Juicygreens closed at 305 Washington Street on June 30. For a few weeks the space sat the way empty storefronts in Islington always seem to sit: blinds down, a taped-up sign, foot traffic from the library and the pizza shop next door walking past without much of a glance. Anyone who has lived in this stretch of Westwood for more than a decade has watched that pattern before. A tenant leaves, the space goes quiet, and the corner waits.
What's different this time is who is filling it. Ron's Gourmet Ice Cream, a family business that has been scooping in Hyde Park since 1976, is opening its third location in that exact spot, expected late summer 2026. The Select Board approved the Common Victualler license earlier this year, and Ron's confirmed the move themselves on social media with a line that undersold how long this had actually been building: "We've been keeping a pretty big secret."
The secret isn't really the ice cream. It's the timing. Islington Center spent nearly a decade being planned, rezoned, and rebuilt by the town before a single business owner outside that process got to choose anything. Ron's decision to move in now, on its own terms, is the first sign that the plan has actually finished doing its job.
A Redevelopment Written Into One Town Meeting Vote
The corner of Washington and School Streets didn't get its CVS, its library, or its condominiums by accident. The Islington Center Task Force formed in September 2015 to study the block. A Request for Proposals went out in 2016. Petruzziello Properties was the only bidder. And on May 30, 2018, Town Meeting approved three warrant articles in a single sitting that decided almost everything about what the block would become: an anchor CVS, eighteen two-bedroom condominiums with underground parking, a relocated home for the Mothers Morning Out preschool, a new municipal parking lot, and an expanded Wentworth Hall to house the Islington Branch Library, Youth and Family Services, and the town's recreation programs.
The numbers behind that vote tell you how deliberately the town treated this as an investment, not a favor to a developer. The effective value of the town-owned parcels involved was projected to climb from about $615,500 to roughly $2,769,000 once the project was complete. Annual tax revenue on those same parcels was projected to rise from just over $62,000 to about $481,000 a year, netting the town close to $424,000 annually after covering service and operating costs. That is the kind of math that explains why a Board of Selectmen spends three years negotiating with a single bidder instead of walking away.
Not everything survived the plan. The Blue Hart Tavern, a historic building the redevelopment was supposed to preserve and relocate, could not be saved and was demolished by its owner in March 2019. The rest of the build, a 55,000 square foot mixed-use building with those eighteen condos, a 14,000 square foot commercial retail building, the renovated library, and a new playground, went up largely as designed.
By 2019, in other words, Islington Center's bones were set. What the town could not vote on was who would want to run a business inside them once the construction fencing came down.
What the Plan Could Never Assign
That's the part that took another seven years to sort itself out, one storefront at a time. Neroli Ristorante settled in at 282 Washington Street, an Italian kitchen where executive chef Mario Lepori built a menu of house-made pasta and imported ingredients around a small, warm room a few doors from the library. Islington Pizza and Sub Shop, at 315 Washington, has been a fixture even longer. Maria Tassiopoulos runs the business her family opened back in December 1995, well before anyone was drafting task force meeting agendas. Neither of these businesses arrived because of a zoning amendment. They arrived because Islington was already a place people walked to.
Ron's fits that same pattern, and its history is worth sitting with, because it shows a business that does not expand casually. Ron Covitz opened Ron's Ice Cream and Bowling in Hyde Park in 1976. The company waited more than two decades before adding a second location, in Dedham Square, in 1999. That location just went through a major renovation and reopened in late May of this year. Now, fifty years after Ron Covitz first opened his doors and with his son Jay running the business today, Ron's is choosing Islington for location number three. A shop that has expanded roughly once every twenty-five years does not pick a spot on a whim.
That pace is the detail that separates Ron's arrival from the CVS's. The CVS came because the town spent years assembling parcels, negotiating a developer agreement, and building a financial case around it. Ron's came because a family that has made exactly two expansion decisions in fifty years looked at 305 Washington Street and decided it belonged in the same sentence as Hyde Park and Dedham Square.
The Block Finally Reads as Finished
Here is the shift worth noticing if you live nearby and have mentally filed Islington Center under "still figuring itself out." The infrastructure question was answered in 2019. The library, the parking, the condos, and the CVS have been sitting there for years, doing exactly what the 2018 vote intended. What kept the block feeling unsettled was the ground-floor retail, the part no zoning amendment could guarantee. Juicygreens occupied the last uncertain link in that chain, and it operated for years before closing in June, which means the space was never truly vacant long enough to read as a problem. It read as a placeholder.
Ron's isn't a placeholder. It's a business with a track record of staying exactly where it plants itself for a generation at a time, and it picked this corner after the corner had already proven it could support a restaurant, a decades-old pizza shop, and a rebuilt library drawing foot traffic through the block. That is a different kind of vote of confidence than a subsidized anchor tenant can offer. Nobody negotiated a development agreement to get Ron's here. The family looked at what Islington had become and decided it was worth the drive from Dedham.
For anyone who walks this stretch of Washington Street on the way to drop off library books or grab a slice at Islington Pizza, the practical change is a small one. There will be a place to get a scoop of ice cream on the same block, run by people who have been doing this since 1976 and clearly aren't in a hurry to leave. The larger change is quieter. Islington Center has moved from a place defined by what the town built into a place defined by who chose to show up once it was built. That's a different kind of finished, and it's the kind that tends to last.
If you're curious what a decade of deliberate village center planning does to property values and demand in a neighborhood like Islington, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground context Anne Kennedy brings to conversations about Westwood real estate. Reach out for a free home valuation and a look at what's actually happening on your block.
