Meadow Glen Mall Redevelopment | Medford

chmeeee said:
Looks like Wegmans is going to be rolling in.
http://bostonrestaurants.blogspot.com/2015/11/wegmans-is-apparently-coming-to-medford.html?m=0
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This is big news for anyone who wants to buy and renovate some of the big 1920s houses in Medford or a "great bones" Victorian in Malden.

At the mall site, it almost raises more questions than it answers. Meadow Glen is so sad (except for Kohls and the food court which resonate with folks who like that sort of thing) that you'd have to think it will be at least partially demolished.

Then again, the Mall is so bad at drawing a crowd these days that they could afford to build the Wegmans on a corner/edge of the site and have it share parking while the mall proper awaits a better demolish-and-rebuild offer.
 
I think the most interesting part is that they said it WON'T be at the empty Shaw's across the street. I would have thought that would be the easiest/obvious location. I wonder what this will mean for the mall. The Kohls is nice and everyone seems to always love a Marshalls/TJMaxx no matter where it is.

More frequent bus service to Wellington would help a lot here.
 
This is Great news for the MeadowGlen Mall.
One restaurant that will be missed by the Masses is the OLD COUNTRY BUFFETT.
 
Wegmans in, non-anchor stores out at Meadow Glen Mall in Medford...in other words, there demolishing the whole "mall" part of the mall (which means Marshalls will need a new/better entrance too.).

Article includes this concept from New England Development, which I assume is a view from the southwest of the west elevation (with Marshalls out of the picture on the far left, and Kohls cropped out on the right)
Wegmans-Medford-rendering.jpg


The Meadow Glen Mall has been permitted for the renovation of 60,000 square feet...Marshalls and Kohl’s will continue their leases, and they are welcoming new tenants, including Wegmans...the arrival of Wegmans would coincide with the closing of the mall’s 40 or so non-anchor stores. The complex would then become a shopping center with only exterior entrances...New England Development also appears to be looking to add a fourth big-name store at the site.
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So basically like the Gateway Plaza in Everett, 'cept with a north-to-south layout of:
Marshalls-[TBDbox]-Wegmans-Kohls
 
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cden4 said:
Barf
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What can we say? It is about the same distance from downtown as South Bay and so we get big box, car-centric, slightly-too-far-to-transit stuff.

All is not lost. One car dealership is already developed as apartments, and maybe we'll get housing on the old Shaws site across the street from Meadow Glen (hard to think of anything else that'd go directly into Shaw's building, cept maybe a big Trader Joes) If Shaws gets torn down, it can only be for housing.
 
Strange, The Wegman's in Burlington is part of a development that tries to approximate an urban setting... in Burlington. Here they are in sight of downtown Boston and shouting distance to Wellington Circle and they're keeping the parking lot out front and eliminating the internal connection between stores?

If they're essentially leveling the majority of the mall anyway, it would be nice if they could build the store out to the street and include a covered parking area in the back like the one they have out-front of the Burlington store. They also love their outdoor spaces - fire pits and couches, etc. They could use the roof of the parking garage to offer spectacular views of downtown, looking down the Mystic. Kohls could stay where it is with a new entrance opening up to the parkway and the stores could maintain an internal entrance & connection in the back. Seems like a far more desirable arrangement if I'm driving or walking there - especially in the winter.
 
The former Shaw's is the parcel that faces the mall from across Locust St. (a North-South street perpendicular to the parkway)

This plan for luxury apartments is the first concrete plan for the location. Personally, I'd hoped for a Trader Joes in the old Shaws, but I guess having a Wegmans across the street made luxury apartments a more natural fit.

https://goo.gl/maps/dKjGpo2fXYv

This would means that luxury apartments will bracket the LoConte rink on both its north and south sides.
 
The site of the Meadow Glen Mall was also the site of the Meadow Glen Drive-In. Half of Medford was conceived there in the 1960's!
 
