Neighbors on the suburban streets bordering Belmont brought a petition to the Historical Commission on Thursday after weeks of work carefully hidden from two homeowners among them.

Confident that construction is stopped for now at the city’s former Ellis School and North Cambridge Catholic High School, the Historical Commission decided Nov. 4 to delay talks about landmark status until December.

For the record, Rodney’s Bookstore isn’t closing, the City Council rescinded its sign ordinance and the Historical Commission has recommended historical landmark status for St. James’s Episcopal Church.

Repairs at a badly deteriorated house once lived in and written about by the great, if largely forgotten, William Dean Howells have been delayed by the Historical Commission for lack of details.

The Cambridge Historical Society is offering residents free Toscanini’s ice cream Saturday along with digital scans of their vintage photographs. That’s just the start of what’s new in history.

A 46-condominium building proposed to wrap around Porter Square’s elegant St. James’s Episcopal Church was essentially approved Thursday by the Cambridge Historical Commission, with only minor modifications or delays expected.

The work seen lately at the decaying Faces nightclub property on Route 2 is on infrastructure — sewage or piping, according to a city Web site — not construction to replace the building itself.

The possibility of charging more than $8 a year for resident parking permits was raised Monday at a City Council meeting, along with landmark status for the Shell gas station sign on Memorial Drive; holding fast on an Avon Hill historical district; criticism of paying Everett police officers for work in Cambridge; honoring freemason Prince Hall; and other issues.

Development of condominiums around a historic Porter Square church was hampered tonight at a meeting of the Cambridge Historical Commission, with commission members seeming to suggest ways for the project to be slowed and the revelation of an ancient deed that could be used in an attempt to block construction.