Drive through Cushing Square and you'll pass a building most residents already have an opinion about. The Bradford rises four stories at the corner of Common Street, Trapelo Road, and Belmont Street, and its apartments have been filled with tenants for years. Its ground-floor retail has not. Long before that vacancy became the story, residents were already joking about how long the project took to open at all. One commenter on a local news site put it bluntly: they should call it the Godot, because the town had been waiting forever for it.
A few blocks away in Belmont Center, Leonard Street just went through the opposite motion. A run of restaurant closures gave way this year to a new arrival, right as Town Meeting voted to loosen the same kind of height limit that shaped Cushing Square two decades ago. Put those two stories side by side and you get something more useful than a list of what's new: a preview of exactly what Belmont Center's zoning vote can and cannot promise, based on what already happened once, a short drive away.
Leonard Street's New Arrival
Belmont Center's restaurant scene looked unsteady on paper for a while. Trinktisch closed. Stone Hearth closed. Shine's Fresh Asian closed. A short-lived spot called Foodie's Market came and went. Then Brooksy's, a pizzeria with roots in Andover, opened this year at 57 Leonard Street, run by Brooks Rice, a Newburyport resident who spent years in the food-truck world, helping launch Stoked Pizza Co.'s truck back in 2013 before an Andover landlord who also owns property in Belmont convinced him to expand.
Brooksy's joins a Leonard Street lineup that includes il Casale, the Italian restaurant Chef Dante de Magistris runs with his brothers out of the town's old firehouse, and The Wellington a few doors down. Bellmont Caffè, run by owner Rachid Smairi, and the café tucked inside Belmont Books round out the stretch. None of that reads like a district in decline. It reads like a small business district that keeps recycling the same handful of existing storefronts, because for decades that's the only kind of space Belmont Center's zoning allowed anyone to build.
A Height Cap With a Number Attached
That limit has a specific figure behind it. Belmont Center's zoning has allowed by-right construction of only two stories and 28 feet for years. Chris Ryan, the town's Office of Planning and Building Director, told Town Meeting members this spring exactly what that cap has meant in practice.
"And that's why nothing happens here."
At a Special Town Meeting held March 4 and 5, members voted to change that. Warrant Article 2, the Belmont Center Zoning Overlay, passed 165 to 87, and Warrant Article 3, the Center Gateway Overlay District, passed 196 to 52. The new form-based code replaces the flat height cap with a graduated one: two and a half stories in Zone 1, up to five stories in Zone 4, with at least two floors of commercial space required in every zone. That last requirement matters as much as the height numbers. Any new building in the district has to bring real ground-floor and second-floor business space with it, not just more apartments stacked over a lobby.
Cushing Square Already Ran This Experiment
Belmont has done this before, just not in this square. In 2006, Town Meeting passed a similar overlay for Cushing Square, clearing the way for what eventually became The Bradford: 115 apartments built by Toll Brothers Apartment Living above roughly 37,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.
The apartments leased up. The retail didn't. A dispute over how rent from the commercial space would be divided tied up leasing for seven years. That fight finally settled out of court in December 2024, and as of this past February, fourteen months later, the retail space was still empty. Toll Brothers sold the retail condominium to new owners, Zelco Properties and AGW Partners, in October 2025, and the leasing broker they hired, Charter Realty's Jeff Arsenault, told Belmont Citizens Forum in February that he expected to announce a boutique fitness tenant within about three months and have most of the space leased by the end of summer. That's a broker's forecast, not a signed lease, and there's no public update yet confirming whether it held.
The lesson isn't that Belmont Center will repeat Cushing Square's exact timeline. It's that passing a height overlay answers the question of whether a bigger building can go up. It doesn't answer the harder question of whether the ground-floor retail inside it gets tenants on any predictable schedule. Cushing Square spent the better part of two decades finding that out the hard way.
The One Advantage Belmont Center Already Has
Whatever eventually gets built in Belmont Center's taller envelope will be competing for customers who are already showing up on foot. The Belmont Farmers' Market opened its 21st season on June 4 and runs through October 29, drawing close to 50 vendors into the municipal lot at 10 Claflin Street, just behind the Leonard Street storefronts. Market Chair Hal Shubin has described it as more of a weekly gathering point than a produce stand, and the market's own numbers back that up: it brought more than 21,000 shoppers into Belmont Center in 2025.
Cushing Square doesn't have an equivalent draw pulling thousands of people past its empty storefront every week. That difference may be the real variable to watch as Belmont Center's new zoning starts to play out. A few things worth knowing if you're headed to the market this fall:
- Thursdays, 2 to 6:30 p.m. through September, shifting to 2 to 6 p.m. in October, at 10 Claflin Street.
- Returning vendors include Boulder Bagels, Hi-Rise Bread Company, and Mei Mei Dumplings, alongside growers like Hutchins Farm and Nicewicz Family Farm.
- The market doubles SNAP benefits up to $25 a week and hosts a rotating community tent with groups like the Belmont Public Library each week.
What to Watch Next
None of this means Belmont Center is about to look unrecognizable. Brooksy's is still one pizzeria in one storefront. il Casale, The Wellington, and Bellmont Caffè are still the same anchors they've been for years. What changed this spring is that the zoning excuse for why nothing bigger gets built is gone.
The real test isn't whether a taller building eventually rises somewhere on Leonard Street. Given the vote count in March, it probably will. The test, based on what Cushing Square already went through, is how long it takes for the ground-floor retail inside that building to open its doors, and whether Belmont Center's built-in foot traffic from the farmers market makes that timeline shorter than the one across town.
Watching how a town's zoning decisions actually play out on the ground, not just on paper, is most of what makes local market timing hard to get right from the outside. If you're weighing a move in Belmont or trying to read what a project like this could mean for property values nearby, Marjie & Phil track these shifts block by block across Belmont, Arlington, and the surrounding towns. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually changing.
