Walk from Berkeley Street to Massachusetts Avenue on a Sunday this fall and you'll hit a wall of activity for eight blocks, then stop cold at the last one. The three-story building on the corner, the one Frank Gehry redesigned in the late 1980s, has sat empty since TJ Maxx closed its doors in early January. No sign in the window. No leasing banner. Just the ghost outline of a store that used to fill 45,000 square feet across three floors.
Everywhere else on the street, the opposite is happening. New restaurants are opening in spaces that turned over in months, not years. Open Newbury Street, the car-free Sunday program, is still running through October. If you live in Back Bay and only track the headlines, you'd think the street is thriving. If you walk it, you know it's actually two different stories happening at once, and the corner where they meet tells you something the roundup posts won't.
A Building That's Gone Dark Before
The address itself has a longer memory than most of the businesses that have occupied it. Tower Records ran the space from 1987 to 2001. Virgin Megastore followed for a few years. Best Buy took it over next and stayed until it shut down in April 2012. TJ Maxx didn't open there until May 2016, which means the building sat vacant for four years between those two tenants, a stretch most people walking past it today never noticed because they weren't paying attention yet.
That history matters because it sets a baseline. An empty big box on this corner isn't a crisis. It's a pattern.
| Tenant | Departed | Vacant For | Next Arrival |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Buy | April 2012 | 4 years | TJ Maxx, May 2016 |
| TJ Maxx | January 2026 | 8 months and counting | Not yet announced |
A TJX spokesperson framed the closure in company terms when it was announced last fall: "We are always assessing and reviewing our real estate strategies." That's a corporate way of saying the math on a 45,000-square-foot department store lease on Newbury Street stopped working for them. Eight months in, nobody else has stepped up to make that math work either, and the building's own leasing history suggests that could take a while longer.
What's Actually Filling In This Season
Meanwhile, the smaller footprints on the same street are moving fast. At the Lyrik development, Rosa y Marigold and Avra Estiatorio have both already opened this year, bringing Peruvian-Chinese chifa cooking and Greek and Mediterranean fare to two brand-new dining rooms. Daily Provisions, the all-day café from Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, is on track to open at 501 Boylston Street this fall, its third Greater Boston location after Harvard Square.
A few blocks over, the space that used to be Little Steve's Pizzeria at 1114 Boylston has already changed hands twice since the original restaurant closed in 2021. A new ownership group reopened it under the same name in the spring of 2025, then closed it again by early 2026. Now Achilito's Taqueria has signed for the same 2,300-square-foot space and is targeting a late-October opening. That single storefront will have swapped operators twice in five years, while 360 Newbury has drawn zero public interest in the eight months since TJ Maxx left.
Even the larger-format spaces on the street are filling with something other than traditional retail. Swingers, the UK-based mini golf chain, has signed on for its fourth U.S. location in Back Bay, a 21,000-square-foot entertainment venue built in partnership with Tavistock Restaurant Collection, the group behind Abe & Louie's and Atlantic Fish Co. That's a space nearly half the size of the old TJ Maxx, and it's going to restaurateurs and an indoor golf concept, not another apparel chain.
Put those together and the pattern gets sharper. What's replacing retail on Newbury Street right now isn't more retail. It's food, drink, and things to do with your hands on a Sunday afternoon. A discount department store the size of 360 Newbury doesn't have an obvious slot in that mix, which may be part of why nobody's filled it yet.
The Fall Sundays Still Belong to Pedestrians
None of that has slowed down the street's other identity, which is the one that shows up ten Sundays a year when Newbury goes car-free from Berkeley Street to Massachusetts Avenue. The remaining fall dates are:
- Sunday, September 6
- Sunday, September 13
- Sunday, September 20
- Sunday, October 11
- A final date in December, still to be announced closer to the holidays
Each of those Sundays, the street closes to vehicles from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with parking restrictions starting at 5 a.m. and towing after that. The program almost didn't run at full strength this year. The city had signaled it was scaling back its Open Streets events overall, which made the eventual announcement feel less certain than in past summers. "We've seen Open Newbury grow and thrive over the years," said Nick Gove, the city's interim Chief of Streets, when the full schedule was confirmed. Boston brought it back anyway, on the same Berkeley-to-Mass-Ave route it's used since expanding past its original one-day pilot in 2016.
That route detail is worth sitting with. The car-free stretch ends at Massachusetts Avenue, which means every Open Newbury Sunday this fall, the foot traffic walks the full length of the street and arrives directly in front of the same dark storefront. Thousands of people, ten Sundays running, ending their walk at the one address on the block that isn't part of the story yet.
What It Adds Up To
The easy version of this post would list the new restaurants and call it a fall preview. The real shape of the season is that Back Bay's street life keeps expanding in exactly the format that skips over its biggest available space. Small storefronts are turning over in months. A 21,000-square-foot entertainment venue found a taker. The 45,000-square-foot corner that anchors the whole strip is still working through the same kind of gap the building has weathered before, just with a different set of shoppers walking past it every Sunday afternoon.
If the four-year gap between Best Buy and TJ Maxx is any guide, the corner won't sit empty forever. But whatever comes next will have to answer a question the rest of the street already has: what does a space that size actually do for a neighborhood that's decided its weekends are for eating, drinking, and putting a golf ball through a windmill, not browsing racks of clearance jeans.
If you're watching how a single stretch of retail changes shape this fast and wondering what it means for property values or timing a move on this block, that's the kind of read The Agency Boston does for a living. Request a complimentary consultation and we'll walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the headlines say.
