Belmont.

Belmont sits on a hill about six miles northwest of downtown Boston, tucked between Cambridge, Watertown, Waltham, Arlington, and Lexington, and it has spent more than a century earning its nickname: the Town of Homes. There is no highway cutting through the middle of it and no industrial district to speak of — just under five square miles of tree-lined streets, small village centers, and a surprising amount of protected open space. Buyers usually arrive comparing Belmont with Lexington, Winchester, and Arlington, and they tend to stay for the combination they find here: strong schools, a genuine small-town feel, and a commute that puts Harvard Square roughly fifteen minutes away on a bus.

Getting into the city is easier than the map suggests. Four MBTA bus routes run to the Red Line at Harvard — the 73 from Waverley Square, the 74 and 75 from Belmont Center by way of Concord Avenue and Huron Avenue, and the 78 from Arlmont Village up on the Arlington line — and Alewife station sits just past Belmont's northeast corner for anyone who would rather park and ride. The Fitchburg Line commuter rail has platforms at both Belmont Center and Waverley Square with a short run to North Station, though service there is light and many trains stop only on request, so most residents treat the buses as their real transit. By car, Route 2 skirts the north side of town toward Cambridge in one direction and I-95 in the other, Trapelo Road and Concord Avenue carry the local east-west traffic, and the Mass Pike is a quick hop south through Watertown or Newton.

The housing stock is among the most varied in the inner suburbs. Belmont Hill holds the town's grandest properties — center-entrance Colonials, shingled estates, and midcentury moderns on wooded lots with long views toward the city. Belmont Center and Payson Park are full of Victorians, Queen Annes, and 1920s Colonials on sidewalk streets where neighbors actually know each other. And then there are the side-by-side two-families that are practically a Belmont signature, clustered thickest around Waverley Square and the Winn Brook neighborhood: handsome, solidly built, and long a favorite of owner-occupants who live in one half and rent the other. Condominiums are the newest layer, most visibly in the mixed-use buildings that have reshaped Cushing Square. Inventory runs tight in every one of those categories, and a well-prepared listing here still draws a crowd.

Belmont's landmarks are quieter than its neighbors' but no less distinctive. McLean Hospital, the Harvard Medical School–affiliated psychiatric hospital, has occupied a wooded hilltop campus here for well over a century and remains one of the town's best-known institutions. Mass Audubon's Habitat Education Center & Wildlife Sanctuary offers 88 acres of trails, meadows, and vernal pools off Juniper Road. And the town's own conservation land — Rock Meadow with its Victory Gardens, the trails on Lone Tree Hill, the walking loop at Clay Pit Pond — gives Belmont far more room to roam than a town this compact has any right to.

Belmont Public Schools enrolls roughly 4,400 students across a PK–12 system that is one of the main reasons families shop this town. Four neighborhood elementary schools — Burbank, Daniel Butler, Wellington, and Winn Brook — feed Chenery Upper Elementary, and from there students move on to Belmont Middle School and Belmont High School. The district also runs its own preschool program.

Independent options are unusually strong for a town this size. Belmont Hill School, a boys' school for grades 7–12 on Prospect Street, draws day students from across Greater Boston along with a small boarding contingent, and Belmont Day School covers pre-kindergarten through grade eight as an all-gender day school on Day School Lane.

• Points of Interest

• Belmont Center — the Leonard Street village center, with local shops and restaurants, the town's civic buildings close by, and a commuter rail platform
• Habitat Education Center & Wildlife Sanctuary — Mass Audubon's 88-acre preserve on Juniper Road, with about four miles of trails, a nature center and gallery, and a universally accessible path
• Rock Meadow Conservation Area — meadow and woodland trails on the west side of town, and home to the long-running Belmont Victory Gardens
• Lone Tree Hill — a broad stretch of town conservation land on Belmont Hill, laced with walking trails and popular with dog owners
• Clay Pit Pond — the town pond off Concord Avenue, ringed by an intergenerational walking path
• Underwood Pool — Belmont's outdoor summer swim complex on Concord Avenue, open to residents and non-residents from mid-June through the end of August
• Cushing Square — the compact shopping district where Common Street meets Trapelo Road, refreshed in recent years with new mixed-use buildings above the storefronts
• Waverley Square — the Trapelo Road business district near the Waltham line, anchored by its rail platform and the terminus of the 73 bus
• Belmont Public Library — a busy civic anchor and one of the town's most-used buildings
• McLean Hospital — the Harvard-affiliated psychiatric hospital whose landscaped hilltop campus has been part of Belmont for generations

• History

Belmont's land was farmed for more than two centuries as the outlying acreage of Watertown, Waltham, and West Cambridge — today's Arlington — before residents won a charter of their own in 1859. The new town took its name from Bellmont, the hilltop estate of China-trade merchant John Perkins Cushing, whose family is still remembered in Cushing Square. Through the nineteenth century Belmont's market gardens, orchards, and greenhouses supplied Boston's produce markets, and the arrival of the railroad and later the streetcar steadily turned that farmland into house lots, filling Waverley, Payson Park, and the Winn Brook flats with the homes that earned the town its enduring nickname. McLean Hospital's move to a Belmont hilltop at the close of the century added the institution that has anchored the high ground ever since.

Belmont occupies a hilly patch of eastern Middlesex County about six miles northwest of downtown Boston, small enough to cross in ten minutes and hemmed in on every side by neighbors. Cambridge lies to the east, Arlington to the north, Lexington at the northwestern tip, Waltham to the west, and Watertown along the southern boundary. That position is much of the appeal: Harvard Square, Alewife, Route 2, and Fresh Pond are all minutes away, yet the streets inside Belmont stay residential from one town line to the next.