Jamaica Plain Threw Two Street Festivals This Month. The City Only Planned One.
On August 2, Centre Street closed to cars twice over. Boston's Open Streets program shut down traffic along Centre Street from Lamartine Street to Lochstead Avenue, anchored at the Jackson Square end, for the city's official car-free Sunday in Jamaica Plain this year. Along Centre and South Streets, a separate crowd of shopkeepers ran their own event at the same hour, because the city's route never got there.
That overlap wasn't a scheduling mix-up. It's what happens when a business district gets left off the map it used to be the center of.
Open Streets Boston has rotated through neighborhoods since 2022, and Jamaica Plain has usually gotten one Sunday a year with Centre Street closed end to end. In past years, that closure continued down Centre Street all the way to South Street, deep into the neighborhood's oldest commercial stretch. This year the closure ran only from Lamartine Street to Lochstead Avenue, a shorter route than in previous iterations of the event.
A city spokesperson explained the shift plainly: the goal is for every Open Streets event to feel like a citywide celebration, and this year's Jamaica Plain event starts at Jackson Square specifically because it's Orange Line-adjacent and accessible to residents from other parts of Boston. That's a defensible planning goal. It also means a stretch of Jamaica Plain's most walked commercial blocks didn't get closed to cars this year, for the first time in recent memory.
What sits along that Centre and South Street corridor isn't incidental. The Loring Greenough House, the last surviving 18th-century home in Sumner Hill, is there. So is First Church in Jamaica Plain. So is South Street Mall and Courts. So is the original J.P. Licks shop, the one the whole ice cream chain is named after. All four show up on the JP Summer Fest lineup, which tells you plainly which corridor Open Streets used to close and doesn't anymore.
In other words, the section of Centre Street the city's shorter route skipped this year is the section that made Centre Street worth closing to cars in the first place.
| Open Streets Boston | JP Summer Fest | |
|---|---|---|
| Organized by | City of Boston | Local business owners |
| Route | Lamartine St. to Lochstead Ave. | Centre St. and South St. |
| Hours | 10:30am to 3pm (streets closed 9am to 4pm) | 10am to 5pm |
| Anchor point | Jackson Square, Orange Line | JP's historic commercial core |
Business owners along Centre and South Streets didn't wait around to see if the city's route might get extended. They built their own event, on the same day, covering exactly the ground Open Streets left out. The JP Summer Fest lineup reads like a directory of the district: Blue Frog Bakery, City Feed and Supply, Cafe Selah, Shea Butter Smoothies, Kitchenwitch, Papercuts J.P., Polkadog Bakery, Said & Done Tattoo, Viza Cafe, and the Roundhead Brewing Co. beer garden, all hosting activity along a stretch the official program didn't touch. It's the kind of response you only see from a business community that's used to promoting itself, because for one Sunday this year, nobody else was going to do it for them.
Whatever tension exists between the city's calendar and the neighborhood's own, Centre Street's restaurant scene hasn't slowed down to sort it out. Krista Kranyak, who closed her longtime restaurant Ten Tables in December 2025, reopened the same address at 597 Centre this spring as Beyond Proof, billed as Boston's only zero-proof bar and serving Mediterranean-inspired dishes built around a full non-alcoholic drink program. It's a different kind of bet on the same block, and it's already open.
A few doors down, a still-unnamed fusion tapas concept was sitting mostly untouched at 668 Centre Street as of this spring, according to Jamaica Plain News, though a JP Centre/South Main Streets sign in the window signaled plans to serve alcohol once the buildout catches up. Separately, Boston's Licensing Board approved 13 new alcohol licenses across the city earlier this year, and four of them went to Jamaica Plain: Behan Caffe, opening next to the existing Behan Pub, along with Ethiopian Cafe, Third Cliff Bakery, and Ula Cafe.
Further out, chef Moe Kuroki, who closed her ramen shop Oisa in late 2020 but never really left the neighborhood's food scene, is working on a new concept called Hinata Shokudo. Kuroki has spent the years since Oisa closed hosting pop-ups and building a private chef business, and she's hoping to open the new space, a home-style Japanese restaurant, before the end of 2026. No address has been announced yet, but she's been posting updates on Instagram as the project comes together.
The dual-festival Sunday wasn't a one-off. It's part of a fuller month:
None of this needed the city's permission to happen. That's arguably the point.
Centre Street's business owners didn't lobby the city to reroute Open Streets back through their doors. They built a second event instead, on their own timeline, covering their own blocks, with their own list of participants. That's a different kind of neighborhood signal than a press release or a ribbon cutting. It says the commercial identity of Jamaica Plain doesn't depend on which stretch of pavement the city decides to close. The restaurants opening this year, the market that's run every Saturday since 1984, the porches getting mic'd up for Porchfest, none of it was waiting on a city calendar to matter.
If you live along Centre Street, you already know this. If you're just visiting the neighborhood for the first time, the split festival is as good an introduction as any: Jamaica Plain's commercial core takes care of itself, city route or not.
Jamaica Plain is one of the neighborhoods Diane Basemera follows closely as part of her coverage of Boston's most livable pockets, from the restaurants opening on Centre Street to the market rhythms that shape daily life here. If you're curious what a home search or sale looks like in this part of the city, explore the Boston neighborhood guide or get your instant home valuation to see where your property stands today.
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