5 years after the Natick Center fire, here’s how business owners have moved on

Five years ago this Monday, July 22, a nine-alarm fire raged for over fifteen hours in the Walcott block, a building at the intersection of Route 27, Route 135, and Pond Street in Natick Center. Firefighters from Natick and over a dozen surrounding communities contributed their efforts, and three firefighters suffered minor injuries. Even with all those hands on deck, however, all eight stores in the building were destroyed. 

In the five years since, the owners of those shops have had a wide variety of experiences moving on, especially when the Covid pandemic presented a second challenge for their businesses less than eight months after the fire.   

We caught up with Nancy Kelley of Nancy Kelley Dance Studio, Deborah Smith of Iron Horse, and Linda Zanoni of the Christian Science Reading Room to hear about the impact of the fire and what their businesses have been doing since. 

Nancy Kelley Dance Studio

Nancy Kelley has been teaching dance in Natick since she was nine years old and charging 10 cents for lessons in her house. So, when her studio burned down in the fire, she didn’t let that stop her.

The Nancy Kelley Dance Studio had been located in the Walcott block since 1984. Some of its students have gone on to dance professionally—even on Broadway—or to open up their own dance studios. Further, some older students have danced with Kelley for decades. 

“This dance studio is like a family,” Kelley said. “You’re not only learning dance here; you learn how to be together like a team and respect each other, [how to] be kind. Also I bring up [the dangers of] drinking and driving when they get to the age where they’re going to party.”

Kelley’s brother and his fiancée were killed by a drunk driver in 1985, soon after Kelley opened her studio in the Walcott block. This tragedy gives her a sense of perspective when she thinks about the fire. 

“The fire was bad. It was something that I never thought would ever happen,” Kelley said. “But, I’ve had some tragedy in my life. … [So, after the fire,] it was either I pull my bootstraps up and go find another place or I dig a hole and I don’t. When something bad happens, I just pull myself up and I’ve just gotta move on and do what I do because I love to dance and I love teaching [dance].” 

In addition to Kelley’s own determination, a community effort helped the Nancy Kelley Dance Studio survive the fire. For example, the landlord for the studio’s new location—11 Pond St., sharing a wall with the old studio—found Kelley, rather than Kelley having to find them. 

In addition, firefighters were there for Kelley on the day of the fire and the days after, when she continued to come down to Natick Center and watch in shock. They rescued everything they could from the studio. 

“I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the kindness of the Natick firefighters,” Kelley said. “[They’re] just so so kind and really [tried] to help me get some stuff out of there that was still salvageable.”

Among the salvageable items were three burned banners. One firefighter told Kelley that he wanted her to walk those banners in Natick’s Fourth of July parade, in which Kelley had participated since age nine, to remind people of what had happened to her studio in the fire. 

Even though Kelley’s business survived the fire, the event still has an impact.  

“When I see the fires on the news I can relate,” Kelley said. “You can relate better to the displacement [after] you look at your business just go up in smoke.”

Kelley keeps in mind, though, that it is the people, not the location, that make her studio what it is. 

“It’s the same,” Kelley said. “Different place. It doesn’t make a difference, honestly, what place you’re teaching in; it’s the people that are in it what makes everything worthwhile.”

Iron Horse

Natick Center had been a good home for Iron Horse, a local shop that sells homemade and commercial yarn and other fiber art supplies and offers group classes, private support sessions, Knit-A-Longs, and occasional workshops. The business moved to the Walcott block in 2009 after outgrowing its owners’ farm, where it had been housed since 1998. Iron Horse was successful in Natick Center for ten years, owner Deborah Smith wrote in an email to the Natick Report.  

“This business started with a dream and was built up with lots of hard work,” Smith added. 

Smith has firefighters in her family. As such, she had the background knowledge to know, even on the day of the fire, that her store would be totally destroyed due to the building’s age and lack of a sprinkler system. For 14 hours, she watched her store burn. 

“The fire and losing the store was like losing a child,” Smith wrote. 

Nothing from the store was salvageable. 

Smith and her husband searched for another Natick location for a few weeks, then decided to open back up in the original barn while they figured everything out. They reopened there in December 2019—only to be confronted with Covid shutdowns three months later. 

The business still feels the impact of these two unexpected obstacles. 

“The clientele has slowly diminished,” Smith wrote. “Though we still have a very small loyal base of customers and students, it will never be what it was in Natick.”

Christian Science Reading Room

The Christian Science Reading Room serves as the public-facing space of First Church of Christ, Scientist, Natick. The reading room, which is a nonprofit, had been located in the Walcott block since 1988. It sells bibles, kids’ products, church publications, and more. 

All of these items burned during the fire. 

“[Being a nonprofit] alleviates some of the stress that a for-profit business would have, but it was still pretty tough when everything went up in smoke, from [our] computer to [our] cash box to all of the product that [we] had invested in,” Linda Zanoni, the reading room’s librarian, said. “[We were] pretty devastated.”

In the face of that loss, though, the reading room staff made an effort to maintain a presence and continue to serve the town. For example, they went to an event on the town green the following weekend so that the community would know they were still around. 

“[Our focus was on] how do you regroup and how do you make that phoenix come out of the fire,” Zanoni, who was a volunteer with the reading room at the time, recalled. 

 An important step towards this goal was replenishing inventory. A different reading room had recently closed, and when its staff heard about the fire, they took their materials out of storage and donated them to Natick’s reading room. To this day, many of the materials in the Natick Center location are donated.

Natick’s reading room staff spent about a year looking for a new location. They relocated first to Washington Street, near the Morse Institute Library, and then ended up at their current location: 21 Pond Street, which is in Natick Center. 

Zanoni is happy with the reading room’s new home, especially the foot traffic it attracts from people walking into the center of town. 

 “The businesses around here really require the foot traffic,” she said. “People come over here because it’s a location.”

Being located next to a pet store, Clip & Dip Dog Grooming, which was also displaced by the fire, Zanoni sees a new kind of foot traffic as well: four-foot traffic. Dog owners are sometimes so engrossed by their phones that they walk all the way into the reading room, dog in tow, before they discover that they’re in the wrong location. Zanoni enjoys seeing the look of realization on their faces. 

All in all, the reading room has mostly moved on to life after the fire.

“It’s a change and then you have a new normal,” Zanoni said. “Whether it’s the fire or whether it’s Covid, this is the new existence. Both locations have served us well and it’s been nice to see that there have been places in town where we could find a new home.”

5 years later

Five years after the fire, construction is just starting to ramp up in the space that the fire left behind. 

The long-empty block will be replaced by… The Block, a building that will host a variety of shops, possibly including restaurants, art stores, and more. The new Block aims to open in 2025, according to its website. 

Zanoni believes that it is time for something new to be moving in, and it has been interesting and fun for her to watch The Block take shape. 

“We’re happy to see the progress [Natick] is making,” Zanoni said. “It’s lovely to see the town growing.”

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