There's an "Opening Soon" sign in the window at 116 Main Street. It's been there long enough that people have stopped asking about it out loud and started asking about it to each other, in the Donelan's parking lot, in the Facebook comments under any post that mentions Cochituate. The sign is for Liberty Pizza, the place with the crispy crust and the meatball subs that plenty of Wayland families ordered from on a Friday night. The building behind that sign burned down almost three years ago. It has since been rebuilt. What's actually going back inside it is a different question than most people driving past assume, and the answer says more about how small-town commercial real estate actually works than any press release does.
What Actually Burned, and What Actually Got Rebuilt
The fire started on October 3, 2023, in the afternoon, inside International Auto Body, the shop that anchored one end of the Cochituate Plaza building alongside Liberty Pizza and Town Cleaners. It escalated to a four-alarm response. Cars parked inside the shop detonated as the fire spread, the roof collapsed, and firefighters from Sudbury, Sherborn, Framingham, Lincoln, Weston, Marlborough, and Concord all either fought the blaze or provided mutual aid to Wayland's own department. The auto body shop was a total loss. Liberty Pizza took heavy smoke damage, and the plaza's other tenants were closed while officials assessed the building. Given the scope of the damage, the entire plaza was ultimately demolished and rebuilt from the foundation up.
Sam Maksimous, who bought Liberty Pizza in 2016 after immigrating from Egypt in 2005, was working in the store when it started.
"I smelled the smoke and people told me to get out, so I went out," he said afterward. "The fire was small, and all of a sudden, it became so big."
Nobody was seriously hurt. One firefighter was treated for a minor injury. But the loss to Maksimous and his wife Shery was total. Everything inside the store, the ovens, the equipment, was gone, and limited insurance assistance left the family covering much of it themselves. Residents also started a GoFundMe for International Auto Body owner Joe Gagliardi, whose shop bore the brunt of the fire. In the weeks after, Wayland High School's student newspaper ran a feature on the Maksimous family, and neighbors quietly rallied behind the scenes to support Liberty's eventual reopening, the kind of response that happens when a restaurant has become part of a town's routine rather than just a place to get dinner.
The Building Coming Back Isn't the Building That Burned
Here's the part that gets lost in the shorthand version of this story, the one where people say "they're finally rebuilding Liberty Pizza" as if the plaza is simply resetting to what it was before the fire. It isn't. The physical rebuild is a smaller, reorganized version of the original footprint, and at least one part of it is turning into something that didn't exist there before.
Liberty Pizza's new space will have a cathedral ceiling, a different layout for the restrooms, counter, and kitchen, and eighteen seats instead of the twenty-six it used to hold. That's a third fewer tables for the same brand, the same menu, the same family, on the same corner. Meanwhile the old International Auto Body space, which used to be a single unit, is being split in two. Wayland's Building Inspector, Tom Zuppa, has said that split creates room for as many as five businesses to eventually occupy the building, up from the roughly four that were there before the fire.
| Before the fire (2023) | What's rebuilt (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Liberty Pizza seating | 26 seats | 18 seats |
| Former auto body footprint | One unit (International Auto Body) | Split into two separate units |
| Total possible tenants | Roughly 4 | Up to 5 |
| Convenience store | Present | Possible return, unconfirmed |
| Cleaners | Present (main location) | Possible satellite return, unconfirmed |
Zuppa has said there's "the possibility for the convenience store to return to this building as well," and that the cleaners "may also return and use this Main Street space as a satellite store." Possibility isn't confirmation. Nobody connected to the project has said either business has signed a lease. The building can hold more small tenants than it used to. Whether it will look like the old plaza, just with better bones, or turn into something with two entirely new storefronts that never existed on that corner before, is still an open question that construction alone won't answer.
Why the Timeline Has Kept Slipping
Part of why residents have stopped trusting any specific reopening date is that the story itself has moved through distinct phases that don't line up with a simple "under construction" narrative. Back in November 2023, a month after the fire, Maksimous estimated the rebuild would take at least a year. By June 2026, more than two and a half years after the fire, local reporting confirmed the building shell itself had been fully rebuilt, but none of the original businesses had reopened yet. The structure was done. The interiors weren't.
Then, as of mid-August 2026, Wayland's Building Commissioner Nate Maltinsky described where things actually stand inside the building: the sheetrock and the hood system for Liberty Pizza's kitchen have just gone up, and the remaining work is interior renovation, not structural. "We try to nurture them and move them along in the process," Maltinsky said. Zuppa added that "the rough electrical, plumbing and framing are in place." Both officials told local reporters the public could realistically expect an opening by the end of 2026, roughly three years and a few months after the fire that started it all. Maksimous himself couldn't be reached for comment on that latest update, which is its own small detail. The people who've been most publicly hopeful about the reopening over these nearly three years, town officials and longtime customers, are the ones talking about it now. The person whose name is on the sign hasn't weighed in publicly in a while.
What to Actually Watch For
If you live nearby and want a realistic read on this rather than another rumor, here's what's confirmed and what isn't:
- Confirmed: the building has been fully reconstructed on its original footprint at 116 Main Street.
- Confirmed: Liberty Pizza's space is framed, has its hood system and sheetrock installed, and is moving through interior finish work.
- Confirmed: the seating capacity will be smaller than before, 18 versus the original 26.
- Confirmed: the former auto body unit is being split into two separate commercial spaces.
- Unconfirmed: whether a convenience store returns to the building.
- Unconfirmed: whether Town Cleaners opens a satellite location there.
- Unconfirmed: an exact reopening date beyond officials' general expectation of "by the end of the year."
None of this is a complaint about slow permitting or a knock on anyone involved. Small commercial rebuilds after a major fire genuinely take years, and a plaza that housed four different small businesses under one roof has more moving parts than a single-tenant building ever would. What's worth knowing, if you've been driving past that sign for nearly three years and wondering, is that the plaza reopening isn't the same plaza closing back up like nothing happened. It's a smaller pizza shop, a reconfigured commercial building, and at least one and possibly two storefronts that Cochituate has never seen before.
That's the texture of a town like Wayland, where a single fire on Main Street becomes a nearly three-year story that half the neighborhood tracks without ever needing a real estate reason to care. We follow these details at Rutledge Properties because this is the kind of thing that makes a town feel like a town, not because it moves a listing. If you're curious about what else is changing in Wayland, or you're thinking ahead to a move in MetroWest and want someone who already knows which corner that pizza sign is on, reach out. Work With Us.
