WALTHAM

New apartments, residents were key to business revival

GREG DERR/The Patriot Ledger

Waltham’s Moody Street, deserted as recently as the mid-1980s, is now is a virtual restaurant mecca.

Moody Street in Waltham is a restaurant row of sorts.

Eateries like the Tuscan Grill, Iguana Cantina, Watch City Brewing Co. and Tom Can Cook offer a sampling of ethnic and American cuisine and draw customers not only from within this MetroWest city, but from neighboring communities as well.

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The restaurants are flanked by small shops selling gifts, furniture, paintings and even pianos. Nearby, a six-screen movie theater showing the latest flicks keeps people and cars streaming onto and off the street on weekend nights.

Not long ago, Moody Street seemed deserted.

Like Quincy’s Hancock Street, Waltham’s main commercial drag was a shopping super center in the 1950s and ’60s that later lost businesses to malls and big box strips. When William F. Stanley took over as mayor in 1986, there were about 15 vacant storefronts. Many that still housed businesses looked tired, or worse.

“It lacked a lot of appeal,” he said. “You asked yourself the question when you looked at Moody Street, ‘What would make somebody want to come here anyway?’”

Under Stanley’s leadership, the city launched a campaign to restore Moody Street to some of its former glory. Stanley served as mayor for 14 years, stepping down in 1999.

Housing proved a significant part of the equation.

As one of a series of changes, the city tweaked its zoning to allow second-floor space above ground-floor retail to be converted into apartments, said Ronald G. Vokey, the city’s planning director who helped shape the revitalization efforts.

Then, a developer purchased the old Grover Cronin department store on the Charles River, which had sat vacant and deteriorating since the store closed in 1989, and transformed it into Cronin’s Landing, a 281-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail that opened in 1998.

The addition of residents to downtown was key.

“That housing provided the base for local restaurants,” said Barbara B. Berke, director of the state’s department of business and technology. “The restaurants started to make a little more money. They were able to invest in fixing up the restaurants, nice quality menus, better storefronts. The merchants’ association began to strengthen. The merchants association began to work on things like parking, signage to parking, promotion of Moody Street as a destination.”

In Quincy, a 111-unit apartment building is under construction in front of the Quincy Center MBTA station, and another 200 apartment units have been approved for a vacant parcel of land next to Presidents Place. Officials here hope the residential additions will be a similar catalyst for success.

But Vokey said Waltham did not just wait for builders to discover Moody Street.

Years before the developer decided to build Cronin’s Landing, Waltham officials spruced up downtown and secured state funds to build a 300-space parking garage to make Moody Street more attractive to business executives and investors.

- By KAREN ESCHBACHER