Ride the Minuteman Bikeway through East Lexington today and you will pass three walls that used to be blank. One sits behind Berman's Wine and Spirits at 55 Massachusetts Avenue. Another runs along Busa Wine and Spirits at 131. A third covers the storefronts at 135-145. A year ago these were just the backs of buildings, the kind of surface a cyclist's eye slides past without registering. Now they are paintings, and the reason they exist has less to do with civic beautification than with a specific, measurable problem the town had already identified.
People riding the bikeway did not know the businesses next to it were there.
That is not a guess. It is the stated premise behind the East Lexington Mural and Area Activation Project, which grew out of the town's Rapid Recovery Plan and a companion Center Retail Strategy Report. Both documents flagged the same gap: East Lexington sits directly on one of the busiest recreational trails in the region, yet its retail strip had no visual connection to the path running past it. Bikers and walkers moved through without a reason to stop. The fix the town landed on was not a new parking lot or a zoning change. It was color, applied directly to the walls those businesses already had.
What actually got painted, and why it matters where
The town funded the work through the American Rescue Plan Act, putting roughly $100,000 into public art and site activation across two separate mural initiatives: one along the East Lexington stretch of the bikeway, another on the columns of the Depot Building in Lexington Center. That second project brought muralist Kit Collins in to paint the columns at the Lexington History Museums' Depot building, extending the same logic into the Center itself.
For the East Lexington murals, the town received 27 submissions after an October 2024 call for artists and selected Melissa Pandina and Gabriela Sepulveda to paint all three sites. The murals went up over the summer of 2025 and are now finished, each one tied to a specific business that agreed to host it at no cost, with the town covering permitting, materials, and the artists' fees.
The locations tell you where the town thought the visibility problem was worst:
- 55 Massachusetts Avenue – the back trailer at Berman's Wine and Spirits
- 131 Massachusetts Avenue – the exterior wall at Busa Wine and Spirits
- 135-145 Massachusetts Avenue – the facade shared by the Shops at that address
Select Board member Joe Pato, who lives in East Lexington, put the intent plainly when the project was announced: "We have many gems that deserve to be recognized, and I am excited to see them glow." That is not marketing language borrowed from a press release template. It is a description of a genuine blind spot on a trail that carries thousands of cyclists and walkers a season, past shops whose owners had been asking for exactly this kind of attention.
A new café is betting on the same insight
If the murals were the public sector's answer to bikeway invisibility, Commune All Day Cafe is the private sector's version of the same bet. The café is taking over the long-closed Lexington Liquors space at 7 Depot Square, a few blocks from the East Lexington murals but on the same trail corridor that runs into the Center. Owners Sam and Kinnari Patel, who ran the liquor store there and have operated Turnpike Market in Billerica for twelve years, are converting the space into an all-day restaurant serving coffee from George Howell, smoothies, acai bowls, tacos, and sandwiches from early morning until 10 p.m., with a liquor license in progress so they can add beer and wine later.
The Patels are explicit that bikeway traffic is part of the design, not an afterthought. Sam Patel described the shift from what the space used to be to what it is becoming: "Nobody under 21 will step into a liquor store, whereas everyone will walk into this concept." A liquor store draws a narrower group of the people passing by outside its door. A café built with bikeway riders in mind serves nearly everyone who rides past it, which is precisely the audience the murals a few blocks north were designed to capture.
Commune is expected to open in Lexington Center this winter. The Patels have also mentioned a possible third location in Carlisle, though no site or date has been set for that one yet. What is confirmed is the address, the ownership, and the intent: another storefront on this corridor, built around the idea that people already moving through the area on foot or by bike are the customer base, if the business gives them a reason to stop.
Down Marrett Road, a different kind of return
Not every recent opening in Lexington is tied to the bikeway, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than forcing a connection that is not there. On Marrett Road, a stretch of Route 2A that runs on the opposite side of town from the East Lexington bikeway corridor, a longtime Dunkin' location closed in early 2025 after decades in operation. The original store opened on that site on September 29, 1970, as the chain's 245th location nationally.
The property has since been renovated and reopened on August 18, 2026, as a dual-brand Dunkin' and Jimmy John's, operated by The Pesce Network, a Massachusetts franchise group that runs more than 60 Dunkin' and Jimmy John's locations across the state. A public grand opening was held on September 12, with a ribbon-cutting, games, and a buy-one-get-one Jimmy John's promotion. It is a different kind of story than the murals or Commune, a chain reinvestment rather than a locally owned bet on foot traffic, but it points to the same underlying fact: this has been an active year for Lexington storefronts changing hands and reopening, on more than one side of town.
Two separate decisions, one shared read of the map
What connects the murals and Commune, even though one came from the town and the other from a private couple who already knew the block, is a shared conclusion about where value was sitting unused. The Minuteman Bikeway had traffic. It did not have the visual cues or the storefronts to convert that traffic into customers. The town spent ARPA money to solve half of that problem. The Patels are spending their own capital to solve the other half, in the Depot Square space that Lexington Liquors occupied until now.
If you have not walked or ridden that stretch since last summer, the murals alone are worth the trip, especially now that the vegetation the town warned would initially block the 55 Massachusetts Avenue piece has had a season to clear. And if you are the kind of person who tracks what is opening next in Lexington Center the way some people track a farmers market schedule, Commune's winter opening is one to put on the calendar. The same bikeway corridor that runs through East Lexington continues north into Arlington, where a similar mix of longtime shops and bikeway traffic has shaped its own stretch of Massachusetts Avenue.
For more on what has been happening around town this year, the Lexington neighborhood guide has the wider picture.
If you spot the murals before Commune opens, or you end up at the new Dunkin' and Jimmy John's on Marrett Road before the smoothies are flowing at Depot Square, I would genuinely like to hear what you think. Corinne Schippert is always up for a conversation about what is changing in this town, coffee or otherwise. Let's Connect.
