I never thought it was possible…

…but Wellesley is actually becoming more gentrified.

I loathe what they’ve done to Linden Street. For those of you who have no clue about Wellesley, the center of town runs parallel to Linden Street. Washington Street is the main drag for Wellesley.

Linden Street was sort of the back alley, and a little more of a place for townies. I used to take a walk all the way down to the end of Linden and back every day — it was peaceful.

Now, with two extra stoplights thrown in, a huge mega-complex strip-mall type thing installed on one side, and apartments being built on the other side…it’s turning into Washington Street. And I hate it.

I especially hate it because the yuppies who are moving here and fueling this are my age. They are every snot-nosed little over-privileged jerk I had to suffer through high school with. And I’m a snot-nosed over-privileged jerk myself, so you know these guys are bad.

On top of this, they’ve closed one of the last two diners in town (“Vidalia’s“, once known as “Popovers”, back in the day) which is driving me batshit; that was possibly the only place to get a decent lunch around here, except for the Maugus.

Instead, people want more restaurants like The Blue Ginger. You know, I once stood outside The Blue Ginger reading the menu, and the only thing I found that I could possibly stomach was a glass of water. I hate that fauxnouveaux cuisine crap.

As the title of the post says, I didn’t think it was possible, but Wellesley is becoming more gentrified, to repeat myself.

One notable holdout: Nino’s, otherwise known as “The Linden Store”, otherwise known as the best place on Earth to get a good sub, has not closed, moved, or changed. Oh, and just for the heck of it, I have to point out that the folks who run Nino’s, the LeBruns (“Nino’s” comes from Nino LeBrun, although the “official” name of the joint is “The Linden Store”), are truly great folks. The patriarch of the family is a great guy who has one of his son’s kidneys in him now (and is doing very well, last I heard). Hell of a thing for both him and tells you a little about his sons, too.

Then again, if any place was going to survive the “makeover” on Linden Street, it was Nino’s. The place is a license to print cash. But thank God it’s not gone, like Professional Pharmacy (ah, my youth flashes before me, I worked at Professional while I was in high school) — actually, Professional is even worse, because it didn’t go away, it just changed into a gigantic CVS.

Alright, alright, I’ll shut up, but you know, if you folks had kept Roy Switzler as a selectman, some of this development might not be happening; Roy always held the line against development while he was in there. Mind you, some development is fine, yes, but the current state of things…annoys the hell out of me.

Give me back the old Wellesley. Hell, go further back than my birth, back to when Wellesley was a Republican enclave, and give me that. Now it’s a giant sucking hole of white suburban guilt. The kind of people who support immigrants — until they hire one to clean their house, at which point they start worrying how much the person is going to steal from them.

But I guess this is all in vain. It would have happened eventually. Diehl’s lumber yard was taking up way too much incredibly valuable land, they were bound to sell out sometime (that’s what started the whole Linden makeover).

Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.

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