The signs are all over the place.
Despite what the nightly news might say about the economy, Chelsea is getting by pretty well, thank you very much, and we’re not talking here of the new developments going up across the city in places like Forbes Industrial Park and the Parkway Commons or the new luxury apartment complex on Admiral’s Hill.
No, there is new growth and excitement occurring right in the heart of downtown Chelsea. A section of the city that had been all but abandoned by businesses and developers for a generation is suddenly alive with new growth and expansion and excitement.
All one has to do to prove it is take a walk or ride down Broadway some afternoon and view the changes that are taking place all around.
There’s a new CVS drugstore right smack in the middle of Broadway.
A stretch of road where there probably hasn’t been a new building constructed in decades, suddenly has a new retail building that screams for attention. And that is one of two brand new CVS stores being built here, with the other going up in the aforementioned Parkway Plaza.
Across the street from the CVS is a new branch office for the Chelsea-based Metro Credit Union, in the old Executive office building. The Metro has been headquartered in Prattville for many years, but the emergence of its downtown presence, to go along with new branches last year in Lynn and Swampscott, is a strong testament to the local credit union’s tremendous growth and potential.
A little further down Broadway, there is an even more impressive sight, the new TILL building, which is really the old Bloomberg Furniture building, (it was the old Congress Building before that) but has been renovated for new and exciting uses. Steve Lepler, director of special projects for the charitable TILL Inc., said last week, that TILL’s hope is to be the centerpiece of an exciting revitalization of the downtown Chelsea area.
It seems likely that is a goal the organization could very well achieve, given the interest shown in the area by other businesses and developers as well.