^ note that that is the ground level plan (as I read it there will be apartments on top, but the water table was too high to put any parking below ground)
 
nico said:
Strange, The Wegman's in Burlington is part of a development that tries to approximate an urban setting... in Burlington. Here they are in sight of downtown Boston and shouting distance to Wellington Circle and they're keeping the parking lot out front and eliminating the internal connection between stores?

If they're essentially leveling the majority of the mall anyway, it would be nice if they could build the store out to the street and include a covered parking area in the back like the one they have out-front of the Burlington store. They also love their outdoor spaces - fire pits and couches, etc. They could use the roof of the parking garage to offer spectacular views of downtown, looking down the Mystic. Kohls could stay where it is with a new entrance opening up to the parkway and the stores could maintain an internal entrance & connection in the back. Seems like a far more desirable arrangement if I'm driving or walking there - especially in the winter.
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Nico -- distance is not the criteria -- its $ per person nearby
Meffa is Meffa
Burlington is next to Lexington and Winchester which don't have a Wegmans

if you draw a circle of 10 minutes access under normal traffic conditions you can easily see the difference
 
This looks exactly like the University Station development in Westwood. It's from the same developer (New England Development) and it's a Wegmans anchored strip mall. Nothing more, nothing less.

Like Westwood, it's an improvement over existing conditions (maybe?) but still just a generic Anywhere-USA strip mall. Yes, I think the comparisons to the mall in Everett are on-point.
 
Retail stores on the ground floor of every development would be nice however I understand the decision not to include any. With this development next to Assembly Row and Stations Landing along with Wegmans and a few strip malls the developer may be worried about an over-saturation in retail space. Plus retail space would require the addition of lots of parking spaces as the area around this development isn't the most walkable.
 
They aren't building anything new though... just tearing out the partition walls of a basically abandoned indoor mall and replacing it with a supermarket.

If they were building this new I'd understand the flack, but jeez people.
 
Arlington said:
But City Council wants to appeal (this is in the Meadow Glen thread because 61 Locust is the former Shaw's across the street from the mall. Shaw's closure coincides with the opportunity for Wegmans to anchor the redo of the Mall)
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One city agency suing another should work out well.

Sounds like someone's (or a few) palm didn't get greased.
 
HalcyonEra said:
One city agency suing another should work out well.

Sounds like someone's (or a few) palm didn't get greased.
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Nah, just that Medford's City Council sees a big part of its role as giving vent to NIMBYs (and similar).

Medford's zoning also requires a fixed 2.1 car parking spaces per unit, so it is hard to tell the abutters that they're wrong when they think that a 490 unit building will add 1000 cars to rush hour(s) every day.

The right answer all around would be to cut parking to, say, 1.3 per unit, and, say, 10 car-share spots ask the developer to proffer things like bike & path improvements to Wellington and bus shelters on Riverside Ave, but to let the developer keep all 490 units, rather than have the car tail wag the units dog.

This building is ACROSS THE STREET from a (future) Wegmans, an existing Kohls and Marshalls and who knows what else in the other 3 TBD retail box slots.
 
Arlington said:
Nah, just that Medford's City Council sees a big part of its role as giving vent to NIMBYs (and similar).

Medford's zoning also requires a fixed 2.1 car parking spaces per unit, so it is hard to tell the abutters that they're wrong when they think that a 490 unit building will add 1000 cars to rush hour(s) every day.

The right answer all around would be to cut parking to, say, 1.3 per unit, and, say, 10 car-share spots ask the developer to proffer things like bike & path improvements to Wellington and bus shelters on Riverside Ave, but to let the developer keep all 490 units, rather than have the car tail wag the units dog.

This building is ACROSS THE STREET from a (future) Wegmans, an existing Kohls and Marshalls and who knows what else in the other 3 TBD retail box slots.
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Understood. But this project won't go anywhere for quite sometime. I think it's questionable whether the city council would even have standing to sue, it depends on the city charter. There have been quite a few of these cases in recent years in the suburbs. But once that it determined, it will go to appeal. And then a party with legit standing can come along and start the process all over.
 
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