Category — Auburndale

Auburndale residents — many of whom have been asking for a local place to grab dinner and a drink — will have their wishes granted later this month.

The Bocca Bella Cafe & Bistro will be opening soon at 442 Lexington Street, around the corner from highly rated village diner The Knotty Pine. Bocca Bella will be a full-service restaurant, serving “great food and libation.” The restaurant’s phone number is — or will be– (617) 928-1200.

Space adjacent to the restaurant houses the LuckArt Gallery, which will host musical concerts and art exhibits.

Bocca Bella joins relative newcomer Wally’s Wicked Good Ice Cream & Treats , also highly rated, which offers gourmet ice cream flavors like Purple Cow and Kahlua Chip, and Black Raspberry Chocolate Chip frozen yogurt.

Hungry yet?

You may have thought once or twice before, “Why do developers do our planning for us?  They tell us what they want, and we react.  Why don’t we have our own vision?”

Mayor Warren has convened a committee to create that vision–the Comprehensive Plan Mixed Use Task Force (MUTF). The group is led by the rightly esteemed Phil Herr, who led the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee that gave us our 2007 Plan.

[NOTE:  Two Newton Villagers (Andrea Kelley and John Pears) are serving on the MUTF.  As updates on the MUTF work are available, we will post them here.]

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Last week, Newton Villages hosted Emmy Hahn of Massachusetts Downtown Initiative (MDI) for a tour of city’s village centers.  Hahn has extensive and broad experience in revitalizing downtowns:  she directed the downtown revitalization program in New Bedford, and has coordinated MDI–a statewide educational and technical assistance program to improve downtowns in Massachusetts–for several years.  She knows a lot about downtowns.

During her visit to Newton, while she toured several village centers (plus Needham Street) with a crew of Newton Villagers and others, one concept dominated all others: Business Improvement Districts (BIDs).

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The developers of the Riverside T station have rescheduled the community meeting that was recently canceled.  The next meeting will be held on Thursday June 17, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at the Williams school.  (Map & directions here.)

This meeting will benefit from the recently released traffic study completed by the developer’s consultant, VHB.

For more information, visit http://www.riversidestation.info, the site of the Riverside Station Neighborhood Coalition:  the Lower Falls Improvement Association, the Lasell Neighborhood Association, and the Auburndale Community Association.

[UPDATE 4/2/2010: Online registration is open.]

Nearly a dozen of the projects planned for the city’s community service day will improve public spaces in our village centers. NewtonSERVES is coming up on April 25th — mark your calendars.

Some of the volunteer projects in village centers include:

Auburndale: At the Auburndale Community Library, volunteers will be cleaning and painting indoors and beautifying the grounds outside. A Business Recycling Project in behind The Village Bank will collect paper and cardboard from village merchants for recycling.

Newton Centre: The Garden City Preservation Society’s volunteers gardeners will be working to beautify the planting areas around the historic Newton Centre “T” Station. [Read more →]

BH Normandy Riverside LLC will present its latest plans for development of the MBTA Riverside site at the regular meeting of Newton’s Economic Development Commission.  The meeting is at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, January 12, in Room 209 in City Hall.

Plans dated 12/10/09:  Option A, Option B.