Norwood Tries to Solve Two-Mile Route 1 Zoning Puzzle After Decades Without Regulations-August 17, 1988

A combination of political gridlock and legal hurdles has left a two-mile stretch of Route 1 in Norwood completely unzoned for the past 20 years, a situation town officials are now working aggressively to fix. “We’ve lost the ability to control what happens,” said Town Planner Sharon Wason, who is leading efforts to overhaul local zoning rules under a $130,000 master plan scheduled for completion the following year. Without proper regulations, officials warn that buildings at local auto dealerships could double in height or high-rise office complexes could choke an already congested highway.

The consequences of the unzoned “Trunk Highway A and B” sections—spanning from Dean Street to Sumner Street on the west and north of the Nahatan Street rotary to Everett Street—are visible across the corridor. Wason pointed to a recent development featuring a Bertucci’s pizzeria, an Ethan Allen furniture store, and a Best Gas station near Sumner Street, where the gas station sits 20 feet in front of the restaurant, completely blocking its view from the road. If the strip were zoned properly, the gas station would be located farther from the restaurant and would not visually block the other businesses, said Wason. Although the current design is not a hazard “unless the gas station blows up,” she said it is an aesthetic mistake.

He added that it is unfair to landowners on the regulated parts of Route 1: “Say you’re in a manufacturing zone and you have to set back your business 100 feet while next door in the unzoned part, your neighbor can build right up to the road. That’s not right.” While Grover can enforce parking, lighting, and sign requirements along the unzoned sections, he emphasized, “But that’s not nearly enough control.”

The regulatory void dates back to 1967 when the town attempted to implement a floating buffer zone based on lot depth. After Boch Dodge petitioned the state Attorney General, the state’s highest law enforcement official struck down the buffer bylaw on grounds that it was not uniform—failing to treat all landowners consistently—and zoning reverted to its pre-existing unzoned status.

“We were like a man without a country,” said E. William Bamber, a member of the planning board since 1966 whose brother, J. Edward Bamber, was chairman of the board when the buffer zoning was disallowed. Subsequent attempts to restore zoning hit political barriers.

“We kept attempting to change Trunk Highway A and Trunk Highway B but usually people would object to it,” said E. William Bamber. “If we proposed changing it to manufacturing zoning, people would be upset that we were creating additional manufacturing land.” He noted that at the time, people were unconcerned: “The types of businesses on Route 1 today were never dreamed of… We were thinking of a modest business type zone.”

Former planning board member and current Selectman Thomas Riolo, who served from 1967 to 1981, noted that zoning could have encouraged attractive office parks and proper setbacks: “If we’d had some zoning maybe we would have had some nice office parks, better setbacks, buildings that are off the street.” He added that it is “very unusual” for a town the size of Norwood to be without zoning.

Wason noted that Route 1 is at the center of increasing conflicts between businesses and residents—tense situations that could have been prevented by good zoning. Facing the complex task of designing equitable standards, Riolo noted, “Every time we’ve tried to do something, it’s been thrown out by town meeting or the state attorney general… Now that we have a planner and some money maybe we can do something. It’s never too late to make some changes.” Wason concluded, “The key is finding something that isn’t overly unfair to existing businesses, that will protect residents.”

(Reporting by Lyndsey Layton, The Patriot Ledger).

Archival Note: This article has been dynamically reconstructed from the original public record print archives of the Patriot Ledger