Friendly’s closing – a sadness and an opportunity for the town

I was really, really saddened when I learned from Patch this morning that Friendly’s may no longer exist in Medfield.  I had read about the impending bankruptcy, but had assumed that it would be a Chap. 11 filing with ongoing operation.

Friendly’s has been a big part of the fabric of the downtown ever since we came to Medfield in 1989, and we have been regular patrons.  It was an especially good place to go with kids.  Kristen and I just got ice cream there last Saturday after her soccer game.  When I coached soccer, it was a perfect place to take the team, as part of team building efforts, and affordable when the girls all got the $1.00 kids’ cones – not so much the day they all got and I learned about the Friend-z.

The landlord of the Friendly’s site had previously talked with the town about not renewing Friendly’s lease and getting a bank to locate at that site.  While a bank at that spot might work for the bank and the landlord, I do not see the town well served by another bank replacing such a heavily used restaurant.  I feel Medfield would be better served to have a business that interests a high volume of the Medfield public, such as a Lord’s, a Wills, a Park Street Books, a Go Fresh, a Zebra’s, a Basil’s or a Noon Hill Grill.  I would expect that such a prominent site would attract a lot of fast food establishments, but to my mind such a chain restaurant is of much less interest.

I feel that the downtown could use more retail space.  Eddie El Khoury told me that he looked for years for a suitable location for his Go Fresh restaurant.  A high percentage of the available retail spaces in the downtown are occupied by competing pizza shops, convenience stores, banks, and realtors, many of which are not of much interest to most residents, unless it is our pizza shop or bank.

The town already missed a major opportunity to dramatically remake its downtown when the  land was for sale where the Montrose School is now located.  There were many major developers interested in creating expensive mixed use developments there, which would have been a combination of retail on the first floors and residences above.  The town government at that time made the decision that it did not want to support the idea of the zoning change that was needed to allow such developments (the land is zoned for business and industrial use), so we got a school instead which needed no town permission.  The seller, Julias Tofias, was told by the town at the time to market the property to the businesses for which it was zoned, which businesses just did not want to locate in Medfield,  and so instead we got a tax exempt school and lost $150,000 in existing property taxes (but which property taxes would have been many times as much if the new mixed use developments had been built).  Note that there were no business or industrial users interested in the property, but many requests from developers for the mixed uses that were heavy on housing.  Such mixed use developments would have added to the critical mass of both retail space and housing to the downtown, making the downtown more vital and interesting.  The housing was condos in multistory buildings, and as such, not likely to attract families with children, so such a mixed use probably would have generated lots of positive tax revenue for the town over any municipal costs.  There is no question but that Montrose is a lovely addition to the downtown, but the alternatives were way more interesting to this writer.

The town should do what it can to effect getting the best possible use at the Friendly’s site, if Friendly’s is truly history.  The town should do what it can to positively impact the use of each parcel of land in the downtown, as the success of the merchants in the downtown may well depend upon the sum of those individual small actions taken by the town.  The town will need both vision and active planning to make such a process a success.