonantum story that tends to get flattened into "the lines are back, everyone's happy." They are back, and people are happy. But the mechanism behind it says something specific about how this particular Newton village gets what it wants: not by winning the safety argument, but by changing the geometry underneath it.
Local knowledge like this, the kind that comes from following a village block by block rather than reading a market report, is what the Kennedy Lynch Team tries to bring to every conversation about Newton, whether that conversation starts with a street sign or a for sale sign. If you're curious what else has shifted in your corner of the city, or simply want a second opinion grounded in the neighborhood rather than the spreadsheet, we're glad to talk. Request a complimentary market consultation whenever the timing is right for you.
