A groundbreaking ceremony for the old Star Market site survived wind, dust, temperatures in the high 80s and audio problems Thursday, just as the project to build 319 homes on Somerville’s Winter Hill survived its own series of challenges over the years that included federal policy shifts that threatened financing, tariffs and rising construction costs.
The nearly two decades of wait since the grocery store closed in 2007 was worth it, officials said at the 299 Broadway construction site, giving speeches and scooping ceremonial shovelfuls of dirt as construction went on around them.
By late 2027, the 2.6-acre site is expected to be transformed into mixed-income apartments – 136 of them deeded affordable – with “neighborhood-serving” retail, a public plaza, playground and enhanced pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.
“It’s going to set the standard for what we should be building more of here in Somerville. I’ve brought up this project so many times when I meet with developers as an example of what’s possible here, and it’s so great to look up and see a crane in the sky,” mayor Jake Wilson said. “If you look at the skylines, there are none in Boston right now. There’s one in Cambridge – but it’s taking down a building.”
Wilson said the Broadway project “took a lot of persistence, a lot of never giving up when it looked like things were dead.”
The speakers who followed, from the extensive team of organizations and businesses collaborating with the city on the project, agreed. “In today’s environment, it’s very difficult to get shovels in the ground,” said Robert Korff, of Mark Development. “What we’re looking at is the physical embodiment of some very complicated financing,” added Josh Cohen, of Beacon Communities, “and it’s financing that even at one point involved an act of Congress.” (On a general policy basis, Cohen specified, not as an intervention for Somerville.)
Abe Menzin, an executive vice president of development at another partner in the project, Samuels & Associates, explained what those problems looked like, assembling financing and adjusting it repeatedly to adapt to changing circumstances to keep 299 Broadway and 15 Temple moving forward. The site’s actual groundbreaking was in December.
“Everything was just difficult. We had all the federal policies that were impacting the universities – grad students, postdocs. We’re in a very dynamic ecosystem here, and to have people not knowing if they could get visas and all that” shook the project by raising questions of demand for once the project was built, Menzin said. “A lot of the fears turned out to be not quite as bad. We’re not seeing mass layoffs in [academic and tech] industries. But it was a challenging time to be building.”
Menzin hoped “we’ll look back and say, that was the worst time to have broken ground, and that things will be looking up from there.”
A design that connects
The pair of six-story buildings incorporates a landscape design by Speck Dempsey; the project has taken so long that the firm was Speck & Associates when it started. The design took its lead from work done roughly a decade ago under the city-led planning process SomerVision, Jeff Speck said at the groundbreaking.
Speck’s firm introduced the concept of a front plaza, rear green and a pedestrian path between them, flanked by two buildings with their own courtyards. From virtual meetings at the start of the Covid lockdown – so early that a meeting got Zoom bombed by a man clad only in a Speedo disco dancing on an ottoman under a mirror ball – the plan “ended up holding true through the rest of the design,” Speck said.
“Once this comes to fruition, everybody will see how this project was designed to intentionally make a connection from the outside to the inside, from the community into the development, with all its open spaces and connections from Broadway down to Sewall Street,” Korff said.
The ceremony was well attended by dignitaries suffering mundane indignities. As two days of haze from Canadian wildfires drifted away, persistent high heat had officials aiming to keep speeches short for the assembled crowds, most wearing hardhats in recognition of being on an active construction site. Winds picked up and relocated a small tent over reserved seating, then scattered papers from a lectern and threw dust in the face of speakers. The audio system set up for speeches moved from feedback to low-volume to a threatening hum that required speakers to hold the microphone’s stem or be drowned out.
Passage of time
The mood of celebration survived it all. A couple of speakers in the middle of the program shared a sense of why, starting with Jacqueline McPherson of MassWorks, an infrastructure program of the state Economic Office Executive Office of Economic Development that was another project partner.
“I remember the former Star Market shutting its doors in 2007, nearly 20 years ago. My daughter, who’s now 33, was in high school,” said McPherson, who expressed excitement not just about much-needed housing but about Speck’s civic plaza on Broadway, park on Sewall and the connector, “places where people will gather, connect and enjoy their community for years to come.”
Former mayor Katjana Ballantyne had a nearly identical marker for time passing on the project: “I used to visit the Star Market with one of my older daughters. And the year it emptied out was when my younger daughter was born, in 2007. So it’s been nearly 20 years,” she said. “Just amazing.”
As the photo-op shoveling of dirt on the construction site got nearer, Ballantyne was thinking of late 2027.
“I’m looking forward to a ribbon cutting,” she said.
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