Walk Central Street this month and the changes are easy to spot. A green awning now hangs at 61A, between Wasik's Cheese Shop and J.P. Licks, where Blank Street Coffee opened its doors on May 7. A few doors down at 59 Central, the window that held decades of board games and stuffed animals at Wellesley Toy Shop has been dark since the end of 2025. Signage crews have been working at 94 Central, where a Glowbar location is taking over the space Gretta Luxe vacated when it moved across the street.
None of this looks unusual on its own. Storefronts turn over. This year's new tenants include businesses expanding from outside Wellesley, alongside closures and moves by several longtime Wellesley Square businesses.
New Businesses Coming to Wellesley Square
Line up the 2026 openings and a shape emerges. Blank Street Coffee arrived with nine locations already running in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, plus sites across the U.K. Taste Buds Kitchen, a cooking-class franchise for kids and corporate groups, has been working through signage approval for a Linden Square spot it announced nearly a year earlier. Down Under School of Yoga, which already runs studios in Newton and Brookline, took over the entire floor at 159 Linden Street that Laughing Dog Yoga had occupied since 2002. My Gym signed a lease for 9,600 square feet through a franchisee who operates several other New England locations of a chain with hundreds of gyms worldwide. Discover Strength, a multi-location strength-training studio, is moving into the Square's former lacrosse-training space.
The list also includes businesses outside fitness and food. Glowbar is a national franchise. Small Door Veterinary, headed for Linden Square, operates in multiple cities. Clarendon Fine Art, taking the former Laurel Grove space at 25 Central Street, runs dozens of galleries in the U.K. and one in Westport, Connecticut. Wonder, a virtual food hall concept, has been scouting a Wellesley Square address. And at 59 Central, the space Wellesley Toy Shop left behind, town filings point to Bridgewater Chocolate, a Connecticut confectioner with locations across that state and previous locations in Massachusetts, including Chestnut Hill and Newbury Street.
SALT Patisserie is a partial exception worth sitting with. It's expanding from Newton Centre, not a distant metro, and its second location is landing in the old Starbucks space at 68A Central Street this October. But the business is also in active talks for locations in downtown Boston and Harvard Square, which puts Wellesley Square inside a regional expansion plan rather than a hometown launch.
Longtime Businesses That Have Closed or Moved
Wellesley Toy Shop had operated at 59 Central Street for decades before closing at the end of 2025. Flyte.70, an independent beauty shop near Café Mangal at 555 Washington Street, closed in mid-June after two and a half years, having been founded by two local women, Carolyn Barber and Elena Frankel, around a specific niche: cosmetics for customers over 40. Bach to Rock, the music school, went quiet around the same time.
The closures had no public explanations tied to sales or foot traffic. They occurred during the same twelve-month period as several new leases nearby, while the town was planning a streetscape project for the Square.
The Town Is Rebuilding the Same Blocks
Wellesley Square hasn't had a full reconstruction since the 1990s. The last major work on Central Street was completed in 1997, when Pavao Corp reclaimed the roadway and installed new drainage, curbing, and brick paver crosswalks. Washington Street's last overhaul dates to 1996. Both projects are old enough that the granite curbing and traffic signals installed then are now closing in on thirty years of daily use, which is part of why the town issued an engineering design RFP to carry the Wellesley Square Improvement Project from concept to final design. The scope covers Washington and Central Streets along with adjoining stretches of Cross, Church, Grove, and Crest, the full commercial spine of downtown.
That project is already shaping decisions on the ground. When Fiorella's Trattoria sought approval for a 47-seat expansion next door to its existing space, a neighbor raised concerns about traffic and stormwater at the December 2025 hearing. Town officials pointed to the pending streetscape work as a factor that could ease those very issues, and the Select Board approved the expansion. It's a small exchange, but it shows the infrastructure project is already a live variable in how landlords, tenants, and the town think about what a lease commitment in the Square looks like over the next several years.
The town's own FY26 work plan adds another layer: a separate Wellesley Square amenities plan, with a new RFP slated for release and a public engagement process built specifically to include merchants. Landlords, tenants, and the town are all making bets on the same blocks at the same time, which helps explain why this is the year so many leases are turning over rather than some other year.
A Local Retail Pop-Up
Wellesley Books, at 82 Central Street since long before this wave began, announced in January that owners Bill and Gillian Kohli had renewed their lease for five more years, offering an example of continuity amid the Square's changing business mix.
When Village Bank opens its first Wellesley branch this month at 579 Washington Street, on the former EA Davis site, it plans to use the retail bay next door for a rotating pop-up program with a company called UpNext, featuring Piper&Cloth, a local children's clothing retailer that Yvonne Piper launched in 2022 as an e-commerce business. The reasoning behind it was stated plainly in local coverage: with Wellesley "seeing an increase in chains and decrease in independent retailers" across town, the space is meant to give small local businesses a physical foothold they couldn't otherwise afford. Piper&Cloth will hold it through the holidays before a different independent rotates in.
Charm Ramen & Rice is another recent Wellesley opening. Co-owner Ae Trahan had spent years preparing taxes for restaurants around Wellesley before opening her own at 555 Washington Street in April, in the space Lemon Thai had held for years. She and her partners, Aum and Auy, traveled to California to train with a chef before opening, and her husband Paul, a custom carpenter, built out the nearly 50-seat interior himself.
What to Watch This Fall
A few threads from this year are still resolving. SALT Patisserie's October opening at 68A Central will be the next chain arrival to watch. Piper&Cloth's run at the Village Bank pop-up ends around the holidays, which will show whether the bank finds another independent to fill the slot. Whether Bridgewater Chocolate confirms plans for the former toy shop space is another development to watch.
These changes are affecting the mix of businesses in the Square. For anyone who has lived near Central Street long enough to remember what used to be in these spaces, that's the part worth watching.
At The Lara and Chelsea Collaborative, we spend as much time walking these blocks as we do walking clients through them. If you're curious how a shifting downtown affects property values on the streets around it, or you just want to talk through what you're seeing on your own walk through the Square, reach out and request a private consultation.
