The New Retail Thread

No idea; I found the pic on Flickr and there were no specifics. Still, it's a good guess.
 
looks to be
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a friend of mine owns a couple of homes there!
 
South End news: Space currently Barber Shop Deluxe is listed for rent on craigslist, $1,900, 670 Tremont Street. Space previously Miami Cafe is listed for rent on craigslist, $1,800, @ Aguadilla and Tremont streets.
 
News on a bunch of empty storefronts in Harvard Square:

Tavern to Open in Former Z Square
Published On Sunday, September 27, 2009 10:57 PM
By SHAN WANG
Crimson Staff Writer

The 14 JFK St. space that previously housed Z Square has remained conspicuously empty for more than eight months since the restaurant was shut down in January due to license violations. But last Tuesday, Peter Lee and Patrick Lee, owners of the popular restaurant and bar Grafton Street, applied to transform the space into the Brattle House Tavern.

According to the Cambridge License Commission, Peter Lee?who also co-owns Redline and Temple Bar in Cambridge?also applied for an entertainment license that will allow the restaurant to provide live music, Karaoke, and a DJ.

According to Denise A. Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, the new restaurant and bar may open its doors as early as this December. She hesitated to provide a date, saying that Patrick and Peter Lee have not yet finalized a concept for the restaurant.

?Z Square is a beautiful space, but they will be making some renovations to it and I expect it?ll all happen very quickly,? Jillson said. ?If it isn?t ready by the holidays, we hope it will be ready at least for our Winter Carnival.?

Jillson said she was ?very pleased? that the 14 JFK St. space has finally been rented out after more than half a year of vacancy.

Shabu Square, a hotpot restaurant on the corner of Eliot and Winthrop Streets that closed its doors after less than a year in operation, will be replaced by Conga, a Latin American tapas restaurant in the coming months. Panja S. Lymswam, the owner of Shabu and two other Thai restaurants in the Square?Spice and 9 Tastes?appeared before the License Commission in August to request the change.

Lymswam and Peter and Patrick Lee are among many restaurateurs who hold multiple businesses in the Square. Matt Curtis and Chris Lutes opened Tory Row this year in addition to their Square restaurant Cambridge 1; Marley J. Brush, the daughter of Thomas J. Brush who co-owns Felipe?s, opened Cr?ma Caf? last year. Monella, a clothing boutique that replaced the regional chain JasmineSola a year ago, is operated by the same family that owns Mudo on JFK St.

?There is a sort of formula?I don?t want to call it magic?but it?s that good business sense of what works in Harvard Square,? Jillson said.

The Crate & Barrel building on Brattle St., which has also been empty since January, has had less luck in finding tenants. ?The building is an award-winning design, and it?s unlikely the owners are just going to put anyone in there just to rent out the space,? Jillson said.

?Staff writer Shan Wang can be reached at wang38@fas.harvard.edu.
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I've noticed that they've transformed the empty Design Research space into a (temporary?) museum devoted to the original Design Research store, complete with vintage product displays, Marimekko designs, original Ben Thompson & TAC furniture, etc. It was pretty late when I saw it, so I don't know if its just meant to be viewed from outside through the glass or if you can actually go inside during the day.

It looked pretty cool though. Anyone else been by here?
 
You can only view it from the outside, sadly, but it is pretty cool.
 
There are signs outside saying that you can't go in. Anyone who hasn't seen it should visit and take a look. It really shows off the building.
 
Eagle's Deli in Cleveland Circle is about to undergo a complete remake. The remake is being done by Studio Luz http://www.studioluz.net/

Construction hasn't started yet, but they have posted renderings on their windows and inside the deli itself. The renderings seemed like it was actually trying to go a little more upscale. I'll try and get pics tomorrow.


Also, I am going to try and go to Post 390 this weekend so i'll try and snap some shots of the interior.

Sorry if this is the wrong thread for this. I know it is not technically new retail, but they are completely redoing the building. Please move to the appropriate area if necessary.
 
Boston Globe - October 13, 2009
Their motto: Grow or die
Lyons Group expands its food-and-fun empire

By Katie Johnston Chase, Globe Staff | October 13, 2009

DEDHAM - Sampling the menu recently at his newest venture, Patrick Lyons called the chefs out of the kitchen to tell them the wings were too wet, the potstickers were too dry, and the mound of slaw with the cheeseburger spring rolls was too big.

Attention to detail has served Lyons well in his three decades in the nightlife and restaurant businesses, during which time he has dreamed up a stream of diverse concepts, from Kings bowling alleys to the Axis/Avalon club complex to the Newbury Street celebrity haunt Sonsie.

