Glover hearing opens Sept. 14, but the 2022 overlay already set the core terms

← All news · September 2, 2026

The Planning Board will open its hearing Sept. 14 on a formal application for 96 Swampscott apartments around the General John Glover Farmhouse. Town Meeting's 2022 overlay already fixed the density, height, affordable units and a 120-day clock that defaults to approval. Still open are the farmhouse terms, the building plans and who The Glover, LLC is.

When the Planning Board opens its Sept. 14 hearing on the Glover apartment proposal, it will not be starting from a blank page. Town Meeting already set the core terms in 2022: 96 units in Swampscott, 17 affordable units, a 50-foot height cap, 42 units per acre, and a 120-day review clock that defaults to approval if the board misses its deadline.

The formal application reached the Swampscott Town Clerk at 11:19 a.m. on Aug. 31 — the first formal filing after three years of concepts and two development teams. The hearing is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 14, at 7 p.m. at Swampscott High School.

The application, item 26-13, covers 299 Salem St: three apartment buildings totaling 96 dwelling units in Swampscott, with underground and surface parking and a clubhouse, described as part of a larger 140-unit development spanning Swampscott, Marblehead and a sliver of Salem. It was filed by Lawrence DiGiammarino for The Glover, LLC, a name that has not surfaced in the town’s earlier coverage of this project and whose hold on the land the public record does not yet establish. National Development, which carried the project through a March pre-application, is out: Senior Planner Christa McGaha told Swampscott Tides on Sept. 2 that National is “no longer the developer.”

The 2022 overlay

In 2022, Town Meeting wrote the Glover Multifamily Overlay District over this single parcel and fixed much of what could be built there. The overlay allows 96 units in the Swampscott portion, with the enacted text carrying a scrivener’s quirk, reading “ninety (96),” plus up to 44 more in neighboring towns. It sets a density of 42 units per acre and caps building height at 50 feet. It requires 17 of the Swampscott units to be affordable, about 18 percent, and adds a payment to the town’s Affordable Housing Trust of $16,412 per affordable unit, $279,004, due when the building permit issues. Parking is set at 1.5 spaces per unit, which the board may waive.

Those numbers are not the hearing’s to reopen. Under the overlay, a complying project is allowed as of right. The board conducts a plan review, can attach conditions and order peer review, and can deny only on narrow grounds: a failure to meet the district’s standards, missing information or fees, or impacts it cannot mitigate. The agenda lists the request as a “Site Plan Special Permit”; the bylaw itself calls the relief “Plan Approval.”

The overlay also carries a clock that runs toward yes. The bylaw gives the board 120 days from the opening of the public hearing to file a decision. Miss it, and the application “shall be deemed to be an approval,” the default this paper described Aug. 14 in “silence is a yes.” The clock does not start at the Aug. 31 filing; it starts when the hearing opens. If the board opens on Sept. 14, it runs to roughly mid-January 2027 unless the applicant signs a written extension. A stalled hearing drifts toward a grant, not a denial.

What remains open

The board and the town still have narrower issues to shape, starting with the roughly 300-year-old farmhouse. The filed plans now say the house is to remain, according to Tides, a change from years in which its survival was the open question. But remaining is not the same as restored.

As of the Historical Commission’s Feb. 5 meeting, the preservation effort had $500,000 in pledges and donations, and the property’s owner had not granted permission to enter the house to assess what restoration would cost. Roughly half that money is not grassroots: the terms the Select Board reviewed on March 18 included a $250,000 pledge from the developer, inside a concept of a 99-year, $1-a-year land lease and a $1.5 million-to-$2 million restoration. The Select Board unanimously backed the Commission’s fundraising in April but asked to see more progress, and the mechanism, a ground lease or memorandum of understanding under which the town or another entity would take on the house, remains a draft the Commission reviewed in May. At the March pre-application, the developer’s floor commitment was only that the exterior would be “stabilized and presentable” by the time people move in.

The buildings are also unsettled in the town record. At the March 9 pre-application, National’s team showed two four-story buildings and one five-story building rising to about 60 feet 5 inches, above the 50-foot cap and needing a waiver that then-Chair Ted Dooley called “a significant concern and a threshold issue for him.” Tides reports the new plan spreads the 140 units across six buildings and drops the five-story block. The Swampscott agenda, though, still describes three buildings for the local 96, and the change is not yet confirmed in the town’s own record. Joe Sheridan, now the board’s chair, objected in March to the parking field proposed in front of the farmhouse at what he called the town’s “gateway” corner, and urged preserving the historic stone entrance pillars.

