To Call Allston Home
On the surface, Allston’s high turnover makes our neighborhood seem like a place where people come and go. But its residents — renters, homeowners, artists, families — refuse to let transience define them. Today, they are fighting for a community where those who want to stay can stay.Punk City. Rock City. Rat City. Despite growing up in Allston, we still struggle to find a singular epithet to encapsulate our neighborhood. Here, spray paint and street art bring electrical boxes and brick walls to life. Light poles become chaotic collages of guitar stickers and flyers for upcoming basement shows. There is no shortage of vintage shops, music stores, dance studios and spicy Korean food that call Allston’s ZIP code, 02134, home.
All our neighbors seem to have a “weird” Allston story. Ali J. Iaria, who has rented in Allston since her days as a Berklee student, calls it “Allston: the video game,” where she would watch college girls wearing mini-skirts in December or naked guys screaming on the street, checking them off in her head like a bingo card. Lizzie M. Torres, another resident, remembers a time where she could reach out and touch Phoebe Bridgers as a budding artist performing at Great Scott, a local concert venue. Zach A. Shelley and Genesis E. Lara, local artists, were locked out of their apartment until a parkourist monkeyed up a telephone pole and jumped into their window on the third floor to unlock the door.
It’s no secret that many of those who live — or have lived — in Allston love the neighborhood. Some tell us it’s the “coolest neighborhood in the country.” They want to stay as long as they can.
But staying isn’t so easy. Allston is a community where residents and businesses turn over each year. Ninety percent of all houses are rentals, and it’s not just college students that stay in these units. It’s artists, musicians, young professionals, and families. Some stay for a year — just to ride out their school semesters — but some stay for longer, renewing their lease until they can no longer afford the rising rent.
Allston is changing for everyone. It is no longer a neighborhood teeming street to street with families and kids. It is no longer the place where you can sign a lease for a few hundred dollars a month. Property taxes shot up last quarter. Rent prices rise in leaps and bounds. Practice spaces and studios are becoming harder to come by for artists and musicians. Basement shows for up-and-coming DJs are constantly shut down by police. Community centers are closing for families. It’s becoming harder to set roots in the neighborhood.
On the surface, Allston’s high turnover makes our neighborhood seem like a place where people come and go.
But Allston residents — renters, homeowners, artists, families — refuse to let transience define them. Today, they are advocating for stronger infrastructure, funding, and community benefits from the city and developers like Harvard. They are fighting for a community where those who want to stay can stay.
“We are not as much of a transient neighborhood as people think, because we do have people that want to live here long term,” says Ricky T. Meinke, who formerly rented in Allston and now lives in Brighton, an adjacent neighborhood. “We’re not transient by choice. We’re transient by design.”
'A Rite of Passage'
As old leases end and new ones begin, early September marks a special holiday for the neighborhood: Allston Christmas. Walking around, you’ll see sidewalks filled with free furniture, TVs, books, and lamps left by former tenants. You’ll see U-Haul trucks making their way in and out of the neighborhood. You might also see Kelly E. Regan, knocking on doors, meeting new residents, and handing out pamphlets outlining renters’ rights on behalf of the Greater Boston Tenants Union.
According to Regan, many of the units that renters are settling into have code violations. Renters we spoke to recall rats squeaking within the walls, water leaking from the ceiling, and carbon monoxide seeping from a defective vent. Their complaints signal a deeper issue with Allston’s apartments: landlords put band-aids on issues that need surgery. Allstonians rely on each other to patch up the broken infrastructure.
In Iaria’s first apartment, her bathroom door would have hit the toilet seat if it weren’t for her landlord’s solution: a cutout in the door. Anyone walking past could see into the bathroom, Iaria recalls. “It felt like a rite of passage, but then when you think about it, these people are making so much money off of my rite of passage,’” she says. “What it is is a way to perpetuate that neglect is okay when it’s not.”
Sarah K. Iwany says that finding a place in Allston requires a balance of “roommates that don't suck, a management company that doesn’t suck, and a place I can afford.” When she first came to Allston, Iwany lived in a sublet before moving to Somerville for a year. When she returned to Allston, she rented from Alpha Management Corporations at “The GAP” — a cluster of apartments at the intersection between Gardner, Ashford, and Pratt Streets.
When she lived there, a vent malfunctioned and began pumping carbon monoxide into her apartment. Iwany says that Alpha Management did not respond to her concerns, so she escalated them to National Grid. Even then, she alleges that the management company resisted orders from National Grid to fix the vent as the toxic gas pervaded her unit. After more back and forth, Alpha Management finally relented.
“These are things that are extremely illegal, and I actually have rights, and I can say something about that, right?” says Iwany, whose initial experiences sparked her interest in renter advocacy. “You do have to actually fix the vent that’s pumping carbon monoxide into our apartment.”
“We have looked back in our records and have no record of such an incident,” writes Munther Faisal from Alpha Management Corporation in a statement. “The safety and well-being of our residents are our top priorities.”
After a year, Iwany moved out and rented another apartment managed by Samia Companies LLC. There, water leaked into her light fixture whenever her upstairs neighbors would shower. When she called the management corporation, they told her to go upstairs and ask her neighbors, whom she never met before, to stop showering. After a couple more weeks of calling, she says they finally came in and cut a hole in her bathroom ceiling.
Samia Companies LLC did not respond to a request for comment.
Iaria and Iwany are not alone. Several renters we spoke to say that many property managers and absentee landlords have less of a stake in the upkeep of their units since they expect their tenants to stay for only a year. To them, a complaining tenant will be gone in a few months.