All told, he is involved in 26 venues, and despite a recession that has others scaling back, Lyons Group opened a pub on Lansdowne Street in the spring and a Kings bowling alley in Dedham last month. It is planning three more restaurants in coming months: a Summer Shack in Hingham, an international bistro in the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center in Boston, and a gastro-pub in the Boston area.

?Grow or die,?? said Lyons, a self-described ?creature of culture?? who ditched community college after 40 minutes and always has his eye out for the next big thing. ?When there?s a seismic shift going on, that?s when I?ll stick my finger in the mix.??

Lyons?s partner from the beginning has been Ed Sparks, a certified public accountant he met while trying to get free records for his club from Sparks?s Hingham music store. Sparks suggested buying the property that started it all - Boston-Boston on Lansdowne Street, a disco Lyons was managing, in 1981; the pair transformed the complex several times before selling the lease to House of Blues Entertainment Inc. last year.

Sparks, who handles the money, and Lyons, who supplies the vision, are the principals of Lyons Group, which provides accounting and administrative services to each venue; Lyons and Sparks are shareholders in each independent business. Operating out of the cramped maze that serves as the company?s headquarters on Lansdowne Street, the fiftysomething Lyons and sixtysomething Sparks have had a hand in some of the biggest clubs in Boston, including Paradise, Hard Rock Cafe, and the original House of Blues in Cambridge.

They won?t reveal the value of their collective businesses, which employ about 2,000, but Lyons said he almost hit his goal of having a $50 million empire by age 35.

Lyons Group has also had its share of growing pains. Lyons and Sparks abandoned a plan to go national in the early 1990s after the company they were partnering with was sold, and they got out of the House of Blues chain when they realized all the traveling was having a negative effect on their Boston business.

So the duo have stuck to building a regional company, sifting through the hundreds of proposals developers submit each year. They have branched out to Atlantic City and Mohegan Sun casinos, and now to the suburbs; more Kings, Summer Shacks, and La Verdad taquerias are in the works, helped along by the recession?s affordable real estate and diminished competition.

?We?re either going to look like the dumbest guys or the smartest guys on the block,?? Lyons said. ?We?ll see. I?d put my money on smartest.??

Lyons got into the nightlife game early - making fake IDs for his high school buddies in Buffalo, N.Y. His first club job was at a chain called Uncle Sam?s, where a fondness for foosball led to a job as a barback. He was managing the place by age 18 and soon was sent to shake up other clubs in Detroit, Minneapolis, and Hull. Along the way, he did every job - doorman, coat check, DJ, maintenance man vacuuming vomit out of shag carpets. This time in the trenches helped him learn the business, he said, and learn from his mistakes.

That didn?t stop him from making new ones, though. The first restaurant he and Sparks opened, Fynn?s, a collaboration with Hard Rock Cafe, failed after a few years.

But Lyons and Sparks were determined to do a restaurant right, and in 1993 they paid someone to sit outside a Newbury Street space for two days with a clicker and count traffic. Five thousand-plus clicks later, they signed the lease for Sonsie.

They did not know much about restaurants at the time, but as they settled down and started families, restaurants became more of a focus. ?It?s a lot easier,?? said Lyons, who has two school-age children. Recent additions include Scampo, the chic Liberty Hotel restaurant helmed by chef Lydia Shire, and the Ken Oringer taqueria La Verdad.

Lyons is also the creative force behind the sports-themed Game On! and Bleacher Bar and the rock club Bill?s Bar, all on Lansdowne Street, but dance clubs were his first love. He doesn?t dance. ?If I do something, I like to be good at it,?? said Lyons, who has steely green eyes and rumpled hair streaked with silver.

One thing he?s good at: closing down a club while it?s still hot, something he deems critical to keeping his venues fresh. ?Before the club got tired, we would kill it,?? Lyons said. On the Metro dance club?s last night, Lyons handed out hardhats and had Bobcats drive through the walls at 2 a.m., just as club goers were leaving. When it reopened as Avalon six weeks later, the line stretched into Kenmore Square.

?He just has this innate sense of what people want,?? said chef Jasper White, who partnered with Lyons on the seafood restaurant chain Summer Shack. ?It?s kind of his magic.??

Part of that magic comes from being involved in every step, from designing a club logo with a tube of lipstick to forming a daily e-mail chain to create a pub?s playlist. But the attention to minutiae can lead to extra work.

After a visit to the new Kings, a 25,000-square-foot bowling alley with a retro ?60s flair at an outdoor mall in Dedham, Lyons had a lunch meeting at the nearby P.F. Chang?s. Admiring the restaurant?s round booths, he asked his architect if he could have similar ones at Hingham Summer Shack instead of the square booths on the blueprint. Then he started grilling the waitress: Are you busy at night? Every night? Have you heard about the King?s opening next door?

