Ippolito says Swampscott bought Hawthorne to block condos. The 2022 record proves less.

← All news · August 8, 2026

Planning Board Vice Chair Angela Ippolito's account of a Hawthorne-for-Glover trade framed the Select Board's 3-2 vote to bar housing at the town-owned oceanfront site. The Town Meeting record confirms the Hawthorne and Glover votes were linked, but not the 64-condo deal or block-housing purpose she describes.

Swampscott is drafting a new Chapter 40R district for the Dec. 7 Town Meeting while a disputed account of a major housing overlay remains unresolved in the public record.

The account came from Angela Ippolito, Vice Chair of the Planning Board and its chair when the town bought the Hawthorne in 2022. On June 17, during the Select Board’s Hawthorne RFP discussion, she told the board the town acquired the 153 Humphrey Street property specifically to stop condominiums.

Developer Leggat McCall, she said, had shown the town “two slides”: “a fancy development with about sixty-four condo units on the Hawthorne site” and about ninety units at the Glover site off Salem Street. “The whole reason that we bought the property was to prevent a residential development from going there,” she said. The town then agreed “to rezone a 40R at the Glover” to make 96 units available to the developer, “so that they would drop the Hawthorne property.” She called it “a trade.”

That history framed the debate that ended Aug. 4 with the Select Board voting 3-2 to bar housing from the town’s most valuable piece of coastline. The 2022 Town Meeting record confirms that the Hawthorne purchase and Glover rezoning were linked. It does not confirm the 64-condo figure, a signed Leggat McCall-Athanas condo agreement, or a public purpose of buying the Hawthorne to block housing.

Brian Watson of Oak Road, a member of the Hawthorne Reuse Advisory Committee, tried to answer Ippolito from the floor on June 17. Chair Katie Phelan declined to reopen public comment. “We’re not going to take public comment, Brian,” she said, and told him he could return next meeting or email the board, saying he could “discuss the misinformation” then. Watson replied that Ippolito’s account was itself misinformation and that he was the source of the real history. The exchange resolved nothing. Phelan called Ippolito’s “historical zoning and negotiation background” “paramount to this conversation.”

The official June 17 minutes list the Hawthorne RFP as “discussion only, NO vote,” enumerate the categories the board weighed, including “residential use,” and make no mention of Leggat McCall, a trade, or the clash with Watson.

Ippolito raised the claim again on Aug. 4, this time in an email Phelan read aloud during public comment. It came roughly an hour and forty minutes before the vote, not minutes before it. In writing, Ippolito went further than she had in June: before the town bought the property, she wrote, Leggat McCall “had signed an agreement” with the Athanas family, the sellers, “to develop 64 luxury condos on the site,” and preventing that “was one of the reasons we decided to buy the property.” Housing at the Hawthorne, she wrote, was “literally a no-brainer” for developers.

About an hour and forty minutes later, Mary Ellen Fletcher moved to eliminate residential use from the RFP. The motion carried 3-2: Fletcher, Vice Chair Danielle Leonard and Wayne Spritz in favor; Ted Dooley and Phelan opposed. The tally is Itemlive’s. The meeting’s captions record only “it passes,” and no official minutes are posted.

The 2022 record confirms linkage, not the condo account

At the June 14, 2022 Special Town Meeting, Article 1 authorized $8.875 million in borrowing to buy the Hawthorne, at $7 million, its assessed value, plus two open-space parcels off Archer Street. It passed 214-3, and the town closed that October.

The purpose stated on the floor was not to block housing. Finance Committee Chair Tim Dorsey and Select Board member Peter Spellios framed the purchase as a “once-in-a-lifetime” chance to secure public oceanfront and guarantee coastal access, with the board “strongly” favoring open space and a public process to decide the site’s future by a later Town Meeting vote.

When member Stephen Iannacone moved to lock 90 percent of the Hawthorne as park and bar private development outright, the amendment failed. Town Meeting left the site’s future open.

The linkage Ippolito describes is real and on the record. The moderator confirmed that if Article 2, the Glover rezoning, failed, it would affect Article 1. Kim Martin-Epstein asked directly what happened if the town did not buy. The answer was that Leggat McCall would proceed with purchasing the Hawthorne and developing Glover under existing zoning. Dorsey confirmed the linkage. Spellios noted that the existing zoning had failed to spur development at the blighted Glover site.

The two articles were an interdependent package, and the developer had a fallback path to the Hawthorne if the town walked away. That is what the record establishes: linkage and development pressure.

The record does not contain the rest. No 2022 Town Meeting document gives a Hawthorne unit count. The “sixty-four condos” appears nowhere in the record except in Ippolito’s 2026 account. No document states the purchase was made “to prevent residential.” And the account changed between June and August in the one place that matters most: a developer’s concept pitched to the town became, by email, a signed agreement with the Athanas family.

The 2022 record names the Athanas family only as the sellers the town thanked. No signed Leggat McCall-Athanas condo deal appears anywhere in the reviewed corpus. “Trade” is Ippolito’s word. The record’s word is linkage. The purchase-and-sale instruments she urges people to “go back and look at” are not in the public file, so the claim can be tested against the meeting record but not against the transaction itself.

None of this proves the vote turned on the claim. All five board members said they oppose housing at the Hawthorne. Their 3-2 split was over method: a hard ban versus scoring residential down as a disfavored fallback, the case Dooley and Phelan made on financing grounds. The history framed the debate and sat in the room twice. The record does not show it changed a vote.

Glover is not the Dec. 7 40R

The zoning stakes extend beyond the Hawthorne because the town keeps folding three different tools into one word.

The instrument that governs the Glover site is the Glover Multifamily Overlay District, the local overlay Ippolito presented in 2022. Town Meeting passed it unanimously. It was modeled on an existing 40R Smart Growth district, which allowed 68 units, but allowed 96, at four stories, with 17 affordable units, or 18 percent, and a $279,000 payment mirroring the state 40R’s.

