A Weston August: The Farmstand Is Full, the Trail Is Finished, and the Restaurant Is Waiting on 22 Parking Spaces
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Park at the Lower Community Center off Alphabet Lane this week and you can walk a complete loop of the new Weston without getting in your car again. The stone-dust path crosses toward the Case Estates, past a compass rose set into the ground as a memorial, and opens onto the old rhododendron plantings, past their May bloom now but still shaded and worth the walk. Cut back toward Wellesley Street and you land at a farmstand that didn't exist in this form until fairly recently. Look across the Town Green from there and you can see the Josiah Smith Tavern, built in 1757, its front lawn still empty of the patio tables everyone has been promised.
Three of those four stops are finished and working today. The fourth is sitting on a number: 22.
The Legacy Trail wasn't built as a social corridor. It came out of Weston's Tercentennial year in 2013, when the Weston 300 committee raised money for a lasting gift to the town, and it was formally funded through Community Preservation Act dollars approved at Town Meeting in 2019. The design brief was accessibility. The 0.3-mile stone-dust path meets US Forest Service Trail Accessibility Guidelines and is permitted by the Massachusetts Architectural Access Board, which is a technical way of saying it was engineered for wheelchairs, walkers, and strollers as much as for hikers.
What it has become in the years since is the connective tissue for an entire end of town. It runs from the trailhead across from the Council on Aging at the Lower Community Center out to the Case Estates, where a compass rose set into the path marks the memory of George Bates, a former conservation commissioner and longtime treasurer of the Weston Forest & Trail Association. From there it links to the older dirt trails already crossing the estate's 62.5 acres, land that traces back to Marian Case's experimental gardens before the town finally closed on the purchase from Harvard in 2016.
One rule is worth knowing before you bring the dog. Weston's own Legacy Trail page is explicit that dogs must be leashed at all times across the entirety of the Case Estates and abutting conservation land, a stricter standard than some of the town's other open space carries.
Land's Sake has operated at 90 Wellesley Street for more than 40 years, but the building most residents associate with buying tomatoes is gone. In its place is a heavy timber pavilion designed by the Boston firm Payette, wrapped in an open-air porch on its south and west sides that shields the building from summer sun and doubles as covered space for picnic tables and produce. It's the fourth of five buildings in a master plan that took seven years of pro bono design work to reach this point, and the recognition has followed: a 2025 Harleston Parker Medal and a 2026 AIA Small Project Award.
The farmstand keeps seasonal hours Tuesday through Sunday, open 10 to 6 on weekdays and 10 to 4 on weekends, closed Mondays. What's for sale changes weekly, but the mission underneath it hasn't. Land's Sake donates more than 30 percent of its annual harvest, over 60,000 pounds, to local hunger relief organizations. Buying a CSA share or a bag of carrots at the stand is a small way of underwriting that.
The farm's Thursday evening programming for July has already run its course for the season, and the pick-your-own flower classes that started in July are ongoing. What's constant through August is the daily rhythm: the stand itself, open six days a week, still the anchor of that stretch of Wellesley Street.
The Josiah Smith Tavern has a longer résumé than almost any building in town. It served as an actual tavern for its first 80 years, then as a residence for three generations of the Jones family, before the town restored it and moved in offices for the Weston Historical Society, the Weston Forest & Trail Association, and the Women's Community League of Weston. The ballroom on the second floor looks out over the Town Green and the First Parish Church, whose bell was cast by Paul Revere.
What the building has never had is a restaurant with a liquor license, and that's what's supposed to change with The Woods. The owner is Brian Piccini, a Weston resident since 2018 and the head of Boston Urban Hospitality, the group behind Deuxave in the Back Bay, Boston Chops in the South End and Downtown Crossing, and dbar in Dorchester. Piccini has committed to sourcing seafood from Captain Marden's next door and produce from Land's Sake up the road, which means the restaurant is designed to depend on two businesses residents already use rather than import its own supply chain. When it opens, it will be the first Weston restaurant with a public liquor license since Prohibition.
"The town has been working for 15 years before me to get this done," Piccini told the Weston Observer this spring.
The approvals that needed to happen have mostly happened. The state Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission gave final sign-off on the liquor license. The Weston Historical Society approved the building plans. Baker Wohl Architects has been finalizing design with the Permanent Building Committee, which has estimated the full Tavern, Barn, and Connector rehabilitation at between $10 and $11 million, a scale that explains why the town has moved carefully at every step.
What's still open is a parking variance in front of the Zoning Board of Appeals, and as of a July 6, 2026 letter from Boston Urban Hospitality to the Select Board, it remains the single largest item standing between the project and construction. Current zoning requires 77 parking spaces for the proposed use. Of those, 43 can be built on-site, and 12 on-street spaces were already approved by the Planning Board back in July 2019. That leaves 22 spaces still needed, and the plan on the table is to satisfy them through non-exclusive use of nearby on-street parking, which is exactly the kind of arrangement a zoning board has to weigh carefully before signing off.
The Weston Observer reported in March that the restaurant was on track for a spring opening this year. Spring has come and gone, and the parking question is still the one being negotiated in writing between the applicant and the town. That's not a reason to assume the project has stalled for good. It is a reason to treat "opening soon" claims about the Tavern with more precision than the town's dinner-table conversation usually allows.
The Weston Summer Concert Series, sponsored by Eastern Bank, brought free live music to the Town Green every Wednesday evening starting June 17 with an Ice Cream Social and the Jesse Liam Band. The lineup that followed:
That's the full run. If you're wondering why the Green has been quiet on recent Wednesday evenings, the series has already closed for the summer.
What hasn't closed is the walk. The farmstand keeps its six-day schedule through the fall. The trail doesn't have a season. The rhododendrons will bloom again next May, and the compass rose will still be there to mark the spot. The one piece of this loop still working through a public process is the one with the highest ceiling for what it could mean for the neighborhood around the Green: a full-service, full-liquor restaurant in a building the town has been trying to activate for over a decade.
Walk the loop today and the physical pieces are already in place: a trail engineered for everyone, a farmstand doing double duty as architecture and food access, and a historic tavern with a lawn built for exactly the kind of restaurant it's about to house. The gap between what's finished and what's still pending isn't vague. It's 22 parking spaces and a Zoning Board hearing.
For residents who've watched this stretch of Wellesley Street and the Boston Post Road reshape itself for years, that's the detail worth tracking, not another "opening soon" headline. Watch the Select Board's calendar if you want to know when the last piece falls into place.
If you're thinking about what a more active, more connected town center means for your own address, or you're simply curious how a specific street or block in Weston has moved as these projects have progressed, the team at Jamie Grossman Real Estate tracks these shifts closely. Request a Personalized Home Valuation and let's talk about what it means for you.
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