businesses

The Planning Board gave a thumbs-up this week to a plan to increase the size of the dining patio at the Tack Room restaurant and a more convenient access door.

The Rural Land Foundation (which owns the property) and the owner of the Tack Room, Mike Culpo, found that they needed to replace the 10-year-old seasonal awning over the patio. As part of the improvement, they will increase the patio size from 810 square feet to about 1,060 square feet, or about four feet wider along the Lincoln Road side and five feet wider along the post office side.

The enclosure will have an exit to the green space along Lincoln Road and a new clear, accordion-style doorway from the restaurant interior to make it easier for customers and servers to access the patio.

“It will still be a seasonal patio, but will be much more spacious with roughly 20 tables. Four of those tables will be high-top tables located near a few outdoor TVs we will install,” Culpo told the Lincoln Squirrel, adding that he hopes to have the work complete by late summer.

Editor’s note: for more information, see “Old Town Hall Exchange is back in business” (Lincoln Squirrel, Feb. 21, 2023).

By Stacy Osur

Lincoln’s Old Town Hall Exchange will reopen this coming Wednesday after our annual summer break. Yes, our candy will be restocked and can’t wait to see our shortest customers back in the shop.

This Lincoln institution that was founded in 1963, supports both consignors and the lovely old building that it is housed in, Lincoln’s Old Town Hall. The building was rescued in 1962 from being taken away (yes, away!) by Henry Ford through a gallant group of neighbors that banded together and raised the funds to purchase the building and land from Sumner Smith (who had previously offered it to the town, but was rebuffed). The U.S. Post Office remains a tenant at will and we hope they remain as long as they wish.

Please volunteer with us, make a donation and visit soon! We’re open Tuesday through Friday from noon–4 p.m. through September (hours to be expanded later).

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“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

By Maureen Belt

After nearly 25 years of putting her registered dietitian and nutritionist credentials to work for others — most recently at a nursing home — Lincoln resident Jodi Gorman sprung out on her own. In 2020, she opened Happy Jars, a delivery service for healthy and flavorful small-batch homemade soups and salads.

Gorman’s business plan involved sourcing the finest and freshest ingredients, tweaking family recipes, creating new ones, and ladling or layering the finished creations into tall clear jars to be delivered to customers (though they now can be picked up at the Codman Farm store as well).

Startups require jumping through lots of hoops. There was acquiring a catering license, registering as an LLC, and strict health codes to follow that govern everything from purchasing ingredients to sterilizing cooking tools and logging temperatures. Gorman needed to rent an industrial kitchen to comply with those codes, so she he called around and eventually found a fit at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church in Acton. The venue even offered bonus storage space.

Gorman culled recipes passed down in her family as well as other tried-and-true favorites she’s created over the years. Using as many local and organic ingredients as the season would allow, she began tweaking them for commercial success. Her husband Evan and their two school-aged daughters, Sage and Isa, served as testers, offering feedback like “extra cilantro” and “more parsley.” Neighbor and confidant Sabra Alden chimed in with ideas for bumping up protein and other nutrients.

Once the testers’ high standards were met, Gorman relied on her extensive dietary background and completed the tedious work of precisely itemizing not just ingredients but also the nutritional values and calorie count of every soup and salad. Then there needed to be a website where customers could order and pay for the specials of the week. Another Lincolnite, and graphic artist Linda Cordner, designed the site and maintains it.

Of course, as Gorman was busy doing all this in late 2019, having no idea a global pandemic was brewing.

“We were totally prepared and ready to go the day before everything shut down,” she said at the end of a long day of cooking batches of lentil soup. One added hitch: Mason jars were scarce during the height of the pandemic — problematic for a company called Happy Jars. Opening day moved from March 2020 to July. As it turned out, the timing worked out well for a gourmet home delivery business to enter the market.

“Most people were working from home,” Gorman noted, while many others were avoiding restaurants and limiting trips to grocery stores. It’s a good business to be in. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, food delivery has become a global market worth more than $150 billion since 2017. The bulk of that increase came during the pandemic, the report stated, adding the market can expect an 8 percent growth going forward. As for Happy Jars, it has yet to yield much profit, but repeat customers and word-of-mouth referrals are leading to an encouraging bottom line.

