Interesting, not surprising. "Summit Hill" isn't viable because of Summit Avenue.
Brandon Hall was a hotel built in 1903. As millerm277 pointed out, it burned in 1946. The 1501 Beacon tower is now on the site.
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This mapping of resident names for neighborhoods is interesting. "Corey Hill" seems to be the main name north of Beacon, and Griggs Park south.
Cool pic, thanks. I do love the remaining grand buildings on that stretch. There are some great photos of that hill being developed in the late 19th century, with sparse, grand apartment blocks adjacent to undeveloped land. Very cool.
I wasn't suggesting the stop be named Summit Hill, just sharing the reality, or a reality.
As for the neighborhood names link... so many of those types of claims are BS, I am sorry to say, and that one is no exception. "Emerson Gardens" is a made up real estate company name that nobody uses. Ditto "JFK Crossing". The problem is that google maps imports these bullshit names they mostly glean from realtor sites or god knows where else, and then the college kid who moves in from New Jersey thinks he lives in Emerson Gardens, and there you have it. Not to mention the fact that the "real local" names tend to be held in demographics that don't take surveys, whereas the demographic who willingly takes surveys like this tend toward the over-educated, well-heeled classes that think everything you need to know about your surroundings can be found on google and wikipedia, rather than the guy at Dunkin Donuts.
The thing the people dying to categorize every last little thing dont realize is, not every square inch of neighborhood actually has a neighborhood name, and just because you can type in some nonsense onto google maps and get a clear red line marking off some named region, doesn't make it "real", necessarily. A lot of places are simply defined by what they are near. Emerson Gardens is just a neighborhood "near Brookline Village". Or, "off Davis, by the park". Ditto for the area by BHS. It's "off Tappan", or "near Brookline Hills", or "near Beaconsfield Station". It's not a named neighborhood. And that's OK. Not every neighborhood is an equivalent polity/geographical space the way you're either in MA or RI and each one is an equal state under the federal government. Some neighborhoods are very defined, some ill defined, and some have no name at all.
Coolidge Corner, Brookline Village, Pill Hill, South Brookline, Fisher Hill, Washington Square, Cottage Farm, and Summit (Corey) Hill are really the only neighborhood or place-designating names people would use. Whisky Point is "The Point" (barely anyone would ever call it that now, it's mostly an affectation of people not from there fancying themselves in the know because of The Point's working class associations); anyone saying Whisky Point is not even from Brookline. "North Brookline" is never used except to designate it in contrast to South (eg, "no, I would only ever live in North Brookline" or "we'll be leaving [location in South Brookline] and headed to North Brookline in a couple hours" (even this would be rare)). Nobody says Aspinwall Hill, it's just a nameless hill that most people know is technically called that but nobody does.
Plus, of course the name of a place also depends on who the name is being communicated to. There is certainly the demographic that loves to cram their charming neighborhood name into the conversation when it's someone who has no clue about local geography, but on average, people adjust their communication to whom they're speaking to. A true Brookline person might still say they're from "just outside Boston" to someone in LA but might even just say Boston. They certainly wouldn't say "Brookline". And to someone from Cambridge, they'd probably say "near Brookline Village" but to someone from Brookline they'd say "Pill Hill". In the era of the internet and scads of obsessive people reveling in the ability to categorize arcane information found online and force it into the world of reality, we see these super specific, but actually meaningless, tiny neighborhood names get reified into a reality they dont actually have. If nobody but you and the realtor know that the three streets by your apartment are called Emerson Gardens on google maps, what sort of "real" name is that in the first place? Geography is a living thing, what something is called is based on what people in their daily lives call or don't call it... that is what makes names "official" or not... which, ironically, is what the guy who did the survey in the article you linked was trying to do!
