Hadley Hotel Reaches Drawings Under February 2027 Deadline

← All news · July 9, 2026

The Select Board reviewed construction drawings for the 57-room Delamar hotel planned for the former Hadley School. The deal gives the developer until February 2027 to secure permits and financing, and it now shapes the town's Hawthorne debate three blocks away.

Hotel Delamar Swampscott has reached construction drawings, and the town’s deal now puts the former Hadley Elementary School project on a February 2027 permits-and-financing deadline.

On July 7, the Select Board reviewed construction drawings for the 57-room boutique hotel planned for the former school at 24 Redington Street. Dixon Mallory, director of business development for the developer-operator, presented. The board took no vote, and none was noticed. The next stop is the Planning Board, once the team files its building-permit applications.

Under the land disposition agreement between the town and Clearview Investment, the developer must have all permits and financing in hand by February 2027. That is when the Select Board is expected to execute the ground lease. Construction runs roughly 24 months. Marzie Galazka, the town’s director of community and economic development, told the board that “if everything goes well, the hotel should be open by November of 2029, or at least that is what we had established in the LDA.” That is a contractual target, not a builder’s schedule.

Inside the 1910 school and its annex, the plans call for a two-level restaurant with a speakeasy, a spa open to the public, a ballroom for something like 100 to 120 people in the old gym, a historic mezzanine sized for jazz shows and lecture series, and a seasonal rooftop deck over Linscott Park.

Hadley also matters to the Hawthorne debate. The ninth of the nine questions the board is using to score the Hawthorne RFP is “synergy with hotel/commercial corridor.” The hotel in that phrase is this project, three blocks away, with drawings, a contract deadline and a signed set of terms.

Revenue Starts After Occupancy

The deal has two main revenue streams, plus the town’s rooms and meals excise.

Ground rent is $75,000 a year, unchanged from what Delamar wrote in its RFP response. It starts about 90 days after the certificate of occupancy.

The payment in lieu of taxes starts later. On August 19, 2025, the board amended the LDA and ground lease to convert the PILOT from a flat annual payment into a percentage of the hotel’s food, beverage and room revenue: 1 percent in year one, 2 percent in year two, 2.5 percent in year three and 3 percent in year four, with a floor of $185,000 a year once year four arrives. The first PILOT payment lands 270 days after occupancy.

The town’s rooms and meals excise sits on top of those payments. Mary Ellen Fletcher made the distinction on the record: “we’re talking about the pilot, the payment [in lieu of] taxes. That is separate from the additional money that we are getting.”

The amendment gave Delamar relief. Its due diligence had closed at the end of April 2025, and the company asked to restructure the PILOT and reset the 15-month window it has to secure financing. The amended agreements started that clock at signing, not at the expiration of due diligence months earlier.

Delamar cited interest rates, financing pressure, and its decision to pursue historic tax credits and historic restoration, whose application process needed more time. A board member explained the trade this way: the first three to five years decide whether a hotel survives, so the town would ramp its take rather than take it all up front. The amendment passed 4-0 on a roll call: Fletcher, Doug Thompson, David Grishman and the chair, Katie Phelan.

Grishman framed the concession as a stake in the hotel’s performance rather than a fixed rent check. “as they succeed we are going to succeed, the town is going to succeed,” he said. The point of the percentage, he said, is to care about the hotel’s health “not only in years one and two but in years thirty one and thirty two.”

Room Tax Rose Before The Hotel

At the March 11, 2024 special Town Meeting, the Finance Committee moved to raise the local room occupancy excise from 4 percent to 6 percent, effective that July. The stated reason was statutory catch-up: state law allowed 6 percent, most towns had gone there, and Swampscott had sat at 4 percent since 1989.

Peter Spellios, then a Select Board member and the town’s lead on the Hadley project, was invited to give a quick hotel update. He used his closing line to ask for the vote: “appreciate your support for increasing room revenue, because the room revenue, projected room revenue here is very significant.” He noted the town’s slim menu of local taxes: “a food tax of 0.75 percent,” and a hotel tax on gross room revenue.

Justina Oliver, a Precinct 4 Town Meeting member, Historical Commission member, and former member of the Hadley Reuse Committee, objected to the tax, not to the hotel. “I obviously support the hotels,” she said. She owns one of what she counted as fewer than 40 short-term rental units in town, and argued the tax would hit her bookings before any hotel existed to justify it: “Swampscott’s not a destination town yet.” She moved to postpone the article indefinitely. The amendment failed. The main motion carried on a hand vote.

Short-term rentals in fact carry a separate 3 percent local option, not the 6 percent rooms excise, a distinction drawn on the floor right after she spoke. But her timing point remains. The tax took effect in July 2024. The hotel it was argued on is targeted to open in November 2029, and its PILOT begins 270 days after that.

