While South Norwood Celebrates, a Tragedy Unfolds at 596 BPH

Town Manager Tony Mazzucco recounted how the new park may have only come to exist because longtime local auto magnate Boch Enterprises purchased the land with plans to turn it into an 800+ car storage lot at the end of South Norwood’s “Saint” streets. When the neighbors learned of the plan, the pushback was extensive and intense.

“It’s one of those things where you never want somebody to buy some open space and park cars there,” Mazzucco recalled to the paper, “but if they hadn’t started that process, I don’t know whether we’d get here.”

Everything about the parking lot plan was objectively absurd, from its location abutting a residential neighborhood, to complicated access issues for delivering cars to the site, to the foolishness of storing cars where a river overflows its banks. Ultimately, Boch Enterprises abandoned its plan for the “Saint” streets portion of the property, and sold the land to the town. The adjacent portion of the lot between Hawes Brook and Morse Street went forward as planned and became an overflow parking lot that has mostly sat vacant, demonstrating it wasn’t needed in the first place.

Michael Saad was among those who led the furious community response at the time. Now on the Board of Selectmen, he reflected proudly on the ultimate outcome. “This is where the community and the people of Norwood… took something bad that was going to happen to the Town – and it turned out to be a great project,” Saad told the paper.

In the same edition of the paper, a second story was published about a strikingly similar situation in a different part of town. To borrow a few words from Saad, “something bad” is happening.

Real estate tycoon and developer David Spiegel purchased the undeveloped, forested land at 596 Boston Providence Highway that abuts a residential neighborhood. Unbeknownst to the neighbors, he planned to raze a small forest and put in a parking lot – this one for an expansion of Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s new auto sales business. The neighbors discovered the plan when they saw surveyors behind their homes. They pushed back aggressively and earned the support of Town Meeting in 2023. Spiegel’s parking lot plans were later rejected by the Planning Board and, most recently, the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA), after Enterprise came unprepared to answer basic questions or demonstrate its need for the requested number of spaces.

Despite the failure to gain approval, Spiegel pushed ahead with preparation for his parking lot. Preliminary site work has been under way in recent weeks. Both Mazzucco and Conservation Planner Carly Rocklen explained to me in emails that the site work was allowed because the Norwood Conservation Commission issued an Order of Conditions in 2022 that allowed limited work to be done. The article in last week’s paper noted there had already been a work stoppage at the site for lack of compliance.

Even if Spiegel has the right to proceed with preparing the site for his rejected parking lot, that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. It certainly isn’t neighborly, as Boch Enterprises belatedly concluded seven years ago. Three years into this saga, Spiegel made it clear he does not care about neighborliness. Besides, it’s easy to disrespect the neighbors when you don’t actually live in the neighborhood. The noise pollution, the bright lights late at night, the late-night car alarms, the decreased property values, and the disruption of enjoyment of one’s own backyard are their problems to live with, not his.

On Monday, Spiegel turned the neighbors’ nightmares into reality. The buzz of chainsaws rattled homes along the Neponset Street Extension. Trees crashed down, destroying animal habitat and an important buffer from the sights and sounds of Route 1. Within just a few hours, multiple generations of forest growth were decimated and the tranquil nature of a neighborhood destroyed. A deep-pocketed businessman’s pursuit of a parking lot continues.

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Though much of the forest is gone, the fight is not over. The people of Norwood have pushed back repeatedly against Spiegel’s parking lot endeavor. It offers no benefit to the town, and it is already inflicting damage. We must demand that every governing body in the town does its part to prevent a parking lot from ever being approved at the site. Wealth and greed weren’t allowed to prevail at the expense of a neighborhood in South Norwood; they should not be rewarded here, either.

Chris Wristen

Town Meeting Member, District 5