Update, September 24, 2026. A fuller record of the September 22 presentation adds several details. The net change in parking across the whole project is a gain of one space. The slip lane in front of the Dunkin’ off Washington Avenue will be closed and filled in with plaza space, with the landscaped area around the statues rebuilt as flat programmable space for seating, public art and events; the rose bushes on the Broadway side stay, and the bricks there become pavers. Third Street and Broadway will be signalized; Fourth and Second Streets will not. Washington Avenue to Fifth Street will not be possible because of a bus conflict, so the simulation video shown at the meeting is out of date on that point. Traffic modelling was done by HNTB. The easement plan is “Plan of Alteration and Easements to be Acquired by the City of Chelsea, Broadway, MassDOT Project Number 609532,” dated September 16, 2026, prepared by Greenman-Pedersen, Inc. On business support during construction, the city offers CDBG grants, technical assistance and the storefront improvement program, but Ben Cares told the board that direct payments for construction impact are “few and far between” and that creating such a fund “would rest with the city council and the city manager.”
Bellingham Square is going to be a signalized intersection. Broadway beside City Hall is going to run two ways. Washington Avenue is getting back-in parking. And the sidewalks along the corridor are coming out to full depth and going back down new.
Those details, and the timetable, came from Ben Cares, Chelsea’s director of housing and community development, presenting the downtown Broadway layout and easement plan to the Planning Board on Tuesday night. It is the fullest public description of the project so far, and it answers several questions the council packets left open.
The timetable
Design is complete. MassDOT runs the bidding, and Cares said the advertisement date, when contractors are invited to bid, falls this winter. Construction starts in the spring and runs about two years.
He was careful about what two years means. “That doesn’t mean the entire corridor is ripped up for two years,” he said. The work goes piece by piece, and the city will coordinate with businesses through the chamber to limit the damage.
The limits, and Bellingham Square
The project runs from Second Street up to Bellingham Square and wraps around City Hall. Cares described it as funding “the reconstruction of downtown Broadway” and also supporting “the renovation of Bellingham Square and City Hall Plaza.”
That matters for a question this site raised twice this month. A man fell on the loose brick sidewalk outside the Dunkin’ in Bellingham Square in mid-September, and residents said the brick there has been uneven for years. Whether the square sat inside this project’s scope was not answerable from the council packets. It does, and the work includes “full depth reconstruction of the sidewalk and the roadway.”
What changes on the ground
Bellingham Square becomes fully signalized. Every vehicle stops and a pedestrian signal runs, which Cares called protected pedestrian movement through the intersection. Turning movements open up in several directions. Coming down Hawthorne Street past Phoenix Academy, a driver will be able to go down Broadway, up Broadway, up Bellingham Square or across to Fifth Street.
Broadway beside City Hall becomes two-way. In the stretch by Grove, Shurtleff and Marlborough, traffic will run in both directions. The point is to stop drivers having to loop around City Hall to reach other parts of the city. Someone arriving from Revere will be able to continue straight down Broadway. Cares said that, with the new signal, this should meaningfully reduce congestion on Washington Avenue.
Downtown Broadway itself stays one-way. From City Hall to Second Street the road keeps two lanes in the same direction. Making that stretch two-way was considered and did not proceed.
Fay Square gets rebuilt. The junction where City Hall Avenue meets Washington Avenue at the fire station goes to a one-lane format. Cares described the intersection today as one where drivers ask “what is going on,” and said he has nearly been hit at the crosswalk there.
Washington Avenue gets back-in parking. Cares expected resistance and pre-empted it: the street already has parallel spaces, back-in parking is the same manoeuvre performed more efficiently, and it let the city add a meaningful number of spaces around City Hall. A board member asked whether cars backing in would jam a one-lane street. Cares answered that parallel parking already creates that condition and back-in parking is, if anything, quicker.
The rest. Curb bumpouts and shorter crosswalks throughout, rapid flashing beacons where possible, new street trees, bus stops rebuilt so a bus can pull in and kneel for a wheelchair, bike infrastructure reinstated on Williams Street and Congress Street, and wider pedestrian plaza space on Winnisimmet Street. The bus and bike lane stays. On the plans, red marks a lane shared by buses and bikes; green marks bikes only.
A board member asked whether a roundabout had been considered at Bellingham Square. Cares said MassDOT weighs alternatives at roughly 10 percent design, which for this project would have been around 2018 or 2019, and that a roundabout was almost certainly among them. His own view was blunt: roundabouts move traffic well but are difficult to signalize, and “I don’t think it’s a good pedestrian experience.”
The easements, and what a property owner is owed
The word taking has followed this project, and Tuesday produced the clearest account yet of what is actually happening.
When a project like this begins, Cares said, a surveyor goes out to confirm where the public right of way legally runs. “In some cases that is discovered to be in a different place than the back of the sidewalk actually is, up to a building.” Where that happens the city needs easements, temporary or permanent, to be able to build.
Then the part property owners should note: “All of the property owners are entitled to compensation that is determined by an appraisal process.” Cares said the city does “a whole legal exercise” and that the Federal Highway Administration “oversees the entire right-of-way effort” and is “very keen on preserving property owners’ rights.” He said the city has been in dialogue with property owners and business owners throughout.
That is a more specific picture than the council got on September 14, when City Manager Fidel Maltez said the city is “not taking anyone’s property.” Both can be true. No one is losing a building, and some owners will be paid for an easement across ground they thought was theirs.
One number that does not match
Cares told the Planning Board the project brings “upwards of $13 million from the state of Massachusetts through a federal funding opportunity called the transportation improvement program.”
Maltez’s letter to the City Council describes the same project as “more than $14 million in federal investment.” A headline on this site previously carried $17.6 million, a figure that appears in no document we could verify and which we corrected on Tuesday.
We are reporting both live figures as their speakers gave them. The difference may be the state and federal shares of the same package, or it may be a rounding, and the record does not resolve it.
Where it stands
The Traffic and Parking Commission has approved the plan. The Planning Board’s role on Tuesday was an administrative motion on the layout alterations, with board members signing the mylar plan documents at the end of the meeting. The matter then returns to the City Council for a public meeting and a final vote on the layouts.
Cares noted a community meeting at the Senior Center to brief residents on the construction ahead, run with the Department of Public Works. That meeting is Wednesday, September 23 at 6 p.m.
This account comes from the Chelsea Community Cable recording of the September 22 Planning Board meeting. Corrections to [email protected].