Spacious parking and a good butcher department are synonymous with Roche Bros. supermarkets. You won’t find a parking lot at the Roche Bros. newest store, but you will find direct access to one of the city’s busiest MBTA stations:
“Customers can enter and exit right onto Downtown Crossing station concourse,” says Roche Bros. Vice President of Sales and Marketing Paul McGillivray.
We’re standing inside the store, through a set of glass doors we can see the T station.
Generations of bargain hunters have crossed this threshold. Roche Bros. occupies the space in Boston’s Downtown Crossing that — for nearly a century – housed the original Filene’s Basement.
Black and white photos from the “Basement’s” hey-day hang next to the escalators. One photo shows men’s suits on sale for eleven-dollars.
But the retail space itself has been completely re-imagined.
It’s sleek and modern … with light-colored wood, dark tiled walls, and one eye-catching display of prepared foods after another.
McGillivray says the inventory is customized for urban shoppers.
“You can just kind of purchase little bits and pieces for what you need to tonight,” says McGillivray.
The Downtown Crossing store is both a departure from the company’s twenty suburban locations … and a return to its roots.
In 1952, brothers Pat and Bud Roche opened their first store in Roslindale. McGillivray says Roche Bros. has returned to the city for the same reason they left: customers.
We followed that post war baby boom generation as they moved to the suburbs and the suburban stores were built and flourished in those neighborhoods, but as people are moving back to the city, we're moving back with them.
“We followed that post war baby boom generation as they moved to the suburbs and the suburban stores were built and flourished in those neighborhoods,” he says, “but as people are moving back to the city, we’re moving back with them.”
And Downtown Crossing is booming. Next door to Roche Bros. the glitzy Millennium Tower is going up. It will house more than four-hundred luxury condos. Soon this one neighborhood will boast four-thousand housing units double the number from just five years ago.
“It’s not just single people, it’s empty nesters, people moved back into the city from the suburbs,” says Rosemarie Sansone, president of the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District. She says Roche Bros. is a milestone for Downtown Crossing, which as the name implies, has long been a crossroads, but —especially in recent years— not always a destination. When Filene’s Basement closed, the space remained vacant for eight years.
“Even with the market downturn in 2008,” Sansone says, “people wanted to hold and keep going with the re-imagining of what this district was going to be and they did it.”
It’s quite a turn-around. At Millennium Tower, three bedroom condos are selling for seven-million-dollars. But Sansone insists the neighborhood is diverse with apartments and low-income housing.
“I don’t think this will ever be a totally high-end district,” she says. “I don’t’ think that’s what it was ever meant to be and it don’t think that’s what anybody wants.”
And, amid the sea of well-heeled singles and empty nesters, McGillivray says Roche Brothers is seeing something they didn’t expect, evidence of young families.
McGillivray says “We do have pretty good baby food sales... which is one of the things that surprised us.”
Less surprising for a store that’s attracting not only residents but the workday crowd here to pick up lunch or a couple of a groceries before heading home … on the T.
