Sitting rather quietly a couple of miles south of Hanover, east of the Connecticut River near the point where US-4 gets submerged beneath the I-89 freeway, historic Lebanon (pop. 12,183) has a town green so spacious it seems more like the outskirts of a city park than the center of a town. Near the northwest corner is the main commercial area, or what’s left since the malls arrived, kept alive in part by a tasty establishment: Sweet Tomatoes (603/448-1711), facing the park at 1 Court Street, is an ever-popular trattoria whose gourmet pasta and wood-fired pizzas pull in crowds from miles around.
Right along the bonny banks of the Connecticut River, three miles south of patrician Hanover, the commercial busybody of West Lebanon has everything you probably try hard to avoid: shopping plazas, traffic tie-ups, and familiar fast everything, all clustered around the two local exits off the I-89 freeway.
