Stop and Shop Mixed Use | 1690 Revere Beach Parkway | Everett

Equilibria

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Another huge one for the Vale Street corridor. Looks like the supermarket wouldn't stay.


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That looks more interesting than most of the development on Revere Beach.
 
~800 affordable and market-rate units

"Transit Oriented"... with 906 parking spaces
It's about a half mile (10-15 minute walk) from the new Chelsea CR station being built behind the Chelsea Market Basket and the Chelsea SL 3 station.
 
Holy crap I was thinking isnt this in chelsea because that massive apartment complex is going up in Chelsea literally next door, well come to find out the town line between Everett and Chelsea runs along the back wall of the supermarket. So 2 projects being built side by side are in 2 different towns. Crazy.
 
It's about a half mile (10-15 minute walk) from the new Chelsea CR station being built behind the Chelsea Market Basket and the Chelsea SL 3 station.

And when the T extends SL3 to Everett (which is very likely) it would run right past these developments on either Everett Ave or Vale. I could see an argument for making Vale either a bus-only or bus-first road with all this density.
 
With the thousands of residential units going up in the area, and the high school right across the street, the little "Center Court" neighborhood center will be good for the area (or full of teenagers...). A silver line stop incorporated now into the design would be a good idea, if it's actually going to break off of the ROW instead of continuing to Wellington or Sullivan OL.

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According to Google maps the rear third of Stop & Shop is in Chelsea. That Stop & Shop is only about 10 years old. Being so close to Market Basket it has never been very successful.
 
Theres TONS of room out here, its all parkking lots and warehouses. We should be building dozens of these.
 
Theres TONS of room out here, its all parkking lots and warehouses. We should be building dozens of these.
Many of those "warehouses" are the New England Produce Market and the Flower Market. They were relocated from Boston to make way for condos and shoppes. Where would they relocate now?
 
Was curious what rent commands in this area today... The Pioneer (admittedly one of those faux-luxury POS Bozzutos) is the comparable brand new building next door:
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Many of those "warehouses" are the New England Produce Market and the Flower Market. They were relocated from Boston to make way for condos and shoppes. Where would they relocate now?

They're on the other side of the rail line in a booming distribution district (also home to Amazon among others). Not really the same neighborhood.
 
Yea I mainly meant the parking lots, empty lots, and abandoned buildings should be developed.
 
Yea I mainly meant the parking lots, empty lots, and abandoned buildings should be developed.

The actual property line for Everett Terminal is Market St. cutting between Beacham and 2nd. So the full-on deepwater port zoning slab is fairly well square-shaped between there, Robin St. just interior of Alford, the river, and the commuter rail tracks.

The square bounded by Market, 2nd, Beacham, and Spruce...then the little Tetris block SE of Spruce wrapping up against the Route 1 decks...are a bunch of non-Terminal industrial warehouses taking advantage of the abutting proximity as quasi-extension of the Terminal: Boston Flower Exchange, J.B. Sash, several more food warehouses. That probably remains best overall land use for it because location schlepping off existing truck traffic of rote-similar businesses inside the Terminal. It's also segmented pretty nicely from the residential on the other side of the Route 1 decks and down by Commandants Way. Hampton Inn is the literal only non-warehouse/non-industrial iconoclast on that entire strip.

Note that in particular the Terminal's food warehousing strength has atrophied somewhat because of the rail clearance restrictions to New England Produce, and could with relatively small tweaks be a lot more economically powerful than it is right now. National-standard refrigerator railcars are 17 ft. tall, while NEPC is forced to take obsolete old shrunken-height cars that are getting in increasing rare supply...and they've reduced their carloads + increased their trucking as a result. Relatively easy fix as there's a scant 1.5 ft. vertical shortfall the T has to fix by shaving the trackbed in 2 small spots: the crossover between the BET backside and the Eastern Route main that passes underneath the CC-Sullivan Orange Line viaduct, and some degree of inches under the trio of Sullivan Sq. road overpasses. Basically a six-figure quickie job...just now because Eastern Route RUR is a planned electrification they'll have to lump in 1.5 ft. + 1.5 ft. = 3 ft. on the trackbed undercuts for future-proofing Plate F-dimension Terminal freights underneath wires (but that's also a small job). If NEPC can finally take industry-standard fridge cars their traffic is going to shoot way up, they'll be in expansion mode, and the surrounding parcels will probably also be in expansion mode for more perishables warehousing. And we badly need that more of that in Greater Boston for sake of stabilizing regional wholesale food prices.


