Newton Massachusetts - America's Best Places to Live

Chestnut Hill Reservoir Historic District runs between Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue in nearby Boston, immediately east of Boston College Main Campus Historic District and the Boston-Newton city border. The Chestnut Hill Reservoir is in the center of Chestnut Hill that is a single neighborhood that encompasses parts of all of Boston, Brookline, and Newton, Massachusetts. The Chestnut Hill Reservation is a park that surrounds the reservoir.

During Summer 2010, Newton MA became the 3rd Best Place to Live in America listed on the Money & CNN online magazine's 100 Best Places to Live in America list. It has continued to be among the best cities in the country since that time.

This news is exciting for the town, because it brings a lot of focus and increases promotional suggestions to visit the community for travel, vacations, and stopovers while journeying elsewhere in the northeastern portion of the country.

The local economy is strong, although housing costs are rather high in comparison to the rest of the US, but employment is only 6.0% and indicates jobs being left unfilled because of a lack of enough workers in the larger Boston Metro Area.

As a suburb, Newton enjoys providing its own jobs as well, and is an interesting place to live while commuting to the more hectic and historic Boston.CNNMONEY tells us that Newton is about 45 minutes from downtown Boston by public transport that included rail, subway, and Express bus. This is a lot of available public transportation and residents appreciate it.

Newton itself contains 13 separate New England villages that feature pedestrian-friendly shopping regions, green spaces, parks, and playgrounds. This, combined with good jobs and good transportation make Newton a "best place."

Leading job search and trending engines Indeed.com and Simplyhired.com provide accessible data. From that, we see that the bulk of 194,000 job listings in September 2013 (up from 98,000 local jobs in July 2010) listed most often are located in Boston, Cambridge, and Framingham, all of these places being Education, Business, and Research leaders. Newton has plenty of jobs as well.

Newton is truly an historic city, with 92% (over 19,800 structures) of all of its buildings and other construction listed on the US National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

In addition, Newton is part of the Boston Marathon, had a trolley park, and enjoyed having the Fig Newton cookie named after it. The city name honors Viking explorers early in the New World, sailing down the Charles River.

Newton sits between Interstates 90 and 95 now, but was first settled in 1630 and became an official city in 1874. It began as a milling town that used water power and evolved into an early commuter's suburb with the advent of the railroad in the area in 1834. After this, street cars and automobiles followed.

Other Massachusetts cities on the 2010 Top 100 Best Places to Live in America list are:

• Waltham - #28
• Brookline - #39
• Weymouth - #52

Norumbega Park was an amusement park that operated from 1897 through 1963 at the end of a trolley car line in Newton, much like the trolley parks in Columbus, Ohio - Minerva Park and Olentangy Park. The writer Ray Bradbury has featured trolley parks in some of his short stories and novels, because he visited them in his childhood. They were the next best thing to the circus or a horror movie for him.

I've only seen collections of old photos of these parks, but I can see that they were a major venue of activity at the ends of these trolley car lines. The parks were full of people on weekends. Today, the two in Columbus are 1) a housing development, and 2) a mid-scale apartment complex that retained the small lake of the amusement park to use as the community pond.

Norumbega Park featured not only rides and games, but the Totem Pole Ballroom and dances were very popular int he heyday of trolley parks. The local trolley line ended at the park, but being on the Charles River, people could boat up to the park as well. Today, a hotel is successful on the grounds that overlook a 10-acre conservation area.

The park features sports as well as games and rides, including Ladies' Professional Softball among the Totem Pole Belles (Norumbega Park, by Robert Pollock, 1999).

1. Physical Therapists
2. Administrative Assistants
3. Registered Nurses (RNs)
4. Software Engineers
5. Office Managers
6. Pharmacy Technicians
7. Project Managers
8. Occupational Therapists
9. Dental Assistants
10. Sales Representatives

Additional Fast Increasing Jobs

1. Front Desk Staff
2. Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners
3. Senior Software Engineers
4. Hygienists
5. Salespeople
6. Business Analysts
7. Engineers
8. Account Executives

1. IBM
2. Faulkner Hospital
3. Boston University
4. EMC
5. Massachusetts General Hospital
6. Genzyme
7. Deloitte
8. Boston University
9. Robert Half Finance & Accounting
10. Staples
11. Children's Hospital Boston
12. Biogen Idec
13. Tufts Medical Center
14. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
15. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
16. The Winter, Wyman Companies
17. MIT Lincoln Laboratory
18. Boston Scientific
19. Cybercoders
20. Marriott Corporation
21. Brigham and Women's Hospital
22. Harvard University

1. Physical Therapists
2. Occupational Therapists
3. Retail Salespeople
4. Registered Nurses (RNs), including Travel Nurses
5. Accountants
6. Software Engineers
7. Tellers
8. Store Managers

1. Mitchell Martin
2. TechTarget
3. TripAdvisor and Expedia - Travel and Tourism
4. PatientKeeper, Inc.
5. Newton-Wellesley Hospital
6. Education Development Center
7. Faulkner Hospital
8. CyberCoders and EMC (tie)
9. Caretenders
10. Critical Connection and Aegis Therapies (tie)

WITHIN 5 MILES OF NEWTON CITY LIMITS

These additional employers list large numbers of openings close to Newton:

1. Genzyme
2. Harvard University
3. Biogen Idec
4. Novartis Ag
5. Novartis Institutes For Biomedical Research 80
6. Tufts Health Plan
7. General Dynamics
8. Babysitters.sittercity.com and Nanny.sittercity.com -- Confirms the growig population in and around Newton, Massachusetts.
9. Mt. Auburn Hospital
10. Akamai
11. Pfizer
12. IBM
13. Take Care Health Systems
14. Sanofi-Aventis

• Brae Burn Country Club
• Charles River Country Club
• Longwood Cricket Club
• Newton Commonwealth Course
• Woodland Golf Club

The Boston Metro Area offers some of the most respected and results-producing universities and research facilities in the world. Included in the Newton area are:

• Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre
• Babson Undergraduate College
• Boston College - Located in a National Registered Historic District.
• Boston College Law School
• Hebrew College in Newton Centre
• Lasell College - Oak Hill
• Mount Ida College - Auburndale
• New England School of Acupuncture
• Newton Junior College - Newtonville
• Pine Manor College

For a complete list of colleges and universities in the Boston Metro Area, please see Top 10 Jobs in Boston.