As the city moves toward a Broadway Master Plan to help reinvigorate one of the major throughways in the city, much of the focus is on creating a city common or market square concept at the site of the road’s two major pharmacies.
City officials and consultants held a public forum on the Broadway Master Plan at city hall last week.
Over the coming months, the document will go before the planning board and then the city council for a final vote and endorsement.
Tom Skwierwaski, the city’s planning and economic development director, noted that the master plan will be a living, long-term document providing a flexible framework to identify priorities and investments in the 1.4-mile corridor.
“This is not going to happen in six months,” he said. “We are talking about five years, 10 years, 15 years down the line. The master plan will cover housing, land use, transportation, and zoning issues.
“This will allow us to make important, key changes in each of those areas and is not a static document to be implemented as drawn.”
Meetings with residents, business owners, and other stakeholders along the corridor have helped shape the proposed plan, Skwierawski said.
David Gamble, an architect and urban planner with consultant Gamble Associates, noted that even now, there are a lot of positives with the city’s Broadway corridor.
“There are a mix of uses and a mix of scales, and some open spaces, but not a lot,” Gamble said.
During public forums and feedback sessions with stakeholders, Gamble said there was a lot of support for increased green spaces and resiliency in the downtown. He said one of the goals of the master plan is to increase the mix of uses and make more walkable areas within the corridor.
One of the ways Gamble said the master plan can be approached is by thinking of the 1.4-mile corridor as three separate corridors – a North Broadway corridor from the Chelsea line to city hall, a central corridor extending to Revere Street, and a South Broadway corridor extending to Squire Road.
A big focus of the master plan and the future development on the corridor is on the two pharmacy sites in the center of Broadway, the recently closed Rite-Aid property and the Walgreens.
“What is most problematic in Revere is that the two properties are in the center of the corridor … and they are the most suburban typologies of any other space along the corridor,” said Gamble.
The one-story retail spaces are both about 15,000-square-foot, single-use, one-story buildings with surface parking and are set back from the street, Gamble said.
“We are going to focus specifically on this as one of the big ideas for tonight,” said Gamble.
At an April forum on the Broadway Master Plan, Gamble said there was a lot of conversation about not only increasing open space along the corridor, but also increasing social spaces where people can interact.
In many New England cities and towns, Gamble said there are green spaces in the center of the communities such as commons or market squares.
“We actually think Revere deserves a great park, and that might actually happen in that location,” Gamble said.
Gamble said the master plan looks at how the city thinks about the two pharmacy lots that are least like the rest of its downtown.
The vision for the parcels is to create a new, resilient city common with mixed-use buildings centering around Revere’s historic central fire station.
“The idea is to get the new development and the open space to harmoniously coexist,” said Gamble.
The actual future development could be done other through a public-private partnership with the city and developers, or there could be zoning implemented to encourage the private development of the sites.
Skwierawski noted that as soon as the city got word that Rite-Aid was closing, the city set up a meeting with the property owner to lay out the vision of how it would like to see the parcel developed.
“I don’t think any of us anticipate that the next step that Rite-Aid will take is our vision,” he said. “I think, frankly, we have a lot of work to do on our end to make sure that the development community sees our vision. That includes reforming our zoning to show … what we actually want to see, because when we meet with developers today and we look at our existing zoning, it takes some imagination on their part and some encouragement on ours to say ‘If you go through the zoning board of appeals and you get these variances and a special permit and this laborious process, maybe you will get approvals to do what you want.’”
Skwierawski said it would be no small feat to get the vision for the development in place and that it would be a longer-term effort.
“We are putting our stake in the ground today to say this site, sitting where it is at the center of Broadway is an important opportunity to break up what I think was called at the last meeting in April the relentlessness of Broadway where you feel like there is no green space anywhere,” he said. “You feel like there aren’t those places where we can socialize and hang out and have that more traditional kind of city square feel, a place to bring people together. If we want to do that, we have to do something dramatically different from what’s there today; but is it going to be easy, no; will it take time, absolutely.”
