Watertown Infill and Small Developments

view from back side,retainer wall is new,@ F-LINE I run to and from the gym around the cor.( where pic is from) that sidewalk get up has me a wreck every time I run I started to run down and around since it got dark, what r they thinking?
 
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also something going up on the corner of mt auburn and arlington, on site of former gas station - 3 stories apparently..
 
Arsenal mall is across the the street, DMV is up a block in the Watertown Mall
 
A one story CVS is going in at the corner of Mount Auburn and Arlington. Here are the plans from the Watertown ZBA.

Separately, there are one or two projects approved and under construction on Arsenal Street (separate from the Arsenal on the Charles and Mall).
 
crash575 said:
A one story CVS is going in at the corner of Mount Auburn and Arlington. Here are the plans from the Watertown ZBA.
Click to expand...

Too bad - it looked like it would be something more substantial... just another fat box store with a big parking lot.
 
I'm always waiting for a car to smash me up against those barriers surprise they gotten away with this since last summer!
 
I'm not very familiar with where these buildings are. Any idea what the rehab is for? What the plans are?
 
^ no sorry I just drive by them everyday, looks like manufacturing space converted to office space they're all around the Coolidge st /Arlington st between Mt Aburn st and Arsenal st areas I'll try to find out if no one else knows?
 
One of the projects is at 65 Grove Street. It's the reuse of former manufacturing facility. I believe the future use will be office space with a substantial garage. It looks to include a connection to the future Watertown bike path.

The project documents can be found here.







The other project is at 480 Arsenal Street (but really Nichols Ave). It's a light industrial conversion to office space. The project documents can be found here.

 
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Im not sure this was ever discussed... this project is underway with land cleared on both sides of Irving St



AR-150709040.jpg&MaxW=650




Hopefully theyre preserving the ROW - no sign of that as of yet.
 
FK4 said:
Im not sure this was ever discussed... this project is underway with land cleared on both sides of Irving St



AR-150709040.jpg&MaxW=650




Hopefully theyre preserving the ROW - no sign of that as of yet.
Click to expand...

Orientation's a little hard to peg in just that one render, but it would appear the large space between buildings is the ROW. It's currently set back 150 ft. from the Irving/Arsenal intersection and its original 50 ft. width is preserved in-full as a back driveway for the industrial crud currently there. This is one spot where they have no need to reclaim any cannibalized ROW space to re-establish property/foundation lines at its pre-abandonment width; it's already there in the form of the alley. It appears that the Arsenal-facing buildings and the next set of buildings to the rear occupy the same footprint as what's being demolished, so as long as that layout stays stet they have the original width baked in. Now they just have to make sure it's actually greenspace + path and not a car-centric driveway + parking lot.


Most of the parcels where they actually have to reclaim more width are between School St. and Irving.

  • The Arsenal-facing storefronts would have to be shallow-depth and bunched up closer to the sidewalk, one encroaching factory on the back side would have to have its expansion wing demolished to restore the 50 ft. width, and a bunch of rear parking lots would need to be booted. Otherwise that's all they need to do when flipping the properties to restore the original width consistent with the finished path east of School St. and what this project @ Irving appears to do for re-establishing width.
  • Obviously they'd have to wait for the Lexus dealership to overturn and demolish that building, which is the only outright blocker to a contiguous 50 ft. ROW to Irving. But in the interim they can just snake something narrow around the building.
  • Patten St. has a filled-in underpass so the side embankment holding up Gilkey St. prevented any encroaching on the Irving-Patten block behind the Jiffy Lube and electrical substation. It's mostly just a brush-overgrown dead end after the alley fizzes out. That one's easy to reclaim if Jiffy Lube gets flipped for more sidewalk-hugging, mid-height Arsenal development.
  • West of Patten it's just the municipal parking lot that would have to be booted. Same 50 ft. width fully preserved, and under town ownership.


This shouldn't be difficult. Flipping these parcels @ the Irving intersection AND--presumably--setting aside that 50 ft. ROW between buildings is one critical piece they get in place that could let them establish a path near-immediately from Irving west across Mt. Auburn to Saltonstall Park and the existing Watertown Linear Park path-let to the Main @ Bacon intersection. If those renderings are everything they appear to be this is a big win for piecing the Greenway together. Those town-owned municipal lots from Patten to Thaxter can be reworked for a front-loaded path segment if they just squared the internal bureaucracy of the displaced parking. And then they'd probably just need to re-dig a squat ped tunnel underneath the filled-in Patten underpass to square the grade difference. While a disconnected segment, at 3/4 mile spanning both sides of the Square that's a pretty damn beneficial gain they can execute on in short order. And it's totally enabled by this one development at Irving.



All that leaves afterwards is the 1/2 mile between Irving and School to fill the last Greenway gap and re-establish those 50 ft. ROW property lines. 8 total piece-o'-crap Arsenal-facing industrial parcels to deal with, then the temp loop-around of the Lexus dealership. Slow slog, but self-contained enough to be a 10-15 year realm of possibility. Maybe even something they can tackle in halves as a couple more flips adjacent to this new dev can get a path-let extended east to the Arsenal/Beechwood intersection...then the Arsenal/Louise St. crosswalk to start chopping down the amount of on-Arsenal detouring off the disconnected Greenway segments.
 
I found some documents last night from around 2010 by what appears to be the main advocacy group for the trail in this section and their plan was to give up on the lexus site and have a cycle track running alongside arsenal street until irving, then veering right and picking up the rail right of way west of irving. Couldn't find anything specific about this segment in more recent documents or any specific mention of this real estate project and the rail trail - although it seems like this project will also build a small park on the west side of irving- that much was mentioned in some of the documents, but disappointingly nothing about the trail itself which hopefully is baked into the park plan...
 
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