Swampscott has leased the long-vacant Hawthorne property at 153 Humphrey Street to a private restaurant-and-performing-arts operator for about $10,000 a month for roughly 26 months, but the vote did not decide the property’s future.
The April 27, 2026 Select Board vote was 5-0, taken by the outgoing board before its May 6 reorganization. It keeps the town-owned former waterfront restaurant occupied into mid-2028 while the board works on a separate long-term plan. That plan has not been written. No RFP exists yet: no date, no scope, no scoring criteria.
The unresolved question is whether the town will run an open process for competing long-term uses or write the RFP around a parkland outcome before it starts. A separate push is already under way for the property to become “primarily open park land without any sizable structures” and for the town to acquire 187 Humphrey Street, the privately held church parking lot next door.
The temporary lease
The April 27 lease is a bridge. Rent is $10,000 a month, roughly $260,000 if the tenant stays the full term. An earlier figure of “$300,000 in annual rent,” floated during the March discussion, does not describe the executed lease.
Officials called the structure “triple net”: the tenant pays the property tax, about $150,000, and carries liability insurance. The town keeps the lower property-insurance cost it gets from an occupied building, plus roughly $100,000-$120,000 in utility savings. Adding it up in the meeting, the board reached a town-projected net benefit of around $620,000, excluding food-and-beverage revenue and with a caveat from Chair Katie Phelan: “622-ish … if that number is accurate.”
The building is taken “as is,” and the motion was approved “subject to the lessee signing first.”
One clause drew the only real dissent. Under §7.3, the tenant can terminate the lease if a single extraordinary repair, above and beyond the landlord-type items the town keeps responsibility for, is estimated to exceed $30,000. Vice Chair Danielle Leonard warned the bar was too low: “You could probably get any person that is a contractor to go in there and tell you there’s 30,000 plus of necessary repair. I mean let’s just be honest.” She framed it as a question of leverage, not loyalty: “I’m not looking to benefit this company … I’m looking for the best interest of this town.”
No one joined her. Phelan, Doug Thompson, and David Grishman judged an empty building the worse outcome. Leonard lost the argument and then voted for the lease. The final tally was 5-0, after Phelan briefly misread it as “four-one” and corrected herself when a delayed “aye” landed.
No long-term RFP exists yet
The lease settled the short-term use of the building. It did not settle what the property becomes permanently, whether the building is eventually demolished, or whether the town tries to acquire the adjacent parcel.
At the April 27 meeting, Phelan committed that she and Leonard would bring the long-term question back: “Danielle and I will hopefully be in an agenda very soon to talk about a long-term RFP for Hawthorne. So we can live up to the promise that this is temporary.” She told Leonard, “there is nobody else on this board who is more committed to getting a RFP out for the Hawthorne property in its permanent condition than you.”
That is a verbal commitment. The document that would define the long-term process has not appeared on an agenda.
Parkland proposal is already organized
All four 2026 Select Board candidates, Edward “Ted” Dooley, Wayne Spritz, Charles “Charlie” Patsios, and Wayne Godfrey, agreed the years of indecision should end through an open public process. The agreement did not extend to an outcome. Only Dooley and Spritz named a specific mechanism, a Request for Information. Patsios floated lease-and-preserve versus sell. Godfrey framed it as the town coming “to consensus.” As Dooley put it: “Discussion is a means to a decision, not delay.”
That campaign-trail position is procedural. The parkland letter is substantive.
As this paper reported on May 27, a fourteen-page letter signed by four town bodies and the Swampscott Conservancy, coordinated by Tonia Bandrowicz, who chairs the Conservation Commission and vice-chairs the Open Space committee, argues the long-term plan should be “primarily open park land without any sizable structures,” opposing private and residential development. It also urges the town to acquire 187 Humphrey Street to assemble a larger waterfront park.
The record establishes that the Climate Action & Resilience Committee approved incorporating Bandrowicz’s draft 6-0 and the Tree Committee signed on 4-1. It does not establish a joint vote or any Select Board endorsement.
An open RFI would invite competing visions. The letter asks the town to settle on parkland-without-sizable-structures before the RFP is written. A recommendation can be part of a public process, but it is not the same as keeping the process open.
How the town got here
The town paid roughly $7 million for the property, a figure that comes from the project’s history and the spring campaign, not from the April meeting itself. Phelan has said the price was justified by the control it gave the town over a key waterfront parcel, while acknowledging she had gone through “many stages of grief” about it.
Empty, the building costs money. Carrying costs, including utilities, insurance, and upkeep, ran tens of thousands of dollars a month. Patsios put the annual figure at roughly $400,000.
A Hawthorne Reuse Advisory Committee met repeatedly through 2025. Grishman, an outgoing member, said it recommended demolition. The town’s cached minutes for that committee remain unextracted stubs, so its record is not yet independently verifiable here.
What moved was a temporary-use solicitation. On March 4, 2026, the board voted 4-1, with Grishman the lone no, to award short-term use of the building to the operator behind a performing-arts-and-hospitality proposal over a competing food-truck plan. Grishman preferred to move straight to demolition and redevelopment.
The operator is identified in the award record and in Swampscott Tides as Johnny Ray’s performing-arts venture. The April 27 lease transcript does not name him, calling the tenant only “the proponent” and the use “a restaurant hospitality venue.” Every member at the March 4 meeting, including Grishman, committed to running a separate long-term redevelopment process in parallel.
187 Humphrey remains unresolved
The town does not own 187 Humphrey, and no acquisition has been decided. The parcel appeared as a real-property item on the board’s May 27 agenda, but only in executive session, which produces no open-session minutes. The board’s actual posture is not on the public record.
When the long-term Hawthorne RFP reaches an agenda, the public record should answer three questions: whether it allows competing uses or is written around parkland, whether it includes 187 Humphrey and on whose terms, and whether §7.3 is ever triggered if the tenant seeks to leave over a repair estimated above $30,000.
Sources: April 27, 2026 Select Board meeting (btO9I3hWOh4): lease vote 5-0, terms, §7.3, Leonard objection [≈2:48-2:57], Phelan RFP commitment [3:05]; May 6, 2026 reorganization (HT0RswRSnfY): Phelan re-elected Chair, Leonard Vice Chair. History not established by those two meetings — the ~$7M purchase, carrying costs, the March 4 4-1 temporary-use award (Grishman lone no), operator identity, and the “$300K annual rent” figure — from the March 4 / April 8 record (VR1obDMzar8, F9gmYU1kcoQ), prior coverage, and Swampscott Tides, May 18, 2026 (Monica Sager). Parkland letter, 187 Humphrey identification, and the five-signatory coalition: 2026-05-27_five-committee-parkland-letter.md. Candidate positions: 2026-05-30_candidate-trail-consensus.md. Canonical names and roles from data/people/ and committee rosters in data/committees/; “Wayne Godfrey” is press-attested and appears in no meeting record.