Stanley Kushner remembers when the macadam didn't even exist. Back in 1949, when he bought one of the first houses on Peters Lane, the small wooden Cape Cod-style homes and bungalows predated the road. But it is a neighborhood with a difference. Peters Lane sits at the foothills of High Mountain and is a gateway to the hiking trails and vast open space of the large preserved tract that encompasses it. The other day there was a neighbor's kid sleeping in my hammock .
Dogs run everywhere, and kids are always using one neighbor's pool.
For the residents of Peters Lane, the street and its residents make up an oasis in a town that is slowly becoming a patchwork quilt of new housing subdivisions. Expensive and mid-priced homes in complexes with names such as Squawbrook Run and Reservoir Point are becoming neighborhoods of their own. More town houses and homes are planned along the Hawthorne border. It is simply a street of 12 modest houses and manicured lawns where neighbors have become friends and have built a community around those relationships. That ambiance has prevailed even as the occupants have changed.