Wyoming Hill is the best transit-oriented neighborhood in Melrose. Between Pleasant Street and Main St, one can find a commuter rail station, four bus routes (131, 132, 136, 137), and directly to the south is Oak Grove station on the MBTA’s orange line. Unfortunately it also has easy access to Route 93, if you’re into that thing, which a lot of people are, so drivers also use this street more than any other street in Melrose. It’s a conflict!
The city has not aggressively acted to ease the conflict by, for example, structurally promoting walking and discouraging vehicular trips (e.g. though modern traffic calming/pedestrian infrastructure). Wyoming Hill was rezoned a few years ago to, basically, encourage more housing to be built by excluding automobile repair shops as a by-right business use. Since then, 10–14 Corey Street has been built, but little else has changed in the neighborhood. That looks set to change, with the formal proposal to develop at the most obvious location for new housing in Melrose: the long-vacant lot at the corners of Wyoming and Berwick.
I don’t know how long this lot has been vacant for. Based on historical maps I could find, it’s been empty since at least 1995. Developers are proposing a mixed-use residential building with legitimate commercial frontage (around 1200sqft) along Wyoming. It’s excellent that the Wyoming frontage is slated to be commercial; this will be directly across the street from a few other commercial enterprises (ice cream; barbershops), which is exactly the sort of organic outcome cities should want to promote.
Here’s a cross-section of the ground floor. The numbers are 19 units and 19 parking spaces; per the city, that 1:1 ratio is what’s required for this location, and 1:1 has basically been established as the new “standard” in Melrose for transit-oriented locations, even though it frequently requires a variance (sigh) which opens the city up to lawsuits any time they grant one. I have highlighted a bad feature (in red, a new parking space directly blocking a crosswalk) and a good feature (a formal paved walking path connecting Wyoming to Grove, via a parking lot). The walking path runs directly behind some “commercial parking,” which is not great.
A sort of confusing element of this plan is that the entrance to resident parking is apparently along Berwick Street. As can be seen in the aerial shot above, one of these lots is currently used as basically a large parking shed. In essence the developers are keeping the current footprint of the ground-floor parking, but eliminating the existing means of egress. Berwick, which is not so much a street as an extremely narrow parking lot that people cut through, is one-way onto Wyoming. That means coming back into Melrose from Wyoming, you’ll have to do this maneuver to park your car:
That’s an extra third of a mile! I don’t really understand this point of the plan but I’m sure it’ll come up during the review process. Another confounding element of this is the existence of commercial space inside the garage. This would be a pretty inconvenient place for a customer to park, and so I assume the three spaces are perhaps employee parking. If so, there are plenty of potential employees who are living in Wyoming Hill. Just hire them! They can walk to work, and you don’t need to jam three awkward commercial spaces into your plans. Anyway, the plan suggests adding a couple of new street parking spaces on the westbound lane of Wyoming.
19 units is an underwhelming count for this incredibly prime location. The city’s requirement that the developer build 19 parking spaces means that the developer will either have to dig underground — an extremely expensive endeavor which, as we saw at the MMTV building, may wind up requiring variances anyway — or reduce the number of units. That’s what’s happened here; if the city didn’t require parking, six more ground-floor units could have been provided. The city zoning also caps this at 4 stories; allowing a fifth floor would have added 8 more units here (and a sixth, etc).
Interestingly the developer seems to have thought, just a few years ago, they could fit 30 condos and retail here:
There’s a big difference between 30 units and 19 units, and addressing this reduction is something which hopefully comes out through the planning process. The only apparent variance this project requires is for the awkward building frontage on Berwick. Still, there may be some contentiousness: the sellers, Robert and Janine Hassett, pitched a fit when the city approved the variances for 10–14 Corey. The Corey St developer, John Wise, argued that the Hassetts were essentially just jealous; the Hassetts, per that article, apparently also complained about the city’s rezoning, which prevented them from selling turning their decrepit shed into a Jiffy Lube. John Wise himself was last seen objecting to the city’s approval of the variances for the MMTV building, which he said was too big and would negatively impact his tenants. One could reasonably speculate that Mr. Wise will take an interest in this project, too.
