One Storefront, Under a Year: What Islington's Washington Street Turnover Actually Tells You
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Walk the short stretch of Washington Street through Islington Center this month and you will pass a storefront that has already changed businesses once this year and is about to change again. It sits at 305 Washington Street, a few doors from the barber shop, and if you have lived in this part of Westwood for more than a year, you have probably watched it happen twice.
That single address is a better gauge of what actually works in Islington than any survey of the whole corridor would be, because the corridor is so small that every change registers. The town's own zoning map calls this stretch the Washington Street Business District, an overlay district drawn tight around a handful of parcels near the East Street and School Street intersection. There is no room here for a business to fail quietly. When one leaves, everyone on the block notices, and when the next one moves in, everyone watches to see if it lasts.
Juicygreens opened its Islington location in the fall of 2025, run locally by Westwood residents Ammy and Mike Lowney. Ammy teaches in the Boston Public Schools. Mike is a family medicine doctor who has spent his career pointing patients toward the connection between diet and health, and the juice bar concept traces back to a location the couple's parent company opened in Jamaica Plain in 2017. It was a considered bet, not a pop-up.
It closed at 305 Washington Street on June 30, 2026. Less than a year after opening.
That is not a story about a failing company. Juicygreens still operates seven locations across Greater Boston, serving the same cold-pressed juices, smoothies, and power bowls it always has. Something about this particular storefront, on this particular block, did not carry the concept through its first full year.
Here is what happened next, in order:
Two businesses, one address, under twelve months. The second one is not a trend concept chasing foot traffic. It is a business that has expanded exactly twice in fifty years.
Ron's Gourmet Ice Cream dates to 1976, when Ron Covitz opened Ron's Ice Cream & Bowling in Hyde Park, pairing scoops with candlepin lanes. His son Jay now runs the business, and in the fifty years since that first shop opened, the family has expanded exactly once, into Dedham Square in 1999. That second location just finished a significant renovation and reopened in late May 2026.
Islington will be the third location the Covitz family has ever opened. On social media, the team announced the news simply: "We've been keeping a pretty big secret." A fifty-year-old family business does not make that kind of announcement lightly, and it does not choose a third address on impulse.
The choice is worth sitting with. Ron's had its pick of Washington Street corridors across Greater Boston and picked the exact storefront that a health-focused concept had just left. That is either a coincidence about square footage and lease timing, or it is a read on what this particular block actually wants from a food business. Given how deliberately the Covitz family has expanded until now, the second explanation carries more weight.
The more telling detail may be what has not changed. A few doors down at 282 Washington Street, Neroli Ristorante has held its ground as the corridor's fine dining anchor, with Executive Chef Mario Lepori running a kitchen built around fresh house-made pasta and imported Italian ingredients. At 307 Washington Street, Islington Barbers keeps its chairs full with the kind of repeat, walk-in business that does not depend on being new.
Neither business is chasing a concept. Both have simply kept doing the same thing long enough that residents plan around them, whether that means a standing Friday reservation or a haircut booked before it is strictly necessary. Turnover at 305 Washington Street stands out precisely because the storefronts around it are not turning over.
Westwood has two other commercial areas that dwarf Islington in scale. University Station carries 2.3 million square feet of retail, office, and residential space, built around the Route 128 train station and its commuter rail and Amtrak stop. The Route 1 corridor is built for larger format retail and corporate offices. Islington's Washington Street strip was never meant to compete with either. It was shaped by a town-led redevelopment approved at the May 2018 Town Meeting that added a CVS, expanded the branch library into Wentworth Hall, and built eighteen condominiums, all clustered around the same handful of parcels that make up the business district today.
That compact footprint is exactly why one closed juice bar and one incoming ice cream shop feel like real news here instead of background noise. In a corridor with only a few dozen storefronts, a single lease decision changes what the block feels like to walk through.
If the pattern holds, expect a line at 305 Washington Street sometime in the next several weeks as Ron's opens its doors, and expect that line to look different from the health-conscious crowd Juicygreens drew. Both are legitimate ways to run a small business in Islington. Only one of them has now survived fifty years and three locations.
For residents who have watched this particular storefront change hands twice in one year, the lesson is not that Islington rejects new concepts. Neroli and Islington Barbers prove longevity is possible here. The lesson is narrower and more useful: this block rewards businesses that have already proven themselves somewhere else in Greater Boston before they ask Islington to commit.
Keep an eye on the space. When it opens, it will tell you something Juicygreens' closing already hinted at, which is that Washington Street is a small enough stage that every business on it is being watched, tested, and quietly judged by the people who walk past it every day.
If you're weighing what a home in a neighborhood like this is actually worth, from the walkability of its business district to the kind of demand a stable Main Street corridor generates, Theresa David has spent decades reading exactly these signals across Westwood and the surrounding MetroWest towns. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what you're seeing in your own neighborhood.
Contact Theresa today to learn more about her unique approach to real estate and how she can help you get the results you deserve.
