East Lexington's New Murals Are Finished. One of Its Liquor Stores Isn't.

Walk down Massachusetts Avenue past Berman's Wine and Spirits this month and you'll see hand-painted color where there used to be a blank wall. Busa Wine and Spirits, a few blocks up at 131 Mass Ave, got the same treatment. The Town of Lexington paid for both, along with a third mural at the Shops at 135-145 Massachusetts Avenue, as part of a roughly $100,000 public art investment funded through American Rescue Plan Act money. Artists Melissa Pandina and Gabriela Sepulveda Ortiz did the work, painting some of it at night to avoid disrupting business hours, and finished ahead of schedule.

The stated goal of the project was simple: connect people riding the Minuteman Bikeway to the businesses sitting a few feet off the path, since a lot of cyclists roll right past storefronts they'd never otherwise notice. It worked exactly as designed. Berman's and Busa are still there, now more visible than before.

A short walk away, at 7 Depot Square, a third liquor retailer in the same business district didn't make it. Lexington Liquors is gone. In its place, an all-day cafe called Commune All Day Cafe is moving in, and the contrast between what the town funded and what actually survived on the ground says more about East Lexington's current retail mix than either fact does on its own.

What The Murals Were Actually Solving For

The mural project wasn't decoration for its own sake. It grew out of two town planning documents, a Center Retail Strategy Report and a 2021 Rapid Recovery Report, that both identified the same problem: the Minuteman Bikeway runs directly past a stretch of East Lexington commerce, but bike traffic and retail traffic weren't connecting. People pedaled through without stopping.

The murals were the town's answer. Paint the backs of buildings that face the path, make the businesses impossible to miss, and hope foot and bike traffic converts into customers. It's a reasonable bet, and a cheap one relative to the alternative of rezoning or redeveloping the corridor.

What the plan didn't anticipate, or at least didn't say out loud, is that the type of business most likely to benefit from bikeway visibility isn't necessarily the type of business that was already there. A cyclist stopping mid-ride wants a coffee, a sandwich, something to eat with one hand while the bike leans against a railing. A bottle of wine is a much harder sell to someone six miles from home on two wheels.

The Storefront That Didn't Get a Mural

Commune All Day Cafe comes from the owners of Turnpike Market in Billerica, and as of late July the new owners were still working through permitting, with an opening penciled in for winter. The space itself used to be Lexington Liquors, now listed as permanently closed. Sam and Kinnari Patel, who ran the liquor store, are the ones opening the cafe. The menu they've described covers breakfast and lunch: coffee, sandwiches, smoothies, tacos, acai bowls.

That's not a coincidence of timing. It's the same commercial logic that justified the murals, just playing out through a business decision instead of a town grant. If the corridor's future value is tied to people arriving on foot or by bike rather than by car, an all-day cafe with breakfast and smoothies is a better bet than a package store, mural or no mural. The Patels didn't need a planning report to figure that out. They had a storefront on Depot Square and a read on what was walking past it.

A Corridor That Looks Finished But Isn't

Here's the part worth knowing if you're planning a walk down this stretch of Mass Ave anytime soon: the murals are done, but the cafe isn't. Depot Square will likely sit with a storefront mid-buildout through the fall, with an opening not expected until winter. So for the next several months, East Lexington will present an odd split image: freshly painted walls a few blocks in one direction, and a storefront still being worked on in the other.

If you're the kind of resident who checks in on projects like this as they pass by, don't expect Commune All Day Cafe to be serving anything before the season turns. The murals, on the other hand, are already there to look at, and worth the detour if you haven't seen them yet.

What's Actually Filling The Gap This Fall

While Depot Square waits on its cafe, the rest of East Lexington's food and gathering options are already running at full tilt, and most of them share the same bikeway logic that justified the murals in the first place.

The Lexington Farmers' Market is in its final stretch at Fletcher Park, open Tuesdays from 2 to 6:30 pm through October 27, dropping to a 6 pm close once the month turns. The market sits directly on the Minuteman Bikeway, with bike racks on site and MBTA routes 62 and 76 both stopping nearby, which makes it functionally the same kind of bikeway-adjacent business the mural project was designed to support, minus the wall art. Two vendors worth watching for on a biweekly rotation: Farfalle Italian Market, run out of Concord by owner Gina Nasson and chef Benjamin Peacock, serving filled buns and fresh pasta, and Petsi Pies, the Somerville bakery known for scratch-made pies including a Chocolate Bourbon Pecan that's earned regional recognition. After the regular season wraps, the market runs a single Thanksgiving FEASTival on November 24.

A few minutes away by car or a longer walk, Cary Memorial Hall is running its own fall lineup, with shows on September 17 and September 19, then more dates in October. It's a different kind of foot traffic than the bikeway, but it's the same pattern: East Lexington's fall calendar is built around places people arrive to and linger in, not places they drive past.

What This Actually Tells You

None of this is really about murals or a single cafe. It's about which businesses are proving durable on a stretch of town built around a bike path, and which ones aren't. Berman's and Busa are still standing, now with public art to show for it. Lexington Liquors isn't, and what's replacing it looks a lot more like the kind of business that thrives on people passing through on foot or on two wheels. The farmers market and Cary Hall's fall calendar are further evidence of the same shift: East Lexington's commercial identity this season is being built around stopping, not driving through.

If you live nearby, the murals are worth a look now, the cafe is worth checking back on once the weather turns colder, and the farmers market has eight more Tuesdays before it closes out the season at Fletcher Park.

If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually changing in town before it shows up in a listing description, that's the kind of local read Jackson Price Real Estate tries to offer. Let's Connect if you want more of it.