Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | December 12, 2022 | Worcester Business Journal 5 Family sells Shrewsbury Street restaurant A Shrewsbury Street restaurant, fami- ly-owned since 2009, has a new owner. e Zona family has sold La Sca- la Restaurante at 183 Shrewsbury St., according to Worcester real estate firm Kelleher & Sadowsky Associates, whose Mark Johns brokered the deal on Nov. 16. e husband-and-wife team of Maria and Kevin Zona have run La Scala, which features Italian food, for the past 13 years. ey are graduates of Providence's John- son and Wales University. e couple feature their children – Francesca, Julia, & Niccola – on the restaurant's website, stressing the impor- tance of family in the operation of the restaurant. "It's time for us to say farewell to our little piece of Italy. Kevin and I along with our three beautiful daughters, Frances- ca Zona, Julia Zona and Niccola Zona want to thank every beautiful guest that has graced us with their presence at our restaurant," Maria Zona wrote in a post on the restaurant's Facebook page on Nov. 7. "is was a very hard decision, but the hard decisions in life sometimes are the greatest ones. Our heart and soul and many endless nights and early mornings at 183 Shrewsbury Street, but we made it through some very difficult situations." e new owner is Dave Purvis, accord- ing to Kelleher & Sadowsky. Purvis was a regional and store manag- er for the Darden Restaurants, a pub- licly-owned company based in Florida operating concepts like Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and e Capital Grille. e sale price of the La Scala Restau- rante was not disclosed. Amazon buys properties in Grafton and Westborough for $26.7M Amazon Data Services Inc. purchased two properties in Graon and West- B R I E FS W BJ has partnered with the Worcester Historical Museum to run a year-long trivia contest in celebration of the 300th anniversary of Worcester's founding on June 14, 1722. Readers should email their answer to the ques- tion below by Dec. 22 to bkane@wbjournal.com or visit the trivia page on WBJournal.com to compete for a special year-end prize package. Sponsored by Worcester 300 trivia contest | part 20 And the answers to last edition's question: The formal name of the Worcester restaurant frequented by celebrities like Al Pacino and Wayne Newton was El Morocco. e Port of Worcester e Lady Carrington arrived in Worcester on Oct. 7, 1828, weighing 22.5 tons when empty and measuring 68-feet long and 9.5-feet wide. It was the first canal boat to arrive in Worcester on the newly completed Blackstone Canal, and its appearance marked the beginning of a new era for Worcester. Named aer Lorianna Carrington, wife of Edward Carrington, a director of the newly opened canal, the Lady Carrington not only brought passengers but also served as the stage from which Levi Lincoln, Jr., the governor of Massachusetts and prominent figures delivered speeches welcoming the boat. e canal was in business into the 1840s, but the arrival of the Boston & Worcester Railroad on July 4, 1835, signaled a transition to steam power. n Trivia question: What $160-million public facility opened in Worcester's Canal District in 2021? PHOTOS | COURTESY OF WORCESTER HISTORICAL MUSEUM Worcester trivia leaderboard 1. Mary Camosse - 12 2. Jeff Forts - 5 3. Allison Chisolm - 4 4. Eric Wells - 2 5. 46 tied - 1 1830s view of the Blackstone Canal near today's Kelley Square, looking toward downtown borough from an affiliate of Boston financial services firm State Street Corp. for a total of $26.7 million on Nov. 17, according to the Worcester District Registry of Deeds. In Graon, Amazon bought a 155,000-square-foot flex building on a 1.8-acre lot at 8 Centennial Drive for $15.1 million. e property is part of CenTech Park, a 121-acre technology park located in Graon and Shrewsbury. In Westborough, Amazon bought 600 and 800 Friberg Parkway for $11.6 million. e building at 600 Friberg, a State Street data center, is 99,160 square feet. e 11-acre lot was last sold for $6.5 million in 1992, according to the Westborough Assessor's Office. e two lots are a combined 19 acres. Amazon, the Seattle-based online retailer, did not respond to a request for information as to what the properties' use would be. Amazon Web Services op- erates high security data centers across the country, serving its cloud-computing business. e purchase expands Amazon's over- all operations in Westborough, where it bought a 93-acre lot with an industrial office park for $65 million last year, is expanding its 100,000-square-foot build- ing Amazon Robotics' manufacturing facility at 50 Otis St. to 350,000 square feet, and is leasing a 100,00-square-foot high-bay industrial building at 54 Otis St. under construction. T H E T I C K E R $31.26 New commercial property tax rate in the City of Worcester, the high- est in Central Massachusetts, which is lower than the previous rate of $33.33 and more than double the City's residential rate Source: City of Worcester $220M Combined sale price of Georgetown Apartment Homes development and the former Bayberry Hill Estates Apartments, both in Framingham, which were purchased by Eagle Rock Properties of New York Source: Middlesex South Registry of Deeds 8% Theoretical increase in range for airplanes if they switched from standard jet fuel to a new environmental-friendly formula developed by Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers Source: WPI 202 Rooms at the third largest hotel in Marlborough, the Courtyard by Marriott Boston Marlborough, which was sold on Nov. 28 for $15.3 million Source: Middlesex South Registry of Deeds per $1,000 of assessed value La Scala, on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester W

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