Framingham booms again

Framingham is booming again. In the years after WW2, Framingham was a super-suburb and epitomized the optimism of the post-war era. Some of the highlights of mid-century Framingham were the 1951 opening of Shoppers World (the first mall east of the Rocky Mountains), the opening of the Mass Pike in 1957, and then large company's HQs, along with thousands of suburban residents as farmland was turned into single-family subdivisions.But the Pike and subdivisions killed the downtown and around 1990, the remaining major downtown businesses (Avery Dennison, General Motors, and Cushing Hospital) closed.Yet around that time, Brazilian immigrants were starting to flock to the affordable downtown area of Framingham, and they began renovating the city's center.And since the early 2000s, large apartment buildings (some renovations of old factories, most new construction) added about 1,000 residential units downtown. And that has encouraged more businesses, such as the large Jack's Abby Brewing, to locate downtown.There are another 1,200 residential units approved for construction, and in a recent Boston Globe article, the city's Planning Director, Sarkis Sarkisian, said, "Barely a week goes by that I don't hear from a developer interested in building in Framingham."Read a PDF of the Globe article here: Framingham is reinventing itself