Walkers Brook Drive does not look like it used to. Where the town once buried its trash, shoppers now pull into a plaza anchored by Home Depot, Jordan's Furniture, Golf Galaxy and The Paper Store. It is the kind of corridor every commuter town has: wide lanes, big parking lots, familiar signage. Nothing about it screams landmark.
Except that on March 25, 2026, the Town of Reading confirmed that Trader Joe's would be taking over the former Staples space at 34 Walkers Brook Drive, inside the Crossing at Walkers Brook plaza. Five days later, on March 30, a family of Reading natives opened an Italian restaurant a few doors down at 45 Walkers Brook Drive, in the space Bertucci's had vacated. Two arrivals, one stretch of road, and a detail that explains why this matters more than a typical retail announcement: Trader Joe's had not opened a new store north of Boston in almost three decades.
The math behind the announcement
Trader Joe's opened its first store north of Boston in 1998, in Saugus. In the twenty-eight years since, the chain added exactly one more location in the entire region, a single store in Peabody, before this year's Reading announcement made it three. Two stores, one region, since the Clinton administration. Reading is the third.
Chris Maguire, the company's regional vice president, framed the Reading store as expanding a two-community footprint that had not grown since 1998, calling it a natural next step for the chain now that Saugus and Peabody had proven the market. That framing matters because it means the decision to cross into Middlesex County was not routine. A company that expanded to 630-plus stores across 43 states left this particular corner of Massachusetts alone for a generation. Something in Reading's numbers or foot traffic finally moved the needle.
Reading's Senior Planner for Economic Development, Kevin McCarthy, put the significance in plainer terms, describing the site's path as going from landfill to landmark. That is not marketing language borrowed from a press release template. It is a literal description of the parcel's history, and it is the closest thing this story has to a thesis: the same acreage the town once used to bury waste is now valuable enough to draw a grocery chain that had gone almost three decades without adding a second store nearby, let alone a third.
Toscana Forno made a similar bet, just faster
The restaurant that opened next door did not wait twenty-eight years to make its move, but it followed a similar logic. The Perrina family, who grew up in Reading and graduated from Reading Memorial High School, already operated three Toscana restaurants in Peabody, Beverly and West Peabody before opening a fourth in their hometown. That is a specific kind of confidence. They did not test their concept on their home turf first. They built a track record elsewhere, then brought it back once they had three working locations to point to as proof.
The Reading Select Board approved the restaurant's all-alcohol liquor license unanimously, and Lucio Perrina, who serves as the Reading location's manager of record, committed to being on-site at least 40 hours a week with a fully TIPS-certified staff. That is the kind of operational detail that shows up in select board minutes, not press releases, and it signals a family treating this location as a long-term fixture rather than a quick expansion play.
Here is how the corridor's roster breaks down as of this year:
| Already on Walkers Brook Drive | Arriving in 2026 |
|---|---|
| Home Depot | Trader Joe's, 34 Walkers Brook Drive (former Staples) |
| Jordan's Furniture | Toscana Forno, 45 Walkers Brook Drive (former Bertucci's) |
| Golf Galaxy | |
| The Paper Store |
The plaza did not need new tenants to survive. It already had four recognizable anchors. What changed is that two more operators, one a national grocery chain and one a proven local restaurant family, looked at this specific stretch of road and decided it had crossed some threshold worth betting on.
Haven Street is building its own case, in the opposite direction
While Walkers Brook Drive imports proven concepts, Haven Street downtown has been exporting one. Post 1917 Steakhouse opened in the spring of 2024 inside Reading's historic post office building at 136 Haven Street, the kind of adaptive reuse that turns a civic building into a destination. Chef Jason Carron built the menu around USDA Prime cuts sourced from Brandt Farms, and the restaurant leaned into its setting rather than hiding it, keeping the building's downtown character while adding a bar and event space.
In April 2026, marking two years since opening, Post 1917 expanded its private event space to two dedicated rooms for private dinners, corporate gatherings and celebrations. That expansion came alongside a bigger move: after what the restaurant describes as a successful first stretch in Reading, Post 1917 opened a second location in Lexington this summer, with a Somerville location planned for 2027. Reading did not import this concept from somewhere else. Reading incubated it, and now it is leaving town to grow.
A few doors down on Haven Street, Fat Larry's runs a smaller, quieter version of the same story: a family-owned ice cream and sandwich shop with no chain behind it and no expansion plan beyond serving its own street. Not every business on this stretch is trying to become a regional brand. Some are just trying to be the reliable stop between errands.
What this actually means if you live here
None of this changes what Reading is. It changes where different parts of daily life happen, and it is worth knowing before you plan around it.
- If you are running errands, Walkers Brook Drive is becoming the corridor where you can do all of it in one trip: hardware at Home Depot, furniture at Jordan's, office supplies at The Paper Store, and now groceries at Trader Joe's, all within the same plaza footprint.
- If you want a sit-down dinner without leaving town, Toscana Forno gives Walkers Brook Drive its first real restaurant destination, not just retail.
- If you are marking an occasion, an anniversary, a work event, a celebration, Haven Street downtown is where that infrastructure already exists, and Post 1917's expanded event rooms make it more available than it was a year ago.
- If you just want something familiar and unfussy, Fat Larry's is still there doing what it has always done.
The town's own announcement noted that Reading will become Trader Joe's 22nd Massachusetts location, following recent openings in West Roxbury and Newton. That statewide pace has been steady. What had not moved in this specific region for twenty-eight years is the number of stores north of Boston, and that is the number that finally changed this year.
Reading is not becoming a different town because of a grocery store and a restaurant relocation. But the fact that a corridor built on a former landfill can now draw a chain that skipped an entire region since 1998 says something real about how far Walkers Brook Drive has come, and it is worth noticing the next time you are choosing between a quick stop out there and a reservation downtown.
If watching your own neighborhood shift like this ever has you curious about what your home would be worth in it, Nancy Fudge and the team at Fudge Properties have been tracking Reading's changes for decades and are happy to walk through it with you, no obligation attached.