Lyons wants to have a hand in absolutely everything, said construction consultant Rich Simmons, all the way down to how the light hits the food: ?It drives some people nuts,?? Simmons said.

He can also be a demanding boss - giving bartenders pop quizzes about beer temperatures - and seems to delight in bending the rules. He obeyed the mall?s size restrictions for the Kings sign, for instance, then hung a massive curtain of shimmering Mylar next to it to catch people?s eyes.

It?s all part of creating an experience. For Lyons, that means not only thinking big, but thinking small - all the way down to the wattage of the light bulbs and the amount of ice in a glass of iced tea. ?A successful business,?? he said, ?is an ability to do a thousand little tiny things correctly.??

Katie Johnston Chase can be reached at johnstonchase@globe.com
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Wow, good story. I never knew that's how he started. Pretty good example of social mobility i suppose, but i do wonder how he received financing for his initial restaurant. That article only mentions having a partner.

I went to Post 390 (new restaurant in the Clarendon, www.post390restaurant.com) this weekend. The interior was really nice. The ground floor windows were huge really helped to set a nice ambiance with the outside lights coming in. There was a huge fireplace in the middle between the host and the bar.

The layout isn't the best. As soon as you walk in there is a wall right infront of you with the hostess to the left. This was also the way which the servers traveled from the kitchen to some additional seating. This caused a mess load of congestion of people waiting for a table, servers, and people trying to get to the bar (which was admittedly overflowing--hence the amount of congestion.)

The food was pretty decent and the service was good. I got some meatloaf stufffed with ham and fontina cheese in a marsala gravy. It was good, as were the sides of greenbeans and mashed potatos.

I also got an "Idaho Potato", which was a grilled potato with bacon and cheese. Although it sounds good it wasn't very good at all. Maybe it was me, but i the potato just wasn't cooked enough and was hard.

My girlfriend got a goat cheese and olive flatbread pizza which was good. The cheese was really creamy and the olives and basil were fresh.

All in all Post 390 is a good place to eat on a weekend night with someone special or a small group of close friends. I would certainly wait until all the hype and newness has died down though.
 
I was there Friday. I agree with what you mean about the entry configuration.
The place reminded me a bit of Cuffs when it first opened in Jury's. Large groups of afterwork people checking each other out.
I enjoyed the food and it has a great beer list.
 
probably not in the correct thread but....

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/10/15/boston_recruits_local_artists_to_help_ward_off_graffiti/

The blue lights were flashing as the Boston Police car approached the traffic island in Copley Square. Christos Hamawi, standing by with his brushes and paints, didn?t panic. He reached for his permit.

He didn?t just have permission from the city to paint the gray electrical box outside the Westin Hotel. He had been hired for the job. Hamawi, 36, is one of about two dozen local artists brought in by the Boston Arts Commission as part of its PaintBox program.

Modeled after similar efforts in Cambridge, Somerville, and other cities, the program started slowly last year with 13 boxes but has expanded to more than 40.

?The idea is that it would deter graffiti because these boxes wouldn?t be a blank canvas,?? said Karin Goodfellow, staff director of the commission. ?But I like it not just specifically because of graffiti. My interest is more in getting local artists to create art on the streets they?re living.??

The artists apply with a design. If selected, they?re paid $300 for the work. That barely covers materials, which include the paints plus a strong varnish to protect the finished box from the elements. But the artists say they?re not doing the job for the money.

Clara Diaz, 27, is excited about painting a box later this month at the intersection of Dorchester Avenue and Adams Street. She?s lived in Dorchester, off and on, since emigrating from the Dominican Republic at age 9. Diaz will be painting a design centered on a butterfly.

?I?ve lived in this neighborhood for 16 years,?? she said. ?When I leave this neighborhood, which I will, I will have something here. It?s like a mark of myself and a gift of my talents.??

Gary Koeppel, a Roslindale artist, painted a marsh scene on an electrical box at the intersection of Centre and Corey streets in West Roxbury.

?It?s an opportunity to get out there in the community and get a little bit of publicity for myself,?? said Koeppel, 53. ?I put my website on the box and did actually get a call from somebody who was interested in getting me to do a project.??

For Hamawi, the boxes represent a chance to take his art out of his South End studio and onto the streets. In that spirit, he found his inspiration for the box in the environment outside the Westin. In particular, he took his cue from a weed growing near the base of the box to create a scene with green and yellow grasses and wildflowers.