But not all tenants want to be short-term. Lizzie Torres has rented in Allston for a decade. She moved to Boston in 2010 as an undergraduate student at Northeastern studying political science. She discovered Allston a year later, attending basement shows with friends from Berklee, going to concerts at Great Scott, and eventually renting a unit with three friends. She lived in that unit for seven years, but she had to find a new apartment after an absentee landlord increased fees on laundry and illegally attempted to charge sublet fees not outlined in her lease, she says. She now lives elsewhere in Allston.
To remain in Allston, Torres has had to scaffold together rent, often with the help of other renters. “We’ve been passing around the same $25 via Venmo to make sure we didn’t overdraft,” she says. They find other ways to support each other — spending hours on legal websites to learn about tenant rights or directing renters to the Attorney General’s office to advocate their needs.
At the same time, Torres turned to more formal methods of advocacy and founded Boston Artist Impact, an artist advocacy organization. She also created Allston Pride Week, a series of events to celebrate the neighborhood’s queer community. Through her advocacy, she’s made a name for herself in the neighborhood. “Everybody knows that Lizzie’s always gonna rock for Allston-Brighton,” she says. “The people know that about me.”
A few years ago, Torres was looking for a new apartment in Allston. Because she found a local landlord who was familiar with her advocacy work, she felt like she had more of a say in negotiating the terms in her lease so that she could stay.
“Any landlord who’s actually walked around their property and is very connected to the property would tell you, ‘I’d rather keep the tenant I knew because I can build a rapport with them,’” says Torres. “There is no rapport building around here, which makes it hard for renters to stay in a home.”
Local relationships — whether with a landlord or with other renters — help tenants feel rooted in the neighborhood. When we meet Regan in early March, she’s running a social gathering for Allston tenants at Model Cafe, a dimly-lit bar. It’s pouring outside, but inside, people fill the tables as rock music plays in the background. Some are old friends, but others are introducing themselves for the first time. Everyone is laughing over odd things they picked up during Allston Christmas, the rats that scurry around their apartment, or their next band performance at Pavement Coffeehouse. They tell each other about the next tenants’ meeting later that month.
“It’s really encouraging to see so many people excited to join the tenants’ union, or just to help make Allston a better place,” says Regan. “That’s something I really appreciate about Allston and why I want to continue to stay here. The longer that you’re in a community, the more connections you have. And it just makes your life feel better.”
'Fool’s Gold'
From the outside, Studio 52 looks like an old loading dock. It’s three stories high and could fit two or three trucks side by side. At the base of the stairwell to the entrance, cigarette butts are scattered in a neon-orange Home Depot bucket. The rhythmic clashes of cymbals and rapid thumps of drums surround us as we pass through the halls. On this particular Monday night, the band Actor Observer is gearing up for their concert next week, celebrating the tenth anniversary of their first album.
Greg W. Marquis, one of the founding members and the lead vocalist in the five-person group, calls the band’s continued existence “miraculous.” He says that for many musicians and artists, spaces to practice and perform in Allston are becoming harder to book. In fact, Studio 52 was slated to be relocated to a smaller space amid redevelopment. When the purchase for its original building fell through, the landowner re-opened it to musicians for the time being.
Other places have not been as lucky. The Orchard Skateshop, which hosted art shows, was pushed out after the landlord decided not to renew the lease. The Sound Museum, which was a practice space for countless bands, was demolished to make way for biotech labs. Funding fell through, and now it’s a pile of rubble.
In the past, Allston’s cheap rent, accessible studio space, and casual concert venues have made it an incubator for the careers of local bands such as Aerosmith, which started on the second floor of an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in the 1970s. Over the past decade, development has stripped away the infrastructure that has long supported up-and-coming bands.
When Marquis started Actor Observer in 2009, basement shows in Allston came a dime a dozen. As a first-year at Berklee in the mid-2000s, Nick J. Grieco, a guitarist in the band, recalls how he would often roam around the neighborhood and stumble into three basement shows in a single night.
For new bands, these basement shows are often where they get their start. According to Marquis and Grieco, artists would spend their time at shows and parties looking for people to book their next gig. If they make a name for themselves in a basement show, they can move up to a bigger venue like O’Brien’s Pub or Great Scott. Grieco calls this progression “rungs on a ladder.”
Today, these rungs are falling away, eroding opportunities for new artists to gain their footing. The decline, according to Grieco, began shortly after 2010 when police began shutting down basement shows. By 2013, the casual shows that Grieco frequented had all but dried up. It became known as the “Allston Basement Purge.”
Zach A. Shelley, also known as “Zeko Deshoda,” runs his own event company Stamina DJ Collective. He says that the rocky relationship between police and artists has especially hurt the underground art community. According to Shelley, constant police raids force musicians to move out of Allston and perform elsewhere.
Beyond basement venues, other rungs are coming apart as well. Great Scott, an iconic music venue from the ’70s known for its local bands and cheap tickets, closed its doors during the pandemic. It was replaced four years later by a Taco Bell.
“Suddenly, everybody’s running around like chickens with their heads cut off. ‘Where am I gonna go to see good shows in my community?’ And then, ‘where am I gonna book?’” says Grieco. “At the end of the day, in this day and age, the name of the game is momentum, and as soon as your local spots disappear as an option, the band loses momentum.”
For Marquis, momentum finds itself in the small moments: in long lines of fans gathered on a weekday night to see a live show at O’Brien’s, in the connections with people willing to take a chance and book a new band for a basement show, and in serendipitous encounters, like bumping into a stranger wearing your favorite local band’s hoodie at a restaurant.
But at the same