For close to four years, there was a building on Route 1 that Saugus residents had learned to stop expecting anything from. A "Coming Soon" banner hung in the windows of the old Saugus Plaza Shopping Center at 357 Broadway, promising an Amazon Fresh grocery store that never once opened its doors. Drivers passing the site on their way to Kowloon or Prince Pizzeria watched the sign fade for years. It became the kind of local joke you only get if you actually live here: somebody would ask what happened to that Amazon store, and the answer was always the same shrug.
That building has a tenant again. It is not a new company. It is the one that used to be there.
Same Address, Same Grocer, Four Lost Years
Before Amazon ever touched 357 Broadway, the space was a Hannaford, and Big Y took it over in 2016. Then in 2022, Amazon bought the site with plans to convert it into an Amazon Fresh, its first "Just Walk Out" concept store in New England, the kind where sensors and cameras were supposed to let shoppers grab groceries and leave without touching a register. The technology never arrived. The store never opened. The banner stayed up so long it became a fixture of the corridor in its own right.
Earlier this year, Big Y closed that loop. The company held a 90th-anniversary event at the future Saugus site with Governor Maura Healey in attendance, using the moment to announce six new stores across Massachusetts, Saugus included. The Saugus location, a 46,000-square-foot store, held its grand opening events starting September 10, 2026, with giveaways and tastings running through the following weeks. The new store created about 100 part-time and full-time jobs.
If you drive Route 1 regularly, this is the closest thing the corridor has had to a plot twist resolving itself. The grocer that left in 2016 is the same one that came back in 2026, and the years in between were spent waiting on a company that builds warehouses, not supermarkets.
The New Big Y Is Selling the Corridor's Own Food
Here is the detail that made me look twice. The new Big Y did not come in as an outside chain dropping generic products into a big box. Its shelves are stocked with suppliers that already exist a few driveways down Broadway.
| What's on the shelf | Who makes it |
|---|---|
| Take & Bake pizzas | Prince Pizzeria |
| Hummus and dips | Cedar's Mediterranean Foods |
| Artisan breads and linzer cookies | Jessica's Brick Oven |
| Fresh mozzarella cups | Mozzarella House |
Prince Pizzeria, the family-run restaurant a short drive north on Route 1, now has its take-and-bake pies sitting in the same aisle as the store that replaced the store that replaced Amazon's abandoned promise. That is not a coincidence a chain plans for. It is what happens when a grocer commits to sourcing from the businesses already anchoring the road it is moving back onto, rather than treating the corridor as blank shelf space.
A Second Empty Box Is Filling In, Too
The Amazon Fresh building was not the only stretch of dark storefront on Route 1. A few blocks south at 880 Broadway, a retail center that used to house the discount outlet BinStar sat through a full redevelopment. That 34,246-square-foot center now has a tenant lined up: 7th Street Burger, the New York smash-burger chain, is targeting an October 2026 opening there.
The chain keeps its menu narrow on purpose, built around three categories and nine total ingredients, no chicken, no milkshakes, just cheeseburgers, fries, and drinks made fast. A single smash burger runs $6.50 and a double runs $9.50. Saugus will be one of four Massachusetts locations once it opens, joining a Newbury Street store that opened in March 2026, a South Boston location from April, and a Harvard Square spot targeted for early 2027.
What is worth noticing is not the burger chain itself. It is that this is the second dormant retail box on the same road getting refilled inside the same year, by a company expanding fast enough to need real estate, not the other way around.
The Steakhouse Site Is Becoming 280 Apartments
Not every change on Route 1 is a storefront swap. The old Hilltop Steakhouse site at 855 Broadway, once marked by its enormous neon cactus sign and the fiberglass cattle out front, is now approved for Hilltop Avalon, a mixed-use redevelopment with 280 residential units and roughly 23,050 square feet of retail space. The cows moved on years ago, and the sign that made the Hilltop recognizable from half a mile away is gone with them.
This is the one true addition on the corridor rather than a reoccupation. Everything else happening on Route 1 right now, the grocery store and the burger chain both, is landing inside buildings that already existed and had already gone empty. The apartments at Hilltop are the exception, built on land that a single restaurant used to occupy alone.
What Has Not Moved
Two blocks from all of this, Prince Pizzeria's Leaning Tower of Pizza is still leaning. The Castraberti family has owned the restaurant since 1961, when Arthur Castraberti bought what was then a struggling twelve-seat pizza stand and built it into one of the largest independently owned pizzerias in the country. The tower itself, part roadside oddity and part landmark, has outlasted the giant sausage sign, the orange dinosaur, and the Hilltop's cattle that used to share the road with it.
Prince has also kept up a running tradition of tipping its hat to its neighbor across the street. The restaurant released a meatball eggroll as a tribute to the Wong family, who own Kowloon, the massive Polynesian-Chinese restaurant that has anchored the opposite side of Route 1 for decades. Two family businesses, on opposite sides of the same road, still checking in on each other while the buildings around them change hands.
The Actual Pattern Worth Knowing
Watch Route 1 long enough and a shape starts to emerge that is different from what most people assume when they hear "the strip is changing." The corridor is not expanding outward with new ground being broken every year. It is refilling itself. Big Y came back to the exact address it left. 7th Street Burger is stepping into a box that used to hold a discount outlet. Even the one genuinely new structure, the apartments at Hilltop Avalon, is rising on land a single restaurant already occupied rather than on any previously undeveloped parcel.
For anyone who lives near Route 1 and has watched a "Coming Soon" banner gather dust for four years, the news is not that the road is turning into something unrecognizable. It is that the buildings that sat empty long enough to become local punchlines are, one by one, getting real tenants again, and in at least one case, tenants who are stocking their shelves with the pizza from the place down the street.
If you are curious what any of this means for property values or timing near the corridor, or you just want to talk through what is changing in your part of Saugus, reach out to Kristopher Gergler. Let's Connect.
