Space for Existing Chinese Restaurant & New Retailer Included in Plans for Watertown Mall

The new owners of the Watertown Mall showed plans to revamp part of the mall, which include creating a new space for a popular restaurant and creating space for a new retailer.

National Development, a Newton-based national real estate development and management company, purchased the property from Alexandria Real Estate in 2025 with plans to make improvements. The renovations will focus on the area between Target and Best Buy, which will include the Registry of Motor Vehicles, a 31,000 sq. ft. spot for a yet to be announced retailer, and a new location for the Chinese restaurant currently in the mall, Nick O’Connor from National Development told the Zoning Board of Appeals on April 22.

“We’ll relocate and expand Joyful Garden. We’ll provide them with a front entrance with some good visibility. I will note that we plan to keep him open during the relocation,” O’Connor said. “The two spots, they’re just adjacent to each other, so we’ll keep his existing restaurant open. We understand that he’s a huge community favorite and does a great business. He actually inherited, took over Old Country Buffet, so not exactly the most efficient restaurant for him, but we feel a new and improved space can do wonders for him.”

The mall has had many tenants over the years, O’Connor said, starting in 1975 when Stop & Shop and Bradlees were the anchors. Other stores and eateries included Gap, Papa Gino’s, Marco, Dream Machine, and Medi Mart. Best Buy came in in 1999, followed by Target in 2002, and Carter’s in 2007. While no announcement has been made, Carter’s recently announced the closing of 150 stores nationwide, including some in Massachusetts. The list of which will close has not been released but reports say they will not be renewing leases in some locations.

National Development showed slides with a new exterior to the left of Target, showing signs for the Joyful Garden spot and the new retailer. In the renovations, O’Connor said, most of the interior hallway will be removed, but drawings show the current mall entrance and hallway leading to the interior entrance to the RMV remaining.

“The (new) junior anchor abuts and is adjacent to Target, eliminating the interior mall connection from Target to the rest of the mall,” O’Connor said. “We feel this interior connection works well with the older mall model: a lot of smaller stores that benefit from the flanking anchors, but that’s really for a hangout browsing mall. This is, we feel, more of a destination mall. The old school’s a bit outdated with the size of this mall, we don’t really feel like we need that interior corridor again, because it’s really not the hangout mall.”

In recent years, O’Connor said, many of the spaces have become vacant.

“When Alexandria Real Estate bought the property in ’21 it had eight out of nine spaces filled. … The only vacancy was Avenue, which is right on the front there today,” O’Connor said. “Fast forward to ’25 it has six out of nine spaces filled: the one on the front, Avenue, vacated in ’19, the dance studio (Maria’s) in about ’23, and then Working Gear recently closed their doors right after we bought it.”

Other plans include a new sign on the street with improved landscaping, and the former cut through next to Best Buy will be turned into a grassy area.

ZBA Chair Melissa SantucciRozzi said she is happy to see the planned improvements.

“Thank you for buying the property. Thank you for keeping retail. Retail is a community benefit,” SantucciRozzi said. “I don’t want to have to drive to Natick and all these other wonderful places you’ve developed to buy a pair of socks or grab something last minute.”

She had a few comments about the plans, including wanting to see something beside a concrete sidewalk in the stretch between Target and the Mall entrance.

“I want the parking and what people see when they’re on Arsenal Street to reflect the quality and the caliber that your tenants are going to experience inside the building,” SantucciRozzi said.

ZBA Member Sarah Baker said she would like to see something done to make the parking lot more pedestrian friendly. Rich Hollworth, principal with VHB, said the travel lane along the building will be narrowed.

“It is all asphalt today, so it creates the situation where the pavement isn’t as well defined in that direction, and it’s a really long crossing, so that’ll be narrowed, so at the very least that’ll essentially be a measure,” said Hollworth, who added that the lane is currently 60 feet wide and will be cut to a width of 40 feet.

ZBA member Gregory Girard said he is concerned that the traffic studies do not accurately reflect the anticipated number of cars.

“The counts are higher than would be predicted by the ITE, the Institute of Traffic Engineers, would calculate it to be,” Girard said. “And also the yet the future project, the future projections, estimates of future traffic are based on that same handbook, the ITE handbook, which is inadequate and doesn’t accurately describe today’s condition.”

Hollworth said the projections do not capture all the situations.

“The ITE rates have their own limitations, but they are the generally accepted standard that we’re held to for traffic generation numbers in order to be accepted by MassDOT and others,” Hollworth said. “There’s a few reasons that can be attributed to. One is you have a really busy RMV that generates traffic throughout the day, which is unlike a lot of other retail characteristics that you’d see out there. And then two is, there’s some amount of cut through traffic that wouldn’t be captured in our existing editions; counts of people cutting through to kind of go from Elm Street to Arsenal Street that wouldn’t be recognized.”

Baker added that the current parking lot is a heat island.

“Planters don’t go very far for mitigating that, and there’s not a lot you can do if you’re going to maintain the parking that you need,” Baker said. “But if the parking is outsized for the activity you anticipate, if there’s some wiggle room there, I would just highly encourage anything to reduce the 10 degree increase that we all experience when going into that space.”

The ZBA approved the amendment to the 1974 Mall permit, and wanted National Development to report back about plans for changes to parking and landscaping.