According to The Salem News, the parking lot at The Cove Salem filled up early on the evening of August 27. State Senator Joan Lovely was handing out citations. Jeff Swartz, the Salem Chamber of Commerce's executive director, was working the room. Somewhere near the appetizer table, provided by the neighborhood's own restaurants and bakeries, Ken McTague of Concept Signs was probably talking shop with Chris LaConti of The Cove Hotel. It was the 12th Annual Neighborhood Pride Landscaping Contest, the centerpiece of the Bridge Street Neck Celebration and Beautification Awards, and the whole thing had been organized the way this neighborhood organizes most things: through storefronts, not apps. Anyone who wanted to nominate a yard or a business dropped a form off at Coffee Time Bake Shop or at To Do, Ta Done. No portal. No QR code. Just two counters on Bridge Street where people you already know will take your paperwork.
That detail matters more than it looks like it should, because it tells you something about how this stretch of North Salem actually functions. But the contest itself tells you something bigger.
Two Residential Categories, Not One
The awards split into Residential and Commercial, and the Residential side splits again into Regular and Small Space. This year, Jennifer White of 17 Conant Street took first place in Residential Regular. Jason Lang, at 41/43 Osgood Street, took second. Ramila Patel of 13 Cross Street took third. In Small Space, Kirshe Hinsman, who gardens outside a condo unit at 106 Bridge Street, placed second.
A landscaping contest with two residential tiers isn't a quirky bit of civic bureaucracy. It's an acknowledgment of what the housing stock here actually is. Bridge Street Neck was Salem's original gateway settlement, a peninsula between the North River and Collins Cove that's been built up in layers since the 1630s, and a lot of what got built is small on purpose: single houses subdivided into two and three units, Federal and Victorian-era homes with dooryard-sized plots, condos carved out of buildings never designed to be condos. You don't run a landscaping contest with a "Small Space" category unless a meaningful share of your entrants are gardening on a patio, not a lawn.
The zoning tells the same story from a different angle. In 2019, the city worked with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council on a fresh look at the Bridge Street Neck corridor, and planners found that 51 percent of the existing uses along the corridor were already non-conforming under the rules in place at the time. One example they flagged directly: the neighborhood has plenty of buildings where a hair salon or shop occupies the ground floor and someone lives above it, a combination current zoning in most of the corridor doesn't actually allow. The built environment got here first. The rulebook is still catching up.
So when the Beautification Awards hand out a Small Space citation alongside a Regular one, they're not being generous. They're being accurate.
A Pollinator Bed At Gonyea Park
Across the rest of Salem this year, the city's 400th-anniversary preservation money is going toward genuinely large projects: stabilizing the 18th-century earthworks at Fort Lee above Salem Willows, and carefully disassembling a deteriorated marble tomb marker at Broad Street Cemetery for reconstruction. Big, funded, multi-year work.
In Bridge Street Neck this season, the neighborhood's most talked-about improvement was smaller. A native pollinator bed was planted at Gonyea Park, the pocket park off Northey Street named for Bob Gonyea and established back in 1997 to give the neighborhood's families a park that wasn't a half-mile walk across Bridge and Winter Streets to Salem Common. The planting got its own mention at the awards ceremony, standing next to municipal citations and merchant sponsorships like it belonged there. Which, in this neighborhood, it does. Civic improvement here doesn't always wait for a grant cycle. Sometimes neighbors pitch in with a shovel.
The Businesses Involved
Coffee Time Bake Shop has been on Bridge Street, at number 96, for more than 30 years, family owned the entire time, open five in the morning to eleven at night, seven days a week. It's the kind of anchor that doesn't need an award to matter, but it took nominations for one anyway, because that's the role a bakery plays on a street like this: part business, part clearinghouse for whatever the neighborhood is organizing that month.
The Commercial side of the awards runs on the same logic. The Bridge Street Neck Merchant Task Force, working under the Chamber of Commerce, sponsors the whole event, and the businesses that showed up, Concept Signs, The Cove Hotel, Bill and Bob's Roast Beef represented by Heather Lagonakis, aren't outside observers of neighborhood pride. They're underwriting it. A merchant task force that funds an awards night for its own residents is a different animal than a chamber that just runs a ribbon cutting once a year. It suggests the businesses here see themselves as permanent enough to invest in the block, not just lease space on it.
Where The Walking Actually Goes
If you're new enough to the Neck that you haven't mapped its parks yet, here's the short version. Gonyea Park, now with its pollinator bed, sits behind the Veterans Riverway. Collins Cove Park, closer to the water, has pickleball courts and a baseball diamond alongside its shoreline views, making it the rare Salem park that serves both a Saturday morning match and a summer picnic. Remond Park is quieter: a small sitting area with benches looking out over the Rams Horn Channel, built within the last eight years on the exact spot where the old bridge to Beverly used to stand before the current span went in. Charles R. Curtis Memorial Park rounds things out with a smaller playground a block or two from most front doors.
None of these are destination parks. That's the point. The 2019 planning vision for the corridor explicitly called for a neighborhood that's "safe and comfortable for all ages and abilities to walk and bike," and the park spacing here, small, frequent, a few blocks apart, reads like a plan that took that seriously instead of building one big amenity and calling it done.
The Pattern
Put it together and the picture that emerges isn't the postcard version of Salem, the one built around witch trials and a Halloween economy downtown. It's a working residential peninsula where the biggest civic event of the season is a landscaping contest run out of a bakery counter, where a pollinator bed at Gonyea Park gets the same applause as a state senator's citation, and where the zoning still hasn't fully caught up to a housing stock that's been mixing small footprints and big ones since before the city had a name for either category. The Beautification Awards didn't invent that reality. They just built a ballot around it.
If you already live on the Neck, none of this is a reason to do anything different this fall except maybe walk past Gonyea Park and see the pollinator bed, or grab a bismark at Coffee Time before the bakery's morning rush thins out. But if you're the kind of person who reads a neighborhood's civic calendar and starts thinking about what it would mean to actually live inside it, or if you already do and you're weighing what a small-footprint property here is really worth against one of the "Regular" category lots, that's a different conversation. Michael Selbst works this stretch of the North Shore directly and can walk you through what Bridge Street Neck's mix of historic housing stock and hyperlocal zoning actually means for a purchase or a sale here. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