National Development, which took the Glover project over from Leggat McCall, now carries a 140-unit concept there: 96 Swampscott units and 44 Marblehead units, preserving the Glover House. Dooley, who chaired the March pre-application review, called its five-story element a “threshold issue.” Whether the enacted overlay is legally a state-approved Chapter 40R today is unresolved in the record. It is best read as a bespoke local overlay built on the 40R template, not a certified 40R.

That is separate from the town’s MBTA-Communities compliance under MGL c.40A §3A, the overlays near Essex Street and Vinnin Square that Town Meeting adopted 152-13 in May 2024 to meet an unfunded state mandate. Both are separate from a true Chapter 40R under MGL c.40R: a voluntary state district with EOHLC approval, a 20 percent affordability floor, and one-time plus per-unit state incentive payments.

The town is now writing that kind of district. For the Dec. 7 Town Meeting, the Planning Board is drafting a commuter-rail 40R Smart Growth district, with MAPC building the analysis, the incentive math, and the EOHLC application. Two Swampscott Housing Authority properties are inside its boundary, which already shrank after residents objected at a July 13 hearing.

It is still a draft, not a district. It is being built while the history of the last overlay is argued from memory, disputed but never adjudicated, by people who will help write the next one.

Addendum (2026-08-09)

A close re-reading of the June 14, 2022 Special Town Meeting transcript the day this piece published sharpens three of its claims. Two cut toward Ippolito’s account; one resolves a question the piece left open.

  1. The record does contain a Leggat McCall purchase-and-sale agreement for the Hawthorne. This piece said no signed Leggat McCall–Athanas deal appears in the reviewed corpus. That is right as to a condo development agreement and right as to the 64-unit figure — neither exists anywhere in the 2022 record. But Town Meeting was told, on the floor and without contradiction, that the developer already held a contract to buy the property. Kim Martin-Epstein described the arrangement as “a private agreement between Leggett-McCall and the Athanas family” covering both sites. The moderator answered, “I believe you’re correct.” Finance Committee Chair Tim Dorsey then went further: “If Article I is rejected, then the purchase and sale agreement for the Hawthorne property that the developer who is developing Glover had previously entered into for the Hawthorne property would come back into, would breathe again.” What the town extinguished in 2022 was a live contract, not a concept. What it did not establish is what Leggat McCall intended to build under it.

  2. The contingency was flat, not partial. This piece said the moderator confirmed a failed Article 2 “would affect” Article 1. He was more absolute than that. Asked directly by town meeting member Ehrlich — “Is the purchase of the Hawthorne property contingent upon our approving the change in zoning for the General Glover property?” — the moderator answered, “Yes.” Later he added that if Article 2 failed, the land-acquisition vote “would be null and void unless something else could be worked out.” The two articles were not merely linked; one was conditioned on the other.

  3. Swampscott has had a state-approved Chapter 40R since 2016. This piece left the Glover overlay’s legal status unresolved and read it as “a bespoke local overlay built on the 40R template, not a certified 40R.” That is correct about the Glover Multifamily Overlay District adopted in 2022 — but it is not the whole map. Presenting Article 2, Ippolito described the existing overlay on the same parcel as a Chapter 40R Smart Growth district: “That was approved by the state. 40R is a provision that you apply for with the state.” Spellios dated it from the floor — “What year did we do it? … 2016. It’s been there for six years, and nothing has happened.” Ippolito also confirmed the 2022 amendment was noticed to DHCD, the state housing agency then administering 40R. So the town’s bylaw carries two overlays over the Glover site: the 2016 state-approved 40R Smart Growth district (68 Swampscott units, up to 44 in Marblehead), still in place as base overlay zoning, and the 2022 local Glover Multifamily Overlay District (96 units, multifamily only) layered on top and bound to the 40R’s design standards. That is why town documents refer to “Smart Growth and Glover overlay districts” as two things. It also means the commuter-rail district the Planning Board is drafting for Dec. 7 would be Swampscott’s second 40R, not its first — and the town’s one prior 40R sat inert for six years and produced nothing until a second, denser local overlay was written over it. Whether the 2016 district remains certified on the state’s current approved-district list is still unverified.

One correction of detail: this piece attributed the 96-vs-68 comparison to the enacted overlay alone. The floor exchange put the delta at 28 units in Swampscott, which Ehrlich called “a 40 percent increase,” and the enacted text carried a scrivener’s error — §4.10.5.0 read “90” where the tables read “96” — that the moderator ruled from the chair would be read as 96.

None of this changes the piece’s central finding. The 2022 record still contains no Hawthorne unit count, no stated purpose of buying to block housing, and no adjudication of the Ippolito–Watson dispute. It does establish that the trade Ippolito describes had a real contractual object behind it.

Source: professional transcript data/professional_transcripts/WvWyI4PfZfI.txt (Special Town Meeting, June 14, 2022) at [1:05:29]–[1:08:35] (Ehrlich contingency question), [1:31:27]–[1:31:46] (null-and-void), [1:34:48]–[1:38:16] (Martin-Epstein/Dorsey P&S exchange; Spellios 2016 dating), [2:02:09]–[2:13:05] (Ippolito’s Article 2 presentation, DHCD notice, state approval), [2:22:44]–[2:23:07] (scrivener’s error), [1:59:15]–[2:00:54] (Article 1, 214-3), [2:26:57]–[2:28:11] (Article 2 declared unanimous). The transcript never names the presiding moderator; the office was held by Michael McClung from before 2022 until Ryan Hale succeeded him in April 2026 (data/political_context/2026-05.md), so the role attributions above are given by role rather than by name.

Sources