By Josh Resnek
Quite a number of public speakers at the recent council meeting all agreed – Everett needs a super market of its own.
Now that the Stop and Shop is closed and fading into the dustbin of local history, many voices have risen locally to complain.
“Why doesn’t Everett have a super market or Everett needs a supermarket.”
McKinnon’s is a great local market but it isn’t Stop and Shop and it certainly isn’t the Market Basket.
Hundreds of new units are being built on the former Stop and Shop site.
As many as 700, I think, are being built right there on that spit of land on the Parkway.
What, I wonder, and many who spoke before the council wondered as well, would it take to incorporate a supermarket into the general scheme of a 700 unit development?
Some years back a development just off Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge of hundreds of units included a Star Market on the bottom floor and hundreds of units all around.
What was the point?
Everyone living in those apartments had a place to shop. Everett could use just such a supermarket in the midst of thousands of new units going up off the Parkway.
But where and how?
Without the will of the city to impose on apartment house developers certain stipulations and guarantees, the developers do as they like.
In Everett, developers tell the city what they want to do.
It should be the other way around.
At least that’s what several people said last week in front of the city council.
They are right, of course.
On the other hand, what’s wrong with Market Basket be- ing considered an Everett supermarket even though it is located in Chelsea.
One public speaker last week asked: “How are Everett people going to get to the Market Basket?”
That was a bit like asking how residents of North Everett could get all the way to the casino, or even to Everett Square.
Admittedly, it is easy enough to get around.
If the Market Basket in Chelsea was about two hundred yards west of where it stands today, it would be in Everett.
However, the cries of some Everett residents for an Everett supermarket to replace the durable Stop and Shop are legitimate.
If Everett is to be a first class place to live and a first class community with all the fixings, then it needs a supermarket.
Why, we wonder, as the speakers at last week’s council meeting wondered aloud, can we not have a supermarket in Everett in and among or part of the great developments now going up or within proximity of those already up?
That’s a legitimate question.
Why can’t those who control the elements of development here cause a supermarket to be built among the major projects now going up?
From where we sit, that’s a pretty compelling question.
Everett needs more than thousands of new apartments.