Development is being dangled again at an empty restaurant space decaying for seven years in Somerville’s little Wilson Square.
Aguacate Verde closed its doors unexpectedly in 2016 and has remained vacant since – still painted orange and green and adorned with a fading sign, its doorway recently covered over with drywall by its owner, Somerville’s LaCourt Realty.
“We plan to remodel the building hopefully sooner than later,” said a LaCourt Realty representative who would give his name only as Nick. Attempts to get his last name were ignored; a call late Monday to the owner of LaCourt, Mouhab Rizkallah, did not get an immediate response.
The LaCourt representative said the company plans to unify and modernize the connected buildings at 13-15 Elm St. (the restaurant and a two-story home with four bedrooms owned by the LaCourt Orphanage Trust as of 2020, according to the city assessor’s database) and 2-6 Porter St. (three stories with four bedrooms also owned by the trust as of 2020, according to the database), enlarging the current residential spaces and renovating the restaurant storefront in collaboration with the Somerville Urban Development Commission.
This is not the first time reuse looked within reach. A hearing notice went up in 2017 for a restaurant called Redds on Elm that never came to fruition, neighbors reported online. Rizkallah, after buying the properties for $5.4 million, went through rounds of revisions on plans at neighborhood meetings in 2021 and finalized another development plan in January 2022, but was unable to get approval.
Denise Taylor, Somerville’s director of communications and community engagement, said the property “has been stalled on the applicant’s end for an extended period.”
The city requested additional information from Rizkallah this year and is waiting for a response, Taylor said, but “due to the time elapsed since [Rizkallah’s] last neighborhood meeting to share information on their plans, another neighborhood meeting will be required” once he does provide information.
Rizkallah blames the years of stagnation on the city. Delays in the process are due to “city staff respond[ing] every 60 days or not at all,” he said. The result was that LaCourt Realty “kind of stopped trying.”
“We may very well just renovate the property with no additions at all,” he continued.
The restaurant was known as Tacos Lupita until May 2011 when new management renamed it Aguacate Verde, which suggested people “think green, eat healthy!” though the menu and the experience remained similar to Lupita’s street food, diners said at the time.
Wilson Square residents were already eager for the space to be reoccupied six years ago, trading notes and conjectures on Reddit.
“I keep waiting for some little restaurant to pop up there,” one neighbor said online. “So sad to see this corner so empty.”
A stronger
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