Living in Shrewsbury Street, Worcester, MA

About Shrewsbury Street

Where it is

The neighborhood follows Shrewsbury Street on the city's East Side, a corridor of about 7,000 feet running at an angle from I-290 near Union Station to Route 9, with East Park at 180 Shrewsbury Street and side streets such as Mulberry Street climbing toward Belmont Hill.

The western end of Shrewsbury Street was once the Meadows, where the workers building the Blackstone Canal were kept in camps in the 1820s. Older landmarks along it include the Greek Revival Leonard Sturtevant House, built about 1849 at 84 Mulberry Street near the base of Belmont Hill, and the stone griffins at the gate of East Park, which once supported the arch of the train shed at the old Union Station and were moved to the park in 1916.

A 2016 city announcement quotes a city councilor calling Shrewsbury Street one of Worcester's most successful commercial corridors, and it is best known for restaurants: a July 2023 Telegram & Gazette opinion column by Raymond V. Mariano counted more than 30 restaurants and places to eat, the stretch some call restaurant row. The Boulevard Diner, a 1936 Worcester Lunch Car at 155 Shrewsbury Street with yellow ceramic panels and a barrel roof, is on the National Register. Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, completed in 1928 on Mulberry Street about 25 feet from an interstate highway built in front of it in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was relegated to non-sacred use by a diocesan decree in 2017. A streetscape project designed for the city by BETA Group added street trees, stamped and colored crosswalks, neckdowns and seasonal plantings in the median, and the whole street was resurfaced in 2016.

Housing along the corridor is changing. Mariano's column counted six apartment projects on or near the street, three under construction, two approved and one in review, that together would add nearly 750 apartments, nearly three-quarters of them studios or one-bedrooms, with some buildings six or seven stories high; in the column's view, a city request for proposals for public works land on Shrewsbury and Albany Streets could add more. In 2024 Union Station gained a center platform and a pedestrian bridge with an entrance at 45 Shrewsbury Street.

Homes in Shrewsbury Street

Shrewsbury Street's newer housing is in mid-rise apartment buildings: a July 2023 Telegram & Gazette opinion column by Raymond V. Mariano counted six projects in progress or planned that would add nearly 750 apartments, nearly three-quarters of them studios or one-bedrooms, with some buildings six or seven stories high. Older houses stand on the side streets toward Belmont Hill, among them the Leonard Sturtevant House (about 1849) on Mulberry Street.