Pickering Wharf Has Two New Tenants and One Old Problem

Walk down Wharf Street on a September evening and the wharf still does what it has always done. The masts click against their rigging, string lights come on over a couple of patios, and somebody's dog is getting a water bowl at Longboards before the dinner rush. It feels, for a minute, exactly like the version of Pickering Wharf that's been sold to visitors for decades: shops, boats, harbor air.

Then you notice the empty storefront near the marina gate, the one that one recent visitor account describes as having a mattress propped against its window for the third time they'd seen it there. The paint above it has gone gray and is starting to peel. Where there used to be a hedge along the walkway, there's a patch of bare dirt.

Both of those things are true on the same block, at the same time, and neither one is the whole story.

Two New Signs Went Up This Year

The Salem Arts Association spent decades in a different part of the city before relocating to a new home at Pickering Wharf, at 88 Wharf Street. The Salem Chamber of Commerce marked the move with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in June, and the space opened with an exhibition called "On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America," running from June 20 through July 25. It's a working gallery now, with room for exhibitions, education programs, and the kind of community drop-in energy the wharf's shops have offered for years but its cultural life mostly hasn't.

A few weeks from now, a second arrival lands a short walk away. Stardust Witchcraft Shop, previously located farther from the downtown core, is relocating to Pickering Wharf with a grand opening planned for mid-October, timed to the city's busiest season. The shop's owner has said the old location was simply too far from downtown, and that the wharf move puts the business back where its customers already are. Stardust's plan isn't just a retail relocation. The store intends to run a weekly "Magickal Meet-up" and a full slate of readings, tours, and classes that extend well past October, positioning itself as a fixture rather than a seasonal pop-up.

Two new names, two ribbon-cuttings' worth of investment, both choosing the wharf specifically. That's not nothing, and it's worth sitting with before getting to the other half of this.

The Businesses Keep Betting on This Address

The arts association and Stardust aren't arriving into a vacuum. Longboards Restaurant & Bar, founded on the wharf in 2011 by brothers Justin and Matthew Mattera, moved next door into a space roughly four times its original size back in September 2023, adding a function room upstairs, shuffleboard, darts, and a regular comedy night on top of the lobster rolls it's known for. That's a business that had every opportunity to leave the wharf for cheaper square footage elsewhere in Salem and instead chose to go bigger, on the same block, three years ago.

The current lineup around Longboards reads like a small, self-contained commercial strip: Finz Seafood & Grill and Sea Level Oyster Bar for harbor-view dining, Amazing Pizza for a slice on the walkway, Circle of Stitches for fiber arts, Timeless Life Treasures for handmade gifts and jewelry repair, plus The Witchery and Tarot Cove for the readings-and-ritual crowd that Stardust is now joining. Add Mahi Cruises running boat trips out of the marina and you have a wharf that, tenant by tenant, keeps reinvesting in itself.

This is the part of the story that shows up in every glossy "best of Pickering Wharf" roundup, and it's true. It's also only half of what's actually happening down there this year.

Nobody's Painting the Building

The other half shows up in the complaints, and they're specific enough to take seriously. One recent visitor account describes a Memorial Day visit expecting the usual seasonal touches, flowers, fresh plantings, flags, and finding instead peeling paint on buildings, several empty storefronts, and a mattress propped against a vacant shop window for the third time the reviewer had seen it there. Where shrubs used to line the walkway, the same account describes only bare patches of dirt. It's not an isolated complaint either. Other entries on Tripadvisor's Pickering Wharf page echo the same contrast: praise for individual shops and restaurants sitting right next to notes about the common areas looking neglected.

Here's the detail that explains why the two halves of this story don't connect the way you'd expect. Pickering Wharf isn't managed by the businesses that occupy it. A 2019 filing with the Salem Planning Board, on file with the city, lists the property's owner as Pickering Wharf Complex LLC, the entity that controls the common grounds, the shared landscaping, and the empty units between tenants. The businesses lease their individual spaces from that ownership group. When Longboards quadruples its footprint or Stardust signs a lease, they're investing in the square footage they control. The walkway, the planting beds, the vacant storefront with the mattress in the window, none of that is theirs to fix.

Two Different Incentives, One Address

This is the piece that gets lost when the wharf gets covered as a single story, whether the coverage is glowing or grim. The tenants have every reason to keep investing. Their revenue depends on foot traffic, on the wharf feeling like somewhere worth stopping. Longboards' 2023 expansion, the Salem Arts Association's move, Stardust's plan for weekly programming, all of it comes from businesses betting on the address because it works for them.

Ownership of the shared property answers to a different set of incentives entirely, ones that don't necessarily track with how the wharf looks or feels day to day. A landscaping bed that's gone unplanted for a season and a storefront that's sat vacant long enough to become a running joke among regulars aren't signs that the wharf is failing. They're signs that the property's upkeep and its tenant mix are, at the moment, running on two completely separate tracks.

If you live near the wharf or walk it regularly, that's the useful thing to know heading into fall. The Salem Arts Association's gallery and Stardust's October opening are real reasons the wharf has more going on than it did a year ago. The peeling paint and the bare dirt aren't a sign that the newer arrivals are failing to catch on. They're just proof that nobody who leases space down there is responsible for the parts of the property nobody leases.

Both things are happening at once. Neither one cancels the other out, and neither one tells you the whole story by itself.

If you're keeping an eye on Salem's waterfront corridor for reasons that go beyond an evening walk, whether that's watching how a specific commercial block is trending or wondering what a change like this signals for property nearby, The Agency Marblehead tracks these shifts as they happen, not after they've already been written about everywhere else. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually changing along the North Shore waterfront.