The sun was dropping into the water behind the old Hawthorne building on the night of September 5, and for the first time since the restaurant closed last November, there was a line to get in. A velvet rope. A red carpet laid across the entrance where the Athanas family used to seat Saturday-night regulars for baked clams and popovers. Inside, guests moved between a pastel pink-and-blue room called the Flamingo Lounge and a darker, blue-toned dining room called The Dory, where a live band called Fats Arnold and His Midnight Hot Dogs played its first show ever, on a carpeted stage next to the buffet line.
Johnny Ray, the Marblehead restaurateur running the show, told a reporter that night that the whole thing started with a conversation at his other place, The Beacon, when a friend mentioned the town might be looking for ideas for the waterfront property. "Music is everything," he said. "The opportunity to have a beautiful music venue at this location with this kind of a view was an offer I couldn't refuse."
That's one half of the story that's been sitting in Swampscott since June 2022, when voters approved a single article at a Special Town Meeting authorizing the town to acquire two very different properties: the Hawthorne-by-the-Sea restaurant site and the Archer Street parcel, a stretch of woods off Park Street that had once been eyed for housing. The vote passed 214 to 3. Four years later, both projects have finally arrived, just on very different schedules. One got a red carpet and a live band last week. The other has been sitting finished since midsummer, still waiting for anyone to schedule the ribbon-cutting.
Same Vote, Different Speed
It's easy to miss that these two projects share a birthday. The Hawthorne site gets the headlines because it's visible from Humphrey Street and because its future has been argued over in public meeting after public meeting since 2022, through a scrapped $30 million library concept, a reuse advisory committee that eventually voted 9 to 1 to recommend a mixed-use redevelopment, and a formal letter last spring from the Swampscott Conservancy and four other town committees urging that the land stay mostly open space rather than host any large building.
The Archer Trail got almost none of that attention, and almost none of the drama, until March, when a resident named Frank Smith sent the town a formal email demanding the town "cease and desist" construction over concerns about wetlands and stormwater near his neighborhood. The Conservation Commission sorted it out the following month, clearing the town to finish the trail under an exemption for narrow, low-impact footpaths. By July, the Open Space and Recreation Plan Committee was reporting the trail complete, with signage installed at its access points and a grand opening still just something the committee was "hoping" to schedule.
So as of this month, a Swampscott resident can already walk the three-quarter-mile loop through Archer Woods, past an overlook and around the old radio tower, without a single ceremony having happened. The building next door got the party. The trail got a sign.
What Actually Opened at Hawthorne
The Swampscott Center for the Performing Arts is running under a temporary lease, thirty months long, extending through June 2028, on land the town bought for $7 million. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should, because it explains why everything about the opening felt closer to a soft launch than a settled outcome. Ray and his business partner from Johnny Ray's Music Emporium in Marblehead, Richard Messinger, aren't the long-term answer for the property. They're the answer for the next two and a half years, while the town keeps arguing about what the permanent one should be.
What's actually inside right now: a restaurant and bar serving casual dining and cocktails, Renzo's Pizza and Maria's Gourmet as the food vendors, a stage built for live music, comedy nights, and dinner shows, and a events calendar that already includes a Woodstock-themed fundraiser called Swampstock benefiting the Marblehead Counseling Center. The Select Board approved liquor, entertainment, and common victualler licenses for the space after three meetings that included real pushback from residents along Humphrey Street worried about noise carrying off the property. Ray told the board his sound staff and the building's own structure would keep ticketed performances contained. It's the fourth business he's opened on the North Shore.
None of that answers what happens to the building after June 2028. The Select Board has already voted 3 to 2 to oppose residential development on the site once the long-term request for proposals goes out, and the town is separately exploring whether it can buy the adjacent St. John's Church parking lot to give any future plan more room for green space alongside whatever gets built. The performing arts center is real, it's open, and it's temporary by design. That's not a knock on it. Town Administrator Nick Connors called it a "dual-track" approach, and Select Board Chair Katie Phelan has been clear that the short-term use is meant to "run tandem" with the long-term planning rather than wait for it to finish first.
The Trail That's Already Yours to Use
Here's the part that gets lost next to a red carpet and a live band: the Archer Trail doesn't need a ceremony to be usable, and residents who live near Park Street, Connelly Avenue, Vaughan Place, or Archer Street can walk it right now. The full network runs about three-quarters of a mile, built with entrances at:
- Park Street
- Connelly Avenue
- Vaughan Place
- Archer Street
Each entrance is marked with a small sign rather than a parking area, since the town made a deliberate call not to add lots or on-street parking given how close the trail sits to residential blocks. The path loops around the site's old radio tower, which the town is still deciding whether to remove, and includes an overlook point along the way. It's the kind of low-key public asset that tends to sit underused for a season simply because nobody threw it a party.
That's worth sitting with for a second. A three-quarter-mile wooded loop with a lookout point opened this year in a town where waterfront green space is scarce enough that five separate town boards and committees felt strongly enough to write a joint letter about protecting it at Hawthorne. The trail is the same instinct, already delivered, already free to use, and mostly unannounced.
Why One Got Noise and the Other Got Quiet
The difference isn't about which project residents care about more. It's about what each project needed. Hawthorne needed a paying tenant to generate revenue and activity while the town sorts out a much bigger and more contested question about the site's permanent future, so a grand opening with a red carpet and a band's debut show served a real purpose: it signaled to Humphrey Street that the building was alive again, ahead of a long negotiation about what it eventually becomes. The Archer Trail didn't need that kind of signal. It's a Department of Public Works project with a fixed scope, built by Greener Group under a design led by STV Inc., paid for with $225,000 in town funds and a $112,500 state grant. There's no tenant to court, no license to defend at a Select Board meeting, and no long-term redevelopment fight waiting on the other side. It just needed to get finished, and it did.
For anyone who's lived in Swampscott through both of these processes, the practical takeaway is simple. If you've been waiting for an official opening to go check out the woods near Archer Street, stop waiting. If you've been curious what's actually happening behind the old Hawthorne building's windows, it's open, it has a bar with an ocean view, and reservations are already recommended for weekend shows. Two projects, one 2022 vote, and two very different definitions of what counts as done.
If you're weighing a move in Swampscott, or just want a local read on how a neighborhood like this one is changing, the Kathleen Murphy Group knows this stretch of the North Shore block by block. Contact us any time you'd like to talk through what's happening here.
