There are bad ideas and really bad ideas and a really bad idea is putting a flea market on vacant land on Federal Street.
Most Lynn residents 40 years and older can remember the years when Federal Street between Waterhill Street and Western Avenue was closed to drivers and General Electric’s West Lynn site sat empty and weed-covered with the Factory of the Future looming over the street like an abandoned fortress.
All that has changed in the last 20 years: Federal Street is now a convenient cross route linking two major Lynn streets and Market Basket, opened in 2017, brings shoppers to a site that was once a prime example of local blight.
With a roundabout smoothly steering traffic down Western Avenue and onto Federal Street and more traffic improvements underway on the Waterhill Street end of Federal, the 22-acre former industrial site has all the makings of a location ripe for development.
Residential projects are bringing new life to the Lynnway and Oxford and Munroe streets. Why shouldn’t the long-underused Federal Street site become a fertile field for development opportunities offering jobs for Lynn residents and pouring property tax dollars into city coffers?
Any plan to put flea market stalls on Federal Street represents an underproductive, low-intensity use completely at odds with the Federal Street site’s potential. A flea market also represents a potential visual blight for residents whose homes border Federal Street and an insult to hard-working public and private sector individuals who labored long and hard to resurrect Federal Street and the GE land.
We urge city officials to squash any proposed Federal Street flea market like — you guessed it — a bug.
