After 30 Vacant Years, New Life for Hinchey’s in Melrose’s Wyoming Hill
In exciting news for Melrose’s Wyoming Hill neighborhood, Navem Partners has submitted a proposal to the Planning Board to redevelop the “Hinchey’s” property at the corner of Wyoming and Berwick, which has been vacant since the building was torn down in the early 1990s. The proposal calls for 26 residential units built on top of a 1200sqft ground-floor retail space. This proposal was first surfaced in 2020, when the developer sought (and easily obtained) variances allowing a large “setback” — the distance between the road and the building — on the Berwick street side.
Since that time, there had been no further public action taken on the proposal. That may have partially been COVID-related, but a significant factor was also because developers knew the Planning Department was trying to tweak the zoning on this parcel to make it more economically appealing to developers. That ended up coming to pass when the Planning Board and city council approved a new, narrowly-focused special permit which allows for five-story buildings in areas immediately surrounding MBTA train stations.
Indeed, the developer has since added a fifth story to his building, bringing what was formerly a 19-unit proposal up to 26 units. Otherwise, there are few changes. Both the original and new proposal feature a bike room (exact count TBD), while the new proposal now specifies two EV charging stations in the 19-car garage. Thankfully, no new parking has been proposed in response to the incentive units, and an additional affordable unit has been created. Finally, the developer still proposes to update and formalize the informal public pedestrian walkway which currently passes through this parcel.
This is a critical site for the revitalization of Wyoming Hill, which has not seen a new mixed-use building created in this century. The City’s Master Plan — which notes that Wyoming Hill “has struggled more than the other neighborhood business districts “— does little to articulate anything close to a vision for the neighborhood, which despite its density and proximity to both Oak Grove and downtown Melrose still seems in the minds of longtime residents to be a place for driving through. That makes it critical that this building looks and feels like the Wyoming Hill of the future, a place built around the lives of the people who live here.
Here is where my only major concern about the proposal lies. Despite marquee corner frontage — and the laudable preservation of the pathway — the developer does not propose any sort of outdoor gathering area. Instead, pedestrians accessing the site from Berwick, Wyoming, and the pedestrian pathway will tend to converge around a small three-car commercial parking lot which is required by the city’s zoning:
What a building “looks like” from the ground floor can often influence the way that guests and residents feel about how the neighborhood should be used. In a walkable transit-oriented neighborhood in 2022, car-focused land use simply cannot be encouraged. This space, which is partially covered by the overhang of the building, should in my opinion be changed to an outdoor seating area. Because of the overhang, it is not obviously the sort of open-air plaza which one might ideally design for this purpose. But the shade created by the building will be welcome — or, perhaps, critical to human health — in the summer months, and creative lighting and decoration can easily make this a pleasant location for congregating year-round. This is an obvious location for an outdoor bike rack as well.
The somewhat strange layout on the Berwick Street side is tied to the reason the land has sat vacant for 30 years: there’s an underground culvert, carrying water from Ell Pond, which is essentially impossible to build over. This proposal actually uses two combined lots, a market outcome which took decades to align; the majority of this building is really a redevelopment of the single-story garages behind it, with the Hinchey’s parcel being used primarily as access to the site.
The combination of the lots allows the developer the economic flexibility to leave the culvert area untouched, but means only a small portion of the Hinchey’s lot will actually be profitable for the building operator. If this space is set aside for parking merely because the zoning requires it, the developer should be encouraged to eliminate it. There is both a growing body of evidence pointing to parking as among the least-profitable types of urban land use, and a growing public acknowledgement that parking is the number one impediment to using land for more people-centric activities.
Even locally in Melrose, there have been motions made toward acknowledging this reality, such as with the very popular public parklets program. Nominal reductions to the parking capacity in a neighborhood can yield dramatic improvements to the availability of public gathering space. This opportunity has, notably, not been afforded to the Wyoming Hill neighborhood, which remains severely lacking in this department.
The door is wide open to the possibility of using this area as seating, since the developer is in fact requesting a separate special permit from the Planning Board for parking reduction. That request currently is being made only for resident parking, but could be extended to commercial. The building is within 1,000 feet of two separate downtown municipal parking lots — easily accessed via the pedestrian path! — and there are 20+ merchant parking spaces located right on Berwick, some of which have been occupied long-term by abandoned vehicles.
A second, perhaps more radical notion would be to eliminate this parking area in favor of a second commercial space. Historically, this is exactly how the site once operated, with Hinchey’s on the Wyoming side and a small restaurant/coffee shop on the Berwick side. The layout of the site would appear to allow for this, and a second business would be beneficial to both the city from a financial perspective and the neighborhood from a quality-of-life perspective. Eliminating free commercial parking to fit more businesses would require a level of boldness from the Planning Board which I am not sure is forthcoming, but does illuminate the terrible economic tradeoffs which restrictive zoning (especially parking requirements) imposes on communities.
While outside the purview of the Planning Board, Public Works should take this opportunity to make streetscape improvements here (the developer would contribute $30k to the city for this purpose, should the building be approved). In 2018, longtime business owner David O’Donnell was killed by a driver directly outside this building. Four year later, the only safety improvement is a push-activated flashing beacon. That crosswalk should now be raised, and the existing sidewalk at the corner should be expanded, turning the end of Berwick — a one-way street, which is already one lane until the intersection — into a single lane. This not only enhances pedestrian safety but would discourage drivers from making a short, illegal turn across Berwick from Wyoming to access the building. Years ago, the city expanded the sidewalk outside Cappa’s Trackside kitchen, further up Berwick, which has allowed them to operate a very popular outdoor seating area.
This will be the first meaningful mixed-use development to hit Wyoming Hill in decades, and it is critical that we get it right. Halfway across town, the city is acting to promote a redevelopment of the Caruso’s site — another long-dormant property which has a culvert under it — that includes no parking whatsoever. During a press conference, Mayor Brodeur called this a “back to the future” approach, hearkening to the days when streetcars ran through the city. That’s the right attitude, and it should be promoted most diligently in Wyoming Hill, the true gateway to the city. It’s time we formally close the chapter on the car-centric Melrose era, and get back to what made it great in the first place: walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, centered around transit.
