Somerville Infill and Small Developments

albertmw said:
As far as the "Facade-ectomy" notion goes, note from the 'before' picture below that the original brick has been replaced by a cheap looking fiberboard with some amateur-hour wooden ornamentation (the diamonds in Scipio's shot). As-cheaply-as-possible is the name of the game on this one.

Here's what it looked like originally: http://cdn.patch.com/users/502047/2012/02/T800x600/f53a347203231e1c9fce605aba87ec22.jpg
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Okay, but it's not like that was ornamental brick - that was 1930s doctor's office brick. At least the new facade material is visually interesting.
 
Equilibria said:
Okay, but it's not like that was ornamental brick - that was 1930s doctor's office brick. At least the new facade material is visually interesting.
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Equilib -- I find the graphic a bit too repeating -- needs some variation on the theme
 
Equilibria said:
Okay, but it's not like that was ornamental brick - that was 1930s doctor's office brick. At least the new facade material is visually interesting.
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Fair enough on the brick, but in person this material has all the visual interest of cardboard. It's pretty bad.
 
Edit: The plan WAS to turn it into a grocery store & gym, but none of that is happening. Everything below is null & void.

Plans from: http://www.somervillema.gov/sites/d...14_1015-240ELMPlansWithSupplementalSheets.pdf

Original Proposal: 240 Elm St - Crunch Fitness/Brothers Marketplace:

Renders:

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Proposed Plans:

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I believe those are old plans. Crunch Fitness has withdrawn their plans to move there.

WCVB said:
A Crunch Gym was originally set to occupy the second floor but pulled out and Argiros planned to turn that space into offices, according to O'Donnell.
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[source]
 
The Grocery Store will be huge for the neighborhood.
 
datadyne007 said:
Welp. I tried. Thanks for your corrections. Looks like this project is just... nothing. Well, maybe, just trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing at this point.
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Thanks for digging up the renders. It's possible that some of those architectural plans are still on track, just without any tenants lined up. When the building started to literally collapse into the street last summer they may have been forced to go ahead with whatever plans they had on file.
 
mdd said:
The Grocery Store will be huge for the neighborhood.
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Pemberton Market serves that purpose for me. Than again .. I am on the Cambridge side of Davis.

cca
 
cca said:
Pemberton Market serves that purpose for me. Than again .. I am on the Cambridge side of Davis.

cca
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And for me as well. I live a block over from Pemberton, I use it regularly. I was speaking more in general.
 
When I lived in the area, I was a Star Market guy. Not a long walk, well served by transit, and 24-hour/day, it serves the neighborhood well.
 
bigeman312 said:
When I lived in the area, I was a Star Market guy. Not a long walk, well served by transit, and 24-hour/day, it serves the neighborhood well.
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+1, although it was still Shaws when I lived there. It was right down the street, and I even lived on the far side of Davis (off Holland) and never thought there needed to be anything closer. There's also another (crappy) supermarket on the corner of Broadway and Route 16 near Teele Sq.
 
I think A Trader Joe's would be nice there...for purely selfish reasons.
 
mdd said:
I think A Trader Joe's would be nice there...for purely selfish reasons.
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Doubt they'd go that close since the Community Path sends you right to the doorstep of the Alewife location. Unlike Whole Foods which doesn't give a damn how much its stores cannibalize from their next-nearest location, TJ's is borderline paranoid about always having its stores cranking at near-capacity. It took them forever to wise up and open the second Cambridge location because of how much they overanalyzed negative impacts to the exploding-at-seams Mem Drive store.
 
bigeman312 said:
When I lived in the area, I was a Star Market guy. Not a long walk, well served by transit, and 24-hour/day, it serves the neighborhood well.
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Shopping at Star Market is such a buzzkill. You do it because it's so convenient with it's location and hours but with just about anything you know there is a better quality and cheaper option within the vicinity - McKinnons for meat, Pemberton for produce (same price, better quality) and Market Basket for general grocery. The only good thing about Star is a lot of stuff is on sale frequently in which case it becomes great value but it's obnoxious to shop around that.

In other words it serves the neighborhood adequately, but I would not say it serves it well.
 
I like the idea of a grocery store in Davis in theory, but can't imagine it actually working out. There are already plentiful grocery options in the area, and any building in Davis will have little space and high rents. It would have to rely pretty much exclusively on foot traffic, and I just don't think there are enough people walking through Davis who would shop there instead of wherever they show now.

Somerville has been pushing for a grocery store in Davis for years, and they can't find any takers. Grocers know their business better than anyone, and they've decided to stay away. Roche Brothers came close to moving in, but pulled away for a reason. The market is really good at determining what retail establishments will be successful where, and I wish City Hall would just take their noses out of store location decisions. If the City had just let the retailers and landlords be, we likely would have had a brewpub/restaurant in the old Social Security building years ago and renovations would have been underway long before the structure started crumbling into the street. The same goes for the old Star Market on Broadway, where Curtatone blocked Ocean State Job Lot from moving in back in 2008 and we've had an empty, run-down storefront and parking lot ever since. The Mayor thought Somerville was too good for Ocean State Job Lot (even though plenty of fancier suburbs have welcomed the chain), but apparently not too good for an empty lot.
 
pixelsand8 said:
Shopping at Star Market is such a buzzkill. You do it because it's so convenient with it's location and hours but with just about anything you know there is a better quality and cheaper option within the vicinity - McKinnons for meat, Pemberton for produce (same price, better quality) and Market Basket for general grocery. The only good thing about Star is a lot of stuff is on sale frequently in which case it becomes great value but it's obnoxious to shop around that.

In other words it serves the neighborhood adequately, but I would not say it serves it well.
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Star/Shaws imploded 5 years ago. They didn't enter bankruptcy, but were up to their eyeballs in debt. Pulled entirely out of Connecticut, Western MA, and most of Rhode Island after a ridiculous overexpansion in the 90's/early-aughts. They're now VT/NH/ME, Eastern MA, and the MA border towns in RI. Most of the stores got placed in maintenance mode while they were put up for sale. Chain got bought out by a leveraged buyout firm in 2013, and they filed IPO paperwork last summer (still churning, so they aren't public yet). Would seem to indicate that their balance sheet is now in decent health.

They've gone on a renovation blitz re-converting Boston-area Shaw's back into remodeled Star Markets. The one on the Mass Pike air rights in Newton was the first to get the conversion treatment. I know from my last trip to one a couple weeks ago that the un-converted Shaw's are still the most depressing places on earth, so shopper experience is probably way different at the re-launched Star stores vs. the ones that are still in maintenance mode waiting their turn.

So maybe they're on verge of a comeback? I haven't heard a lot about how they're trying to re-differentiate themselves other than the company execs talking a good game in the business press about a "return to quality". I would think they'd have to offer a twist a little more than that because Market Basket runs the table now on quality customer service for the discount/non-upscale chains. The Star brand's past cachet is simply too far in rear view mirror for that alone to be their ticket to revival.
 
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