The third open question is who is actually building this. The assessor still lists the owner of 299 Salem St as Sunbeam Development Ltd Partnership, care of Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurants, the Athanas family’s entity, which took the land in a $1 intra-family transfer from Glover Realty in 1998. The Glover, LLC is not the owner of record. It may hold a purchase-and-sale agreement, an option or a lease, or a deed may have recorded since the assessor’s last update. The public file does not say, and neither the company’s principals nor DiGiammarino’s role in it is established.

Sept. 14 hearing

The developer swap puts a new and untested applicant on the largest private development in town. The state historic-district designation that might have protected the farmhouse is not in force: the Historic District Commission was told in January that the town is “no longer pushing to establish a Historic District” and that the state application is “currently suspended while negotiations continue.” The overlay itself is a bespoke local tool, built in 2022 atop an older 2016 state Smart Growth district that allowed 68 units; whether that 2016 district remains certified with the state is unverified.

Dooley, who staked out the height-skeptic line as Planning Board chair in March, won a Select Board seat weeks later and is now the board’s liaison to his former panel. During the spring campaign, he said the pending Glover matter was one he “didn’t want to misstep” on. The five members who will actually open the file Sept. 14 are Sheridan, Vice Chair Angela Ippolito, Bill Quinn, Jer Jurma and Ariane Purdy.

The hearing will show whether the 120-day clock starts, what the filed plans say about the six buildings and the farmhouse, and whether The Glover, LLC can demonstrate it controls the land it proposes to build on.

Sources

Addendum (Sept. 3, 2026, 6 a.m.): this is not the first formal application. The Planning Board approved one in 2023.

A post-publication check against the town’s own project page and the meeting record corrects a claim in this piece. The Aug. 31 filing is not “the first formal filing after three years of concepts.” It is the second Plan Approval application on this parcel, and the first came from Leggat McCall Properties, which filed it, argued it and won it.

What the record shows:

Two consequences for the reader.

First, the town has already answered, once, the compliance questions the overlay leaves to the board. The 2023 decision found the Leggat McCall plan met the district’s unit count, affordability, height, parking and design standards. The Sept. 14 hearing is a new application by a new applicant with a different site plan, six buildings rather than three and the farmhouse standing, so the board must make those findings again. But it does so with a signed precedent on the same parcel.

Second, the overlay says a Plan Approval “shall remain valid and shall run with the land indefinitely, provided that construction has commenced within two years after the decision issues,” with extensions available for appeals, for an applicant “actively pursuing other required permits,” or for good cause found by the board (§ 4.10.11.9). Two years from February 2023 passed in February 2025. No construction has started. Whether the 2023 approval lapsed, was extended, or is treated as superseded by the new filing is not stated in any public record this paper has seen. It is a question the board or town counsel should answer on Sept. 14.

One more fact about the town’s website: the project still sits on swampscottma.gov under “Projects, Approved,” and the page text still reads “An opening hearing has not yet been scheduled.” That sentence was written in 2022 and never updated through a hearing, a 5-0 vote, a demolition delay, a developer swap and a second application.

The corrected statement of this piece’s premise: Town Meeting set the core terms in 2022; the Planning Board applied them and approved a demolish-and-build plan in 2023; the Sept. 14 hearing is the second time the board will apply them, this time to a plan that keeps the house.

Addendum sources: Application page, Sept. 19, 2022, https://www.swampscottma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/596/Application-Page; traffic peer review (VHB, Oct. 5, 2022), .../DocumentCenter/View/595/Traffic-Study; stormwater report (Bohler), .../DocumentCenter/View/597/Drainage-Report; project page https://www.swampscottma.gov/1281/Glover-Residences-at-Vinnin-Square. Planning Board Oct. 17, 2022 (data/analysis_markdown_prof/7F91VlfX2S0.md), Dec. 12, 2022 (Xbotm0JjDKk.md), Feb. 13, 2023 (Yo7BUg4xTIg.md, vote at [3:47:30]; transcript data/professional_transcripts/Yo7BUg4xTIg.txt), June 12, 2023 (Z7Glwh6yET8.md); Select Board Dec. 21, 2022 (o3pW2AkUoRY.md, Marblehead decision remark). Demolition-delay vote of April 20, 2023 per Marblehead Current, June 7, 2023. Speaker attributions in the 2022–2023 analyses rest on self-introduction and roll-call naming; the Dec. 21, 2022 remark is attributed to a town official, not a named person. § 4.10.11.9 from data/legal/source/zoning-bylaw-2026-08-11.txt.