GBH Daily: Free Ride: Summer house

🌂Slightly cooler, with a chance of showers and highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 7:36 p.m.

Today we have a Free Ride first: an activity that isn’t quite free (Don’t worry, it costs $3.) Before we get to that though, a quick reminder: early voting for the Sept. 1 primary starts tomorrow across Massachusetts. GBH’s Sara Hassan put together this handy voter guide, which you can use to determine who’s running in your district, how to check your registration and more.

If you’re in Boston, Chelsea, Revere or Winthrop, one of the more contentious races on your ballot will be the contest for Suffolk District Attorney. GBH’s Amanda Keane covered a candidate forum this week where each of the three candidates — current DA Kevin Hayden, former DA Rachael Rollins and attorney Linda Champion — had an hour to make their case to voters. You can find Keane’s recap here.

Four Things to Know

1. As lawmakers in Massachusetts negotiate the specifics of a bill that would allow police officers to arrest people who commit acts of violence against health care workers, advocates for people with disabilities said they worry about the bill’s unintended consequences.

Take Susan Senator, whose 36-year-old son Nat Batchelder has profound autism. He lives in a group home and has a hard time communicating when he’s stressed, which means he will sometimes try to injure or bite himself. Senator said she worries that, if he’s around people who don’t know how to communicate with him, the situation could escalate into criminal charges under the new bill. “There’s all this potential for misunderstanding and tragedy,” Senator said.

2. The 2028 Democratic National Convention will come to either Boston, Denver or Philadelphia. The convention, at which Democrats will formally nominate a presidential candidate, is set for Aug. 7 through 10, 2028.

DNC leadership will announce which city they pick later this year, and Republicans have already announced that their 2028 convention will take place in Houston.

3. Archeologists searching the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown recently found new remnants that may date to the battle fought there 251 years ago: gun flints, musket balls, and the remains of a trench built by soldiers fighting for American independence just hours before the battle.

They also found what Boston city archaeologist Joe Bagley describes as “a very large wig curler.” “The British soldiers that were there, the King’s troops, they were actually required as part of their uniform to have a white wig,” he said. “So these men that were camped out in this fortification that they took over after the battle were having these wigs probably on makeshift stands that they were then having to curl the hair so that they could be presentable as the King’s troops if they ever had to present themselves or join a battle.”

4. Bridgewater’s team will compete in the Little League World Series tournament this week. They lost their first game against Bayonne, New Jersey, 2-1, and are now balancing the series with spending time with the best young baseball players from around the world until their next game Saturday.

“On the bus ride down, it was like letting the boys know you’re one of the 10 teams left in the country,” manager Tim Zackrison said. “You know, you’re one of 20 teams left in the entire world. That’s amazing.”

Bill Miller

GBH

This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.

Free Ride: Bravo to Waltham’s summer houses

A greenhouse full of plants.

A greenhouse at the Lyman Estate in Waltham, August 2026.

Gal Tziperman Lotan

GBH News

Welcome to Free Ride, your weekly guide to a $0 day trip. Remember: the MBTA Commuter Rail is fare-free every Friday this summer. As each weekend approaches, I’ll invite you to take a break and find some nature, art, science, fashion, music and more — all for $0 (or as close to free as I can get).

Imagine you’re a wealthy Bostonian living in the 18th or 19th centuries. The expected thing to do with your riches was to buy an estate away from the city, where you and your family could spend summers and enjoy many acres of greenery and relative solitude.

We are, of course, not robber barons of the Gilded Age, but 21st-century Commuter Rail riders looking for cheap ways to spend our Fridays. Today we’re heading to Waltham to explore some of these estates and their gorgeous grounds so we can get a little bit of that fancy experience on the cheap.

Take the Fitchburg line to Waltham and walk about 20 minutes to the Lyman Estate’s greenhouses. The estate itself, now owned by Historic New England, has a $15 admission fee. But the grounds and greenhouses are free to wander. The greenhouses have signs telling the story of Theodore Lyman, a Boston merchant who bought this land in 1793 and designed it to look like an English manor. These are some of the oldest surviving greenhouses in the country, once used to grow produce and flowers from warmer climates. I found a lovely cactus collection and pink, papery bougainvilleas.

Up the street is the entrance to Stonehurst, the home of lawyer and philanthropist Robert Treat Paine. Paine was born into wealth — his great-grandfather, also named Robert Treat Paine, signed the Declaration of Independence. The younger Paine spent a lot of his life working on social causes. He bought this land to use as a summer home and got the biggest names of the time involved in the construction: architect Henry Hobson Richardson of Trinity Church in Boston designed the home, and Emerald Necklace designer Frederick Law Olmsted planned the grounds.

Today the property belongs to the city of Waltham. I rang the doorbell, paid a $3 fee, and got to walk around the estate. Most rooms are no longer furnished, though there’s a study stocked with a heavy wooden desk and books. The part I found most charming was two wooden doors upstairs. Members of the Paine family marked their heights on the doors for decades. There are tick marks, names and dates spanning generations.

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And remember: if you take any of these trips or have your own Free Ride ideas to share, I want to hear from you! Send me a note at daily@wgbh.org.

😎More free rides:

–On the rail trail in Newburyport

–A whale of a time in New Bedford

–The soles of history in Haverhill

–A $0 beach day in Rockport