Town seeks renter for Fiske Law Office

Weston is seeking a tenant willing to sign a four-year lease for the historic Fiske Law Office at 598 Boston Post Road with the intention of welcoming an additional professional office into the space.

The majority of the Boston Post Road neighborhood sits within Residence District D, which requires the space to receive site plan approval from the Planning Board and a special permit from the Select Board. The submission deadline is Jan. 2.

Assistant Town Manager Lisa Yanakakis said the town initially began seeking tenants after residents at the 2003 Annual Town Meeting approved an article to allow leasing of the building. The town has used the property itself several times over the last two decades, with the Department of Public Works using it for office space in the late 2000s and the school district using it for administrative offices when Case House was under renovation.

She said a Request for Proposals (RFP) went out in 2012 that brought Campus TV, a company renting flat-screen TVs to college students, but the company vacated the building after a few months. Additional RFPs went out in 2016, 2022 and earlier in 2025, but were unsuccessful.

This past spring, the Weston Observer was the sole bidder for leasing the building, but negotiations fell through. Select Board member Tom Palmer noted his board and the Observer’s board were “unable to reach mutually acceptable terms.”

Yanakakis said the unique layout of the building is likely one of the reasons why there are few interested businesses.

“I believe the biggest difficulty with the property is that the upper portion of the building is not handicapped accessible from either the Boston Post Road entry or from the lower level,” Yanakakis said. “Therefore this section of the building is not useful to most businesses that were interested. The town contemplated making it accessible, but realized it was not feasible as it could not accommodate a lift along the stairs due to the narrowness of the stairway.”

If town officials were interested in selling the property rather than maintaining it, there is a major hurdle in the way. To sell the property, Weston must first offer the property to Fiske’s heirs for no more than $500.

The Fiske Law Office building has sat at the corner of Boston Post Road and Linwood Avenue since 1805, when it was constructed by Isaac Fiske, one of 18th-century Weston’s most prominent residents. After Charles Fiske Jr. gifted the office to the town in 1928, Weston used it as the town cemetery office until 1936, when it turned the property over to the Weston Historical Committee, according to information compiled by Weston Historical Society President Pam Fox.

In the mid-1900s, the Weston Historical Committee turned the property into veterans housing. After the last tenant died in 1965, the newly formed Weston Historical Society offered to restore the building and use it as a headquarters. The Historical Society turned the building over to the town in the 1990s. Residents in the mid-2000s approved $258,000 in Community Preservation Act money to renovate the building.

Phyllis Halpern, co-chair of the Historical Commission, said the building – an example of the Federal architectural style with a central chimney, clapboard exterior and low hip roof – is a “bookend” to the central area of the Boston Post Road historic district, marking the transition from residential to commercial use.

“It’s symbolic of an old New England Main Street building type,” Halpern said. “I think it’s really important; it’s like the focal point, in some ways, to the historic district because it’s unique.”

She said she is glad the “town is trying to get somebody to occupy the building,” as preserving history is important for informing people where they came from.

“It’s good for a location to know where it comes from, how it got formed … Once a building is torn down, it’s gone forever,” Halpern said. “If you maintain it to be revitalized, that’s the way you keep history alive. It’s healthy for a community to have buildings of different generations to show the way of life.”