Hamawi has a connection to Shepard Fairey, the artist known for his recent arrest and guilty plea for putting up his art in public spaces without permission. They lived in different units of the same Victorian in Providence in the mid-?90s. Though he says he would never poster without permission, Hamawi declined to criticize Fairey.

?He?s made his choices and been held accountable, so I?m not going to judge him,?? he said.

On his second day of painting, he showed up on the traffic island with other wildflowers he picked up along the way and put into cups.

Painting an electrical box isn?t just about showing up with your brushes. To start, Hamawi scrapes any stickers off the surface and then washes the box with soap and water. Next, he applies a thick coat of paint to create a base.

When it?s going to rain he has to cover the box with plastic. And he can?t use his acrylic paint when the temperature falls below 60 degrees. That made his Copley Square box, the second he?s done for the city, his last of the season.

He had wanted to paint a third box, outside 607 Boylston St. But the Back Bay Architectural Commission rejected the idea, stating in a letter that ?any such decorative painting, however attractive it might be in the abstract, would have the effect of celebrating a utilitarian feature at the aesthetic expense of the architectural context.??

Hamawi wasn?t bothered by the rejection. He had plenty of work to do outside the Westin. The job would, in the end, take about six days. He finished up earlier this week.

?The big thing for me is to be able to paint in the presence of others and share that process,?? said Hamawi.

On a recent morning, that included people in suits hurrying through Copley Square, college students, and the operator of a sightseeing trolley bus, who shouted out, ?Hey Christos, nice job,?? as he drove a group of tourists through the square.

Jason Levy, a 39-year-old attorney, stopped and took in Hamawi?s first strokes of yellow and greens. He had already seen another painted box in West Roxbury and praised the program.

?You take it for granted you?re going to have eyesores in the city but you don?t have to,?? he said.
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He had wanted to paint a third box, outside 607 Boylston St. But the Back Bay Architectural Commission rejected the idea, stating in a letter that ?any such decorative painting, however attractive it might be in the abstract, would have the effect of celebrating a utilitarian feature at the aesthetic expense of the architectural context.??
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Seriously?

There is one of these in Government Center. I like it. It's funky.
 
He had wanted to paint a third box, outside 607 Boylston St. But the Back Bay Architectural Commission rejected the idea, stating in a letter that ?any such decorative painting, however attractive it might be in the abstract, would have the effect of celebrating a utilitarian feature at the aesthetic expense of the architectural context.??
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Translation: funky decoration that celebrates the utilitarian = bad, funky decoration that celebrates nothing-slash-perhaps the robber barons who built Back Bay mansions = good.

Clearly the Back Bay achieved urban utopia in 1890 and any attempt at improvement, no matter how beautiful or cool, should be as unwelcome as a quonset hut in Colonial Williamsburg.
 
Clearly the Back Bay achieved urban utopia in 1890
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I'm not sure I'd actually disagree with that statement.

That said, as the utility boxes are a necessary evil and a blight on the street scape, I see no compelling reason not to dress them up a bit.
 
I mean, yes, the architecture probably peaked around then (with the exception of some later additions like the Hancock tower, which these people also fought tooth and nail), but if not for the transformation of the neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s, Newbury St. would still be a sleepy residential thoroughfare, like Marlborough, or maybe a stuffy commercial one, like Charles. It gained a cosmopolitanism and pizazz from the fusion of Victorianism and contemporary art/fashion/design. I see this art project as attempting to sustain or broaden this dressing up.
 
czsz said:
Translation: funky decoration that celebrates the utilitarian = bad, funky decoration that celebrates nothing-slash-perhaps the robber barons who built Back Bay mansions = good.

Clearly the Back Bay achieved urban utopia in 1890 and any attempt at improvement, no matter how beautiful or cool, should be as unwelcome as a quonset hut in Colonial Williamsburg.
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Seems to more be like the Status Quo at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. By agreeing that the boxes can be better looking, they therefore recognize the right of the city to place these boxes. And that'll never happen.

The Back Bay kookbags cut their nose of to spite their face. They'll never forgive the city for polluting the public sidewalks with elements critical to the public utility, and now block any and all effort to upgrade or improve elements that house such utilities.

The result of such an act of heresy would quite absolutely, positively, definitely, 100-percent-for-sure end with the Back Bay sinking into the ocean, quivering under the roar of a-thousand-times-a-thousand dead Brahmins coming back to avenge descendants for betraying their sacredly elite, effite monumental trophies to convincing each other that their fecal remains have the odor of flowers.
 
Some painted utility boxes in Somerville. The one on the right is across the street from the Somerville Theatre:

switchboxes.jpg
 
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