Also don't think you're totally getting rid of the scrap metal and auto junkyard district north of the tracks, either. Some of those businesses are extremely busy, and located there because there's so few remaining places closer to the city where there's any safety-in-numbers to host a lot of those essential junk dispersal services. They also to a degree feed off the bigtime scrap traffic at the Terminal where Schnitzer Northeast's massive river-facing facility takes daily barge, rail, and truck traffic for its chow-down scrap meals. So lot of scrap trucks double-dip at the small facilities along the 2nd St. chop-shop district as well. Rather, the redevvable empty lots ripe to flip trace on the first block interior to Everett & 16. One redev triangle bounded by 16/Everett/Vale where mixed-use is across the street from industrial on Vale...and a second redev triangle on 16/Boston/Vine where mixed v. industrial are across-street from each other on Boston or Vine. And then just de-uglifying the 16-facing strip of tire shops and fast food joints between Lewis, 2nd/Garvey, Spring, Terminal, and Vine while the interior of the blocks continue to sustain similar measure of industrial density. Not a big production...City of Chelsea just has to keep its hand 'lightly' on the steering wheel to make sure each type of dev contours to its most-ideal facing streets (i.e. less-ugly density abutting 16, sustainable 'ugly' density on the back blocks).

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The troubleshoot here is definitely the Market Basket slab with its parking excess. The outer lots segmented by square grassland plots, which clearly were meant to flank more big-box stores that never got built, really need to get a site plan. The TJMaxx/Homegoods slab doesn't utilize its capacity well enough, the two banks on Everett have absolute overkill-size lots totally anachronistic to the online banking era, and Burger King is Burger King. You could ring the whole perimeter with way more density just keeping the legit-utilized central-most lot facing MB and have a way tighter economic slugger than you've got today. I think the makeover of the ex-Mystic Mall ended up so half-assed with so much slack because the state DoR and FBI offices across the street were built as such as such half-assed suburban structures. Big gov't anchor offices with that much incumbent transit utility should not have been built like they were airlifted from a Route 128 office park...but they saw the abutting Route 1 ramps and went with exactly that. The whole neighborhood took the cue and gapped itself completely out of the density game with parking overdose, just as SL3 was coming to town. Built to zero awareness of where they actually were.

Permeates up Everett Ave. to the S&S site, too. If they can execute that one right and execute the demolished site behind S&S right, the high school across the street and the trio of Logan-catered hotels without parking excess form a solid 1st block of density coming down from 16 to template for troubleshooting the rest of the way. Then that might spur some impetus on the block between Carter and Spruce + the shopping center & gov't buildings to correct some of the over-parking/over-gappage mistakes. For example, if you wedged a parking garage up against the US 1 decks on one of the malformed triangle-shaped parcels by Spruce + tracks or wedged in by 5th + Arlington you could get adequate shared parking for the 2 gov't buildings to walk from, with freedom to zone the giant slab on Spruce in front of Mass DoR that's almost as large as the DoR building itself. Ditto the Spruce/Beech-facing wedge in front of the FBI that's outright bigger than the FBI. If security envelope around the FBI forces any adjacent infill to likewise be a gov't building...then find an appropriate entity to move from the 'burbs to this transit-enriched slab next door. Or let infill on the shopping center side like trading out those anachronistically oversized bank lots and ringing the block take first stab at correcting density and drag the gov't buildings along to keep up with the motif. So long as one of them makes first move--commercial or government--momentum should carry over to the other side.

In meantime Chelsea's got to put its foot down and set some standards here for what kind of density they're looking for, because these disappointing slabs are all last- 15 yrs. misfires and not holding them to any standards while transit was getting so enormously densified here is how it all ended up so dissapointingly gapped out by parking and over-spacing on such very recent construction. They're lucky the lots do chunk out in a way that correcting action is still possible, because lollygagged a different way these slabs could've all instead ended up permanent anachronisms. But no fix is going to happen without tightening the eff up on the site plan & standards...pronto! SL3, RUR, and the 111 taking up a bus lane on the Tobin are the new mobility anchors...it can't all default to "Well, there's an offramp next door so let's cookie-cutter it unmoored to any time/place that has an offramp" prefabbing. That's how they ended up wasting these slabs post-2000 with a context-free slice of imported Burlington to begin with.
 
This is maybe the most exciting area in the region right now. I think I read that whole area of Everett is now zoned as of right for large developments like this.
 

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