Alden is the kind of friend who walked dogs with Gorman in the predawn hours while Gorman debated risking a career with full benefits for the uncertainty of owning her own business. “She talked a lot about doing this for so long — for years,” said Alden, who was elbow-deep in a sudsy pot in the sink.

Besides being a supportive listener and go-to pot scrubber, Alden talks to farmers about produce availability. She picks chicken off bones, sanitizes jars and counters, sweeps floors and inspects lettuce leaves individually. “We triple wash it,” she said, “and the romaine — literally we wash every leaf.”

Each week Gorman makes two soups and salads from her growing recipe collection. Customers log into her website by Sunday night to place their orders from a menu that includes all sorts of soup and salads with memorable names like Uplifting Udon, California Dreaming, Why Not Waldorf, and Sunshine on a Cloudy Day. She can usually accommodate vegan and gluten-free customers as well as special requests. One person asked for no salt in the turkey chili and brown rice soup, so Gorman simply separated that portion from the batch and omitted the salt.

She sources local ingredients whenever possible. For example, she makes croutons from bread purchased at Nashoba Brook Bakery, a slow-rise artisan bakery in West Concord.

“A lot of kids eat my food, and their parents just have peace of mind,” Gorman said. To accommodate children, Happy Jars offers 16-ounce containers that fit neatly into lunch boxes. With the emphasis on protein and nutritious contents, most of her soups and salads are complete meals.

Small soup batches are prepared every Monday and packed on Tuesday after properly cooling and setting. Salads can’t be made that far ahead. “The red cabbage gets brown overnight, Gorman said.” Another Lincoln friend, Terry Kay, helps with Tuesday deliveries in Lincoln and surrounding communities. Delivery fees are based on the size of the order. Heating instructions are included, and contents are good for one week from the day they were prepared. Customers may also pick up their orders — a trend that’s growing since she had to raise delivery rates. And now they’re available to buy in the Codman Farm store as well.

Nearly three years into being an entrepreneur, Gorman is still having fun and looking forward. “I love that I am my own boss and that I make my own hours, and that really goes well with motherhood,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do something else and I was ready. I love to cook, and I really love to feed people, and I love to feed people really good food.”

You can follow Happy Jars on Instagram here.

The Covid-19 pandemic closed the Old Town Hall Exchange’s doors for almost two years — but the shop is back.

“I’ve always loved this place and wanted to see if I could help reopen it,” said Lincoln resident and artist Kate Dahmen. She reached out to Stacy Osur, who manages the building for the nonprofit Lincoln Old Town Hall Corporation, and reopened the store on an intermittent basis during the holiday season.

On the main floor, visitors can browse through the pre-pandemic stock of gifts, cards, toys, baby clothing, and books as well as new penny candy — a favorite of Lincoln kids for decades. The basement is fuller than ever with antiques (“a lot of stuff came in during the pandemic,” Dahmen said). The Exchange does consignment sales, returning 70% of the proceeds to crafters and antique owners while the remainder goes to building maintenance and shop operations.

“We’ll slowly bring in new stuff as space allows,” she said. “We’d love to bring in more unique things and create wall space for original art. This is a place where you can buy something you couldn’t find on Amazon or a major store, but we’ll always have cards and penny candy no matter what.”

The hours of operations are still not set in stone since Dahmen is in the process of finding volunteers to help for two hours a week apiece, so she advised calling ahead (781-259-9876). She hopes to be open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m.–4 p.m. and Saturday from noon–4 p.m. when staffing allows. Anyone interested in volunteering may email her at kate.dahmen@gmail.com. “It’s a really happy place to spend time and it’s a great way to meet people,” she said. 

The Old Town Hall is now in its third location. It was built in 1848 close to the current location of Bemis Hall “for all Political, Temperance, Antislavery & Peace Meetings and Lecturers for Lyceum, and Singing Schools, for Picnics, Fairs and Sabbath School celebrations and for all Literary & Scientific Lecturers,” according to the building’s website. It was moved down the hill closer to the First Parish Church in 1884 and then to its current location in 1918. At various times it housed Lincoln’s first high school and the public library. Later tenants included a general store and gas station, a law office, and a small publisher.

Coldwell Banker occupied some of the upstairs office space until leaving in October 2022. The space is being renovated for new tenants, but Osur said she didn’t know what the space will be used for and when. “The whole thing is still up in the air,” she said.

