What Storey Avenue Could Become: A West End Guide to the September 23 Forum

If you live off Ferry Road, Moseley Avenue, or anywhere on the Turkey Hill side of the city, Storey Avenue is where your week actually happens. It is where you fill the tank, refill a prescription, meet a contractor at the plaza, and pull into Market Basket on the way home. It is also the least walkable part of a city famous for being walkable.

That contradiction is now the subject of a formal city planning process, and the next public meeting in that process lands at City Hall on September 23, 2026. If you missed the first forum in May and the survey that closed in early June, this is the one to catch.

What's on the table

The City of Newburyport has been running a study called Storey Ave Reimagined. City officials are studying potential changes in the Storey Avenue and Low Street area to reimagine what this area could become over time, starting by engaging the community in creating a vision for how the area can be transformed.

Here is what has happened and what is next:

• May 20, 2026 — first Community Forum, Senior/Community Center
• June 3, 2026 — public survey closed
• July 22, 2026 — second forum at City Hall
• September 23, 2026 — third forum at City Hall

The framing comes straight from the city's 2017 Master Plan. That plan contemplates a "village center" for the commercial area at Storey Avenue and Low Street. The specific recommendation the current study is testing is to shift this area from its exclusive focus on vehicles, make it more visually attractive and accommodating to other modes of travel, and transform the corridor into a mixed-use, walkable neighborhood by modifying zoning or creating a new zoning district to promote that type of development.

Ward 5 Councilor Lisa Medina Smith and Ward 6 Councilor Mary DeLai represent the corridor, and both have been part of the conversation from the first forum forward.

The corridor as residents already know it

Storey Avenue is not underused. It is over-driven. Traffic volumes on Storey Ave run around 20,000 vehicles per day at a 35 mph posted limit, sidewalks are inconsistent, pedestrian crossings are long and unprotected, stores sit back from the road behind extensive parking areas, and there are no continuous bike lanes east of Low Street.

The everyday value is real all the same. Storey Avenue is home to Newburyport's two grocery stores, several banks, two pharmacies, an urgent care center, and a range of other stores and services, which makes it an important commercial district and employment center. Market Basket and Walgreens both operate out of 25 Storey Ave. Supercuts sits at 45 Storey Ave inside Port Plaza. Port Plaza itself is just off I-95 on Route 113 and includes restaurants, groceries, beauty and health, retail, and fitness tenants.

Here is the gap the study is trying to close, put plainly:

The city has said the honest part out loud. A full transformation of this area will take years or even decades of phased redevelopments, and a conceptual master plan would help define coherent future street blocks and improved urban form, a West End village center for future generations, built not just for the automobile but for pedestrians as well.

Why this is not only an aesthetic question

There is a second track running in parallel, and it changes the stakes. Massachusetts has required Newburyport to zone for a specific amount of multifamily housing under the MBTA Communities law. The city's own working numbers spell it out.

The existing 40R Smart Growth District around the MBTA Commuter Rail Station is expected to provide roughly a 700-unit credit toward a total requirement of 1,292 units, which leaves about 592 units of remaining capacity that Newburyport needs to place somewhere. City officials are considering whether to satisfy that remaining capacity through an expansion of the existing 40R District near the commuter rail, a new district in the vicinity of Storey Ave and Low Street, or some combination of the two.

The city has been careful to separate the two efforts publicly. Any plan to satisfy the MBTA Communities mandate is separate and distinct from a parallel effort referred to as the Storey Ave Mixed Use Village Center Rezoning, and there are independent reasons for rezoning the Storey Ave and Low Street area to encourage more housing and mixed use in lieu of expansive underutilized parking lots.

For a West End homeowner, the practical read is this: the September 23 meeting is where the design conversation happens, and the state-mandated housing math is the pressure that keeps the design conversation from staying theoretical. Both threads run through the same intersection.

The other half of the West End

The village center conversation tends to swallow the airtime. It should not. The reason so many people chose this side of the city in the first place is what sits west and south of the Storey Ave corridor, and none of that is on the table for rezoning.

The Common Pasture extends roughly from Crow Lane and Hale Street in Newburyport to Turkey Hill Road in Newburyport and West Newbury and to Scotland Road in Newbury. It is an actively used cultural landscape, not a technicality on a map. This historic pasture dates back to the area's original settlement in 1635, and large expanses of the original landscape remain undeveloped in a patchwork of open fields, working farmland, wooded uplands, streams, and wetlands. In a three-part project, 293 acres of the roughly 700-acre Common Pasture were preserved using Community Preservation Act and other funds.

The trail network stitched through it is where a lot of West End weekends actually take place:

• Little River Trail System. A 5.4 mile trail network introducing the surrounding community to the importance of the Little River Watershed, the historic Common Pasture, and protection of the environment and wildlife habitats.
• Gloria Braunhardt Bike Trail and the Albert G. Decie II Little River Nature Trail, both part of that system and both named for the citizen advocates who pushed the preservation effort through in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
• Cooper North Pasture Preserve, reachable from a Hale Street trailhead and connected via the Marlene Schroeder Nature Trail.
• Moseley Woods Park. A 16-acre public park overlooking the Merrimack River with hiking trails, picnic tables, a playground, and a spacious pavilion that hosts a summer concert series.
• Maudslay State Park, the largest of the group, sitting at the western edge of the city.

Read the map with the corridor conversation in mind and something jumps out. The West End already has the two ingredients most Massachusetts suburbs are trying to invent: a real errand hub within a mile of most front doors, and a genuinely protected open landscape at its back. What it lacks is the middle. There is no comfortable way to get from a house on Ferry Road to a loaf of bread at Market Basket without a car, and no protected route from the plaza back out to the Common Pasture trailheads.

That is the specific thing the Storey Ave Reimagined process is trying to design. Whether it succeeds is a separate question, and one residents are being invited to answer in person.

How to weigh in

The city has been direct about who it wants in the room. The stated goal is to gather input from the general public and West End neighbors to determine what does and does not work today, and what changes or additions might benefit the City and immediate neighborhood moving forward.

A few practical notes for the September 23 forum at City Hall:

• Bring a specific route you actually walk, bike, or drive. The most useful public comments in the first forum were the ones tied to a real intersection or curb cut, not a philosophy.
• Read the Zoning Advisory Group materials before you go. The city has been posting working documents on the Planning and Development page, including the February 2024 City Council presentation on MBTA Communities and Storey Ave / Low Street rezoning.
• Understand what is not being decided. A single evening will not rezone the corridor. It will shape a conceptual plan that then feeds into a future zoning proposal.

The through line for anyone who owns a home on this side of the city is the same one it has always been. The West End is quieter than downtown, closer to open land, and dependent on one commercial corridor to work. What happens to that corridor over the next several years will change how the neighborhood feels well before any building gets built.

If you are thinking about how these planning conversations may affect the value or presentation of your home, or if you are weighing a move to a quieter part of Newburyport that keeps you close to trails and everyday errands, the team at Person + Person Group is happy to walk the West End with you. Reach out to download our Newburyport neighborhood guide or request a personalized market plan.