Hadley Had A Sequence

Assistant Town Administrator Pete Kane recapped the Hadley process to the board on January 30, 2024: a Hadley Elementary Reuse Advisory Committee seated in November 2020; a reuse report published in August 2021; Town Meeting authorizing both the solicitation and new zoning for the property in May 2023; an RFP released that September; and proposals due that December.

Seven proposals came in. A review committee of Select Board members and town staff cut them to three finalists, who presented in public that January night. On February 12, 2024, the board designated Clearview and Delamar on Phelan’s motion, unanimously. The winning bid was 62 rooms then.

Spellios told Town Meeting the board chose Delamar for three reasons. First was the operator. “We want a hotel, but we don’t want a Motel 6. We want a hotel, but we don’t want the Park Plaza.” Delamar is “both a developer and an operator” running its own brand; three board members went to look at its West Hartford property, unannounced, at different times.

Second was restraint. Of the three finalists, staff told the board, only Clearview proposed to reuse both the historic building and the annex. The others would have demolished the annex and built new.

Third was town control. Spellios laid out the gate, borrowed from the Machon School deal: if a neighbor wants to develop private land, “they can apply to the zoning board and they don’t even need to knock on your door.” At Hadley, because the town owns the land, “before you file anything with the planning board, before you file for a building permit, before you do everything, the town has to approve it.” Select Board approval comes first; Planning Board site plan review comes after. That gate is why construction drawings appeared on a Select Board agenda this week.

Hawthorne ran the other way. The town bought the property first, in 2022, and is still deciding what it is for. On June 3, 2026, as the board argued over how open the Hawthorne RFP should be, it reached for Hadley as the model for how long a due diligence period to grant and how strong a field to expect.

The lease-length question that night, “thirty years, fifty years, ninety nine years,” is also a Hadley ground-lease question, still without a public answer. What term the executed Hadley lease actually runs is not stated anywhere in the public record this paper could find. Machon’s was 99 years. Hadley’s is described only as long-term.

The Board Delayed Its Own Vote

On September 17, 2025, Mallory brought schematic designs, and the LDA gave the board 20 days to approve them. Thompson asked when the LDA’s two required community meetings were supposed to happen. Phelan answered that they were due after due diligence closed and before anything came to the board: “sounds like we probably should have had at least one of them already.”

Phelan then stopped the clock. “We’ve got time between now and October 8th, and we can still facilitate that before we approve schematics. I think it’s important we do that because we wrote it into the LDA and we need to keep ourselves honest.” The board deferred its vote, asked Delamar for an extension, and scheduled the September 30 public meeting.

The contract disciplined the town, not the builder. That matters because the Hadley process was contested. Neighbors told the board in February 2024 that they felt shut out of it.

Parking Is Still Unresolved

Abutter John Giantis raised headlights and parking on July 7. His understanding, as he described it, was 62 spaces in the lot across from him and 167 total to serve guests, employees and restaurant patrons, with the balance off site through arrangements he had heard might involve the church and the Archdiocese. Those numbers are his account, not a figure the town has published.

Mallory said the site plan has been reworked. The original entrance sat near Humphrey Street and sent cars out facing Blaney Street, where “there was some real concerns with those neighbors, that there would be a lot of light pollution, which is completely understandable. We’ve taken that into consideration. We’ve essentially flipped the flow of traffic.” Vice Chair Danielle Leonard called the drawings beautiful. Ted Dooley asked for greenery screening where it could be had.

The off-site parking is unresolved. So is the town’s interest in the St. John’s lot at 187 Humphrey Street, which it has been discussing in executive session for Hawthorne’s sake since May. The two municipal reuses sit three blocks apart and share a parking question.

Bidders saw the corridor before the town owned Hawthorne. On January 30, 2024, an architect for one of the losing finalists put up a rendering of the Hadley building as seen from “the proposed Hawthorne site, which is currently the Anthony’s Pier 4 building.” The town did not own Hawthorne’s future then, and had not written its RFP.

What To Watch

The next markers are the building-permit filing and the Planning Board hearing that follows it; the February 2027 permits-and-financing deadline and lease execution; the traffic and parking plan; and whether the July 7 minutes, when they post, confirm the presentation substance now resting on press coverage.

Sources

Reporter’s note: The executed term of the Hadley ground lease is not established in any source reviewed. Speaker attributions in the August 19, 2025 transcript drift mid-meeting; the roll call fixes Fletcher and Grishman, and quotes here are limited to lines those tags support. The Tides account describes one elevator in the new tower; the September 30, 2025 walkthrough describes two. Unreconciled.