Route 134: The new Mid-Cape hub
by Debi Boucher StetsonFortune smiled on Charlie Chamberlain long before he developed Patriot Square, one of the most successful shopping centers on the Cape. During his service in Korea, he woke one night to the sound of a fellow soldier screaming because spiders had bitten his eyelids. “He spent six months in the hospital,” Chamberlain said, shrugging as he added, “They don’t bite me.”
Even luckier was the fact that he didn’t get to his assigned unit in time; that whole unit was ambushed and killed. And when the Harwich native returned home from service in the mid-1950s, he had more job offers than he could handle. With the economy booming, he launched a construction business that had 70 employees in a year.
After building thousands of homes in Dennis and Brewster, Chamberlain turned his eye to commercial development in 1985, when he built Patriot Square, the shopping plaza that became a Mid-Cape hub that continues to grow and thrive.
“I built the first real estate office on this highway in 1970,” he said, referring to Route 134, “and you know what people asked me? What the hell are you building in the woods for?”
Looking at the busy commercial strip of Route 134 in South Dennis, it’s hard to imagine, but it was woods a quarter-century ago – more specifically, wood lots, many with old and clouded titles. With help from his wife, a title examiner, Chamberlain bought them up.
It was pure savvy, with a large dose of vision.
“I guess you can call it vision,” Chamberlain shrugged amiably. “Call it what you want.”
Once he got Purity Supreme as his first anchor, Patriot Square took off. Marshall’s came in as well, and is still a huge draw for the plaza, which now has 26 businesses.
Chamberlain’s next smart move was widening Route 134 – his proposal, approved at Town Meeting, his engineered plans and his construction company. The price in 1987 was $2.5 million. “Today it would cost millions,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chamberlain began working on a proposal that only recently came to fruition: the Exit 9 cloverleaf on Route 6.
“I worked on that for 15 years, and it was a totally cooperative effort. The selectmen were very cooperative,” he said.
He is thrilled with the results.
“It’s fabulous – people can get in here,” he said. Before, “People were avoiding this exit” because it was so hard to navigate. With his office right on Route 134 in front of Patriot Square, Chamberlain and his assistant, Elaine Coughlin, heard the accidents at the interchange down the road loud and clear. “We used to have accidents all the time – bang, bang, bang. Now we don’t hear any anymore.”
Chamberlain’s overall vision, even if he demurs from calling it that, was that business centers should be located near Route 6 – the main artery for bringing people to the Mid-Cape and beyond.
“These exits have really determined where the business is going to be – that’s if your town properly zoned the land. Without the right zoning, this would be a bunch of houses,” he said. “This is where business should be – that’s why Route 134 came out smelling like a rose.”
With the once notorious intersection improved – Chamberlain noted that Exit 9 had been the worst in terms of accidents – the Route 134 hub has continued to grow.
Across the street from Patriot Square, Ring Bros. Marketplace (formerly Harney’s) draws shoppers to a plaza that also houses a Dunkin’ Donuts, and is next door to the new post office that Chamberlain built.
Ed Ring, owner of Ring Bros., said his move here from Harwich four years ago turned out to be a very good one. “The first year, we were probably up 20 percent,” he said, and since then, business has continued to grow.
“It’s actually a really good location because it’s not that seasonal – it doesn’t die off as much in the off-season.” Working people tend to stop on their way home, he said, noting that many of them are Lower Cape residents who work in Hyannis.
“It’s like the crossroads of the Cape, if you think about it,” said Ring, who also noted the cloverleaf has made it easier for people to stop here.
Ring Bros. is set up with seven separate businesses under the same roof – a model Ring says he used in Cambridge 13 years ago. Customers come for the fresh produce, dairy and groceries Ring Bros. is known for – and which the business also sells wholesale – seafood from Chatham Fish and Lobster, pizza from Spinners, Italian take-out from Montilio’s and Nata’s Noodles, spirits from Harney’s Liquors and sandwiches from Dark Horse Beef and Deli. Everything is rung up on one front end.
Business on both sides of the road factored in a decision by Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank to locate a new branch in the old post office down a side road from the new post office next door to the Ring Bros. plaza.
The new branch is set to open in 2007, according to Cape Cod Five President Dorothy Savarese, who said the bank had been eyeing Dennis long before she took over the top spot from Elliott Carr.
“We’ve been looking for a good location in Dennis for years now,” she said. “It is a hole in the middle of our territory.”
The bank currently has a total of 16 branches, 13 of them traditional banks and three school branches. And since one of the school branches is at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School in Yarmouth, it already has something of a presence in Dennis.
“We have 5,620 customers that list Dennis as their residence,” Savarese said, noting that’s about a third of the town’s population. “So for us it was as much a service issue as acquiring new accounts.”
Savarese said the new cloverleaf helped seal the deal. “We wanted something that was convenient,” she said. “It’s an easy turn off the highway, better now with cloverleaf,” and as a bonus, the side road stretches over to Old Bass River Road, “so it’s used by a lot of locals as a back way.”
Being part of the Route 134 hub appealed to the bank, which has been watching developments there.
“We’re impressed with how Ring Bros. has done such a great job with Harney’s,” Savarese said. “Marshall’s is there, and Dunkin’ Donuts has done a great job.”
Chamberlain is not surprised the area is growing now that the cloverleaf is done. “You’ve just got to make it easy for people to get to you,” he said. “Obviously, it’s good for every business here in this town.”
The Route 134 hub “really has become a destination in the Mid-Cape,” Savarese observed. “It meets so many of your shopping needs.”
Originally published in the Sept./Oct. 2006 issue of Cape Business.
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