A proposal to add 27 hangars and make other changes at Hanscom Field is the subject of two events on Monday, Feb. 6: a site walk at 3 p.m. and a virtual “consultation session” at 6:30 p.m.

The proposal for the area between Hartwell Road and Taxiway R in Bedford follows a land swap and access agreement between Massport, which owns a 26-acre North Airfield parcel, and Runway Realty Ventures (RRV), owner of an adjoining 18-acre parcel formerly owned by the U.S. Navy. It calls for adding about 408,000 square feet of new hangar space for aircraft parking and storage and renovating the existing Navy hangar building. Details of the proposal are contained in the Environmental Notification Form filed by the developers with the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs as required by the Mass. Environmental Policy Act (MEPA).

Some aircraft now fly in and out empty to pick up and drop off operators who can’t secure aircraft storage space at Hanscom, the proposal says. “This practice results in extra flights (referred to as ‘ferry flights’) that would otherwise not be required with aircraft stored at Hanscom. By providing aircraft parking and storage on-airport, the project will relieve pressure from Logan in accordance with Massport’s long-term planning objective aimed at using regional airports to satisfy the current and future demand for general aviation services.”

The land swap agreement approved by Massport in October (starting on page 12 of the meeting minutes) will allow RRV to reconfigure taxiway R for larger and heavier aircraft, and to build a new taxiway and service road. RRV will be responsible for funding “upgrades and improvements to the Hanscom Field taxiway infrastructure to support design Group III aircraft above 100,000 pounds and/or design Group IV aircraft, as requested by RRV.”

Taxiway R can now accommodate Group III aircraft such as the Boeing 737-700, the Airbus A-320, and the Embraer ERJ 190-100, which have maximum capacities of 108 to 180 passengers and ranges of 2,000 to 3,700 miles, according to SKYbrary.aero. If the expansion proposal is approved, it will be able to accommodate Group IV planes including the Boeing 767 and the Airbus A-310, both of which can carry up to about 250 passengers and have ranges of 6,000 to 7,500 miles.

Save Our Heritage, which works to preserve historically important sites in Concord, Bedford, Lincoln, and Lexington and has fought Hanscom expansion for years, posted an alert to supporters summarizing the proposal. The Bedford Citizen also ran articles on February 1 and February 3.

Massport (the Massachusetts Port Authority) owns and operates Logan Airport, Hanscom Field, Worcester Regional Airport, and public terminals in the Port of Boston. Hanscom Field, New England’s second-busiest airport and the FAA’s designated general aviation reliever for Logan, is used for private corporate aviation, recreational flying, pilot training, and air charter, cargo, commuter service, and air ambulance flights. It has three fixed-base operators (FBOs) that provide fueling, maintenance, and cleaning services for airplanes. Linear Air and Magellan Jets regularly operate out of Hanscom.

The walk-through on Monday at 3 p.m. starts across from Edge Sports Center at 191 Hartwell Rd. in Bedford, and the virtual session at 6:30 p.m. can be accessed here. The public comment period deadline is Tuesday, Feb. 14. Comments may be submitted via the MEPA Public Comments Portal or via email to alexander.strysky@mass.gov.

The three towns that contain parts of Hanscom Field (Bedford, Lincoln and Concord) do not have any permitting authority in the matter, though the land swap must be approved by the FAA and Gov. Maura Healy, and the FAA must also sign off on the revised airport layout plan.

Coldwell Banker has closed its office in the Old Town Hall, leaving the venerable building with just a single tenant: the U.S. Post Office.

Stacy Osur, who manages the building for the nonprofit Lincoln Old Town Hall Corporation, said Coldwell Banker left suddenly with no advance notice. The Old Town Hall Exchange shop closed when the pandemic hit and has not reopened. The two agents who worked in Lincoln, Lois Tetreault and Vita Theriault, are now working in the company’s Weston office.

Of greater concern, Osur said, is that some items in the office are missing. “I drove up to the building and it was literally stripped… They’ve taken things that belonged to the building, antique stuff that was hanging on the walls,” as well as rugs and artwork. “It’s pretty shocking.” She finally got hold of someone in Coldwell Banker in New Jersey who was involved in the decision to close the office, “and they pled ignorance.” Osur added that she’s billed the company for the items.

