Cross Street and Commercial Wharf: The North End's Two Longest-Empty Edges Are Finally Moving This Fall

"Anybody could critique it right now," Frank DePasquale told The Boston Globe in early October, over an espresso at Dolce, his gelato shop. "They look at it and they see an empty building. That's like you're putting a T-shirt on, and you still haven't put on your suit and tie."

He was talking about his unfinished building at the Cross Street entrance to the neighborhood. A few blocks east, on the harbor side, a Cambridge developer had filed paperwork the week before for the burned-out shell on Commercial Wharf. That building has sat in ruins since 2011.

These are the North End's two most visible gaps, one where you walk in from the Greenway and one where the neighborhood meets the water. Both are moving in the same season, and each one makes its case through what it gives the public at ground level: a patio, a sidewalk, open space, a stretch of Harborwalk. Those are the pieces the neighborhood will feel first.

Two front doors, side by side

Cross Street has been the hard corner for a decade

The Globe calls this stretch of Cross Street "the unofficial gateway to the North End." The paper also points out that the Big Dig's backers, when the Central Artery came down, called keeping local business on Cross Street "crucial" to the neighborhood's character.

That has been hard to deliver. Over the years the block has held a liquor store, a juice bar and a nail salon. Bread & Butter, a bakery-cafe, closed in 2015. A proposed Starbucks stalled in 2018 after strong community opposition. A boutique hotel planned next to DePasquale's site never got built either, and the Globe says many other planned Cross Street developments met the same end. For years, the property sat vacant.

DePasquale's plan was revised after community feedback, and the city approved it in 2024. Construction started last year. The program is shops, restaurants and an Italian culinary school, and the Globe's October tour went inside the work-in-progress interior of DePasquale's Pastry, one of the businesses headed there.

The fuller lineup comes from a year earlier. In October 2025, Boston.com reported that the culinary school would be called La Scuola, run in partnership with Dolce & Salato in Italy. That report also listed a Neapolitan cafe, a jewelry store, handbag and shoe shops, a baby-shoe store and a travel agency as planned tenants, with an opening "next summer." Summer 2026 has come and gone. As of the Globe's October 7 tour, the building was still unfinished.

The fight is about the facade. The promises are at sidewalk level.

The argument started online. The Globe reports that a food influencer posted a video titled "Why the North End's new entrance is so ugly," and it passed 10,000 likes. Will Watson, who runs @willeatsboston and used to live in the neighborhood, told the Globe the building as it stands is a "missed opportunity." He described it as "a very modern, strip mall-esque, gray building with neon lights for the signage."

Others in the same Globe story saw it differently. One longtime resident said, "There's just so much brick down here; to try to replicate that would just look artificial." Tom Damigella, president of the North End Historical Society, said anything would be better than such an "eyesore." He added, "You have to uplift the neighborhood. You've got to keep enhancing it, keep improving the infrastructure."

Lucy Maulsby, a historian of architecture and urbanism at Northeastern University, offered the Globe a wider frame:

"The debate is perhaps less about the building and more about a whole set of other issues that are being projected."

The building is already changing on the street. In the first days of October, painters began swapping the dark gray exterior for a warmer brown, which DePasquale told the Globe was always part of the plan. Crews are installing striped awnings over the windows and marble wainscoting. Once it's finished, he says, the building will have falling vines, flower boxes, a repaired Freedom Trail sidewalk, and patio seating to rival "any piazza in Italy."

Most of what he lists sits at eye level or below. The patio, the plantings and the sidewalk that carries the Freedom Trail past the block are the parts people will walk through every day, whatever they think of the stucco and metal siding above. DePasquale said he chose not to release renderings early. "If you come to one of my restaurants, you're not going to show the steak uncooked," he told the Globe.

Commercial Wharf's ruin has stood since 2011

On the water side, the story is older and quieter. Universal Hub reports that around 5 a.m. on May 4, 2011, a worker doing renovations threw away a cigarette carelessly during a smoke break. The three-alarm fire that followed destroyed the building, which then housed the Sarrouf Law Firm. What remains is a two-story shell from the 1950s.

Urban Spaces bought the ruin for $4 million in March 2025, according to Suffolk County Registry of Deeds records cited by Universal Hub. The Boston Business Journal called it "a highly visible eyesore on the waterfront."

The proposal is a four-story boutique hotel with 35 to 45 rooms and a first-floor restaurant. As on Cross Street, the public pieces carry much of the pitch:

• Half the parcel set aside as open space
• A public walkway along the water side, built as part of the Harborwalk
• No parking on the wharf for hotel guests

The no-parking point matters here because of who the hotel would sit next to. Hoodline notes that the site adjoins the Commercial Wharf East condominiums and a marina.

There is also a Cross Street echo. The last boutique hotel planned for the North End's front door, next to DePasquale's site, was never built. This one would put a small hotel at the neighborhood's other front door, facing the harbor.

What has no date yet, and where to follow it

The two projects are at very different stages, so they'll move at different speeds.

Cross Street is past approvals and into finishes. A Globe story republished by Boston.com on October 14 named DePasquale's Pastry and the general mix of shops, restaurants and a culinary school. It gave no opening date and no confirmed full tenant list. Until the businesses announce themselves, the 2025 tenant list is a plan, not a commitment.

Commercial Wharf is at the very start. The City's public notice lists an Article 80B Large Project Review filing by Urban Spaces for 90 Commercial Wharf East Row, filed October 1, 2026 and posted October 2. That notice shows no comment deadline and no meeting date. The Boston Planning Department's project page for 88–91 Commercial Wharf shows the letter of intent as the only document so far, and it carries a note that its beta timeline may not reflect the latest information. The city's public notices page also says comment periods can be extended.

For anyone who walks the Harborwalk past the wharf or the Freedom Trail up Cross Street, these are the things to watch:

1. When the brown paint, awnings and marble are done on Cross Street, and whether the patio and the repaired Freedom Trail sidewalk open with the first tenants
2. Which of the announced Cross Street tenants, including La Scuola, the Neapolitan cafe and the specialty shops, actually sign on
3. When the first public meeting and comment period appear on the Commercial Wharf project page
4. How the half-parcel open space and the Harborwalk segment are drawn once Urban Spaces files more detailed plans

Both edges have been blank for a long time. Cross Street has had a decade of failed proposals, and Commercial Wharf has been a ruin for fifteen years. The next public step for either one will show up first on the city's project page or on the Cross Street sidewalk.

We'll keep tracking both sites as they move from filings and scaffolding to open doors. If you own on Commercial Wharf or near the Cross Street gateway and want to talk through what these changes could mean for your building, Sherean and the team at Urban Circle Realty are glad to share what we're seeing on the ground.