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Before the Coolidge Corner Trader Joe's: A big gas station worthy of a postcard
By adamg on Sun, 05/28/2017 - 4:11pm
This postcard, sometime from between 1930 and 1945, shows the Gulf "Super-Service Station" at 1309 Beacon St., in Coolidge Corner - where the Trader Joe's building and parking lot is today (and of course, then, as now, that was Brookline, not Boston).
Postcard from the BPL Massachusetts postcard collection. Posted under this Creative Commons license.
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Comments
Wish you were here?
.
I admire the pride they took
I admire the pride they took in their business. And the flag.
God forbid there'd be something as plebeian
in C.C. today. I'm surprised the Dunkin Donuts is still there.
rolleyes
Oh please. Standing at the TJs in C.C., you can see a CVS, a tobacco store, a liquor store, a dry cleaner, a Dunkin Donuts, and it's next to a bank with an ATM drive through.
But it's a really snooty CVS
Or something.
So spacious
In other words, the exact opposite of Trader Joe's so-called parking lot. It's even worse than Hancock Village's parking lot.
(Whazzat? Oh. Right. The current, cutesy name for Hancock Village is The Village at Chestnut Hill. By any name, it's in West Roxbury on the VFW Parkway.)
TJ specializes in small parking lots
Are there any TJ's in MA with big lots? Arlington, Fresh Pond, Mem Drive are all shit shows.
They do it on purpose.
They meet the zoning codes - but they actually don't want to spend a lot of money for that much land when it will sit empty much of the time.
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2016/03/trader-joes-parking-lots-donald...
FWIW
I normally bike to TJ and they often run out of bike parking, even with additional racks. (Mem Drive. Arlington doesn't even have much bike parking.) I'm not normally one to complain about small parking lots but come on TJ's - not everyone can walk. At least throw a bone to the cyclists.
I spent many months in Germany with a bike and never had a hard time locking up at Aldi.
Bike parking
Can't you just lock your bike to a street sign if the parking lot is full?
Not many street signs in shopping centers
It's surprisingly hard to find places to attach a ULock in these sorts of lots.
TJs isn't always busy
Get to Alewife or Mem Drive TJs at 7:30 or 8:00 pm on a weekday and you will have plenty of room to maneuver.
Masochistic!
.
Foxboro
TJ's at Patriot Place has a huge lot but I'm sure that is the exception.
Parking
Burlington isn't bad. There used to be an OK one in Tyngsboro, but they moved to a less-convenient location in Nashua so they could sell wine. Both of those share lots with other businesses. The one in Peabody also shares its lot, which is pretty inadequate. Last time I was up there, there was one of those Chinese buffet restaurants next to the TJ's, which added to crowding in the lot.
Coolidge Corner is an attractive place
C. C. is attractive precisely because there aren't massive parking lots where there could be retail instead.
So, given the physical buildings near T.J.'s in C. C., what would you recommend? Should we level the bank? The lighting store and ice cream store next door? Maybe the bagel shop on the other side of the street as the parking lot?
It's a self correcting problem. Frustrated by a lack of conveniently located free parking? You could either (a) arrive by Green Line, 66 Bus, taxi, uber, lyft, bicycle, or foot, or you could drive your car elsewhere, helping to not add to the vehicular congestion of Coolidge Corner and the carriage congestion of T.J.'s aisles. Either way, Trader Joe's will survive and the neighborhood will be better off.
Reasonably navigable...
...is what I should have written, I suppose.
IOW, parking at TJ's is quite difficult in that it's an intensive exercise in tight turns, extreme patience and sardine-style movement.
In other words ...
You can't make me learn to drive!
And before Trader Joe's
It was J. Bildner's, a very expensive grocery chain catering to 1980s yuppies. Used to love their salad bar.
Coolidge Gulf
pumped gas there from 1977 to 1981. I Regret to tell you that it didn't look quite so nice, then.
I