“It didn’t surprise anybody that the office closed. With the [computer] technology we have now, I would go into the physical office maybe once a month,” said Tetreault, whose father ran a real estate business in the same location before it merged with Coldwell Banker. “I’m sure it’s going to be happening more and more with smaller offices.” As to the furnishings, “the company didn’t take anything that didn’t belong to Coldwell Banker as far as I know. Nobody was invited to take it and I have absolutely no idea where it went.” Theriault did not return calls seeking comment.

The office space is now being renovated and updated in preparation for offering it to one or more new tenants. “The idea is to keep that building vibrant and going, and we need the income to pay for snow plowing and gardening and stuff like that,” Osur said. She added that she hopes to get Community Preservation Act funds for a fire suppression system and seek permission to install electric car chargers in the rear. Meanwhile, Lincoln resident Kate Dahmen confirmed that she’s hoping to reopen a shop in the building but declined to provide further details until plans have progressed further.

The Old Town Hall is now in its third location. It was built in 1848 close to the current location of Bemis Hall “for all Political, Temperance, Antislavery & Peace Meetings and Lecturers for Lyceum, and Singing Schools, for Picnics, Fairs and Sabbath School celebrations and for all Literary & Scientific Lecturers,” according to the building’s website. It was moved down the hill closer to the First Parish Church in 1884 and then to its current location in 1918. At various time it housed Lincoln’s first high school and the public library. Later tenants included a general store and gas station, a law office, and a small publisher.

The Lincoln Post Office has had to close for periods of time during the day due to lack of staff, and it’s unclear when the problem will be resolved.

“We’re just so short-staffed,” said Lincoln Postmaster Gerald Dichiara, who started his position in Lincoln about two months ago. The South Lincoln location is supposed to have two full-time clerks, a part-time clerk, five mail carriers, and three assistants to cover absences. Right now, however, there’s only full-time clerk Liz Kenney and one assistant, and one of the mail carriers is retiring soon, he said. Sometimes he works the window himself, but when he can’t, he has to post a hand-written notice on the post office doors informing customers that the office is temporarily closed.

Dichiara works with post offices in Concord and Acton to move staff around as needed, juggling days off and lunch breaks. Complicating the matter is that the post office must remain open for passport appointments. There are usually about half a dozen total on weekdays, but on Saturday mornings, “we’re swamped with them,” he said.

Changing the post office’s official operating hours (for example, by closing for lunch every day)  is apparently not possible either. “There’s nothing I can do about changing the hours on the window. You have to go through a chain of command to have that done,” Dichiara said.

Lincoln is not alone; many post offices all over the country are short-handed due to Covid-19, staff turnover and other issues. Dichiara said that Lincoln just went through two rounds of advertising positions internally and had no applicants. Three other external candidates were offered jobs, but two never showed up for orientation and one didn’t pass a background check.

The Tack Room restaurant in South Lincoln has gotten a temporary OK to expand the outdoor dining area onto the grass and expand its hours of operation.

Under the plan, which was approved by the Select Board on April 25, the restaurant will create a roped-off area on the lawn in front of the building for picnic tables, two- and four-seat hightop tables, a server station, and a spot for lawn games. Canned and bottled wine, beer, and cocktails will be served as well as food.

The expansion would occupy about two-thirds of the green space during warm weather. “Our goal is not to turn this into a massive outdoor space. We would treat this sort of like a beer garden,” co-owner Brandon Bunnewith told the board, which needed to approve the plan because it involves a change to the liquor license.

The outdoor area beyond the patio will initially be open on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons from about 4–9:30 p.m. 

The Tack Room also got permission to open an hour earlier (10 a.m. rather than the current 11 a.m.) on Thursday through Sunday for brunch, and close an hour later (midnight rather than 11 p.m.) on the same days. Outdoor seating would close no later than 10 p.m.

“We’ve been having people come in for later dinners and hanging around, asking if we can stay open a bit later,” Bunnewith said. “This gives us a bit of extra buffer time so we don’t have to rush people out.”

The restaurant also hopes to offer live entertainment in the outdoor area, though it will have to apply separately for that. Bunnewith said he has never had a complaint about noise or behavior but that he would work with town officials on mandating limits to noise at night.

“A number of people say they’re in favor of a more vibrant town center, which is in the interest of many of us in town, but we have to be respectful of abutters,” Select Board member Jim Hutchinson said. 

The board approved the expanded service footprint and hours of operation until the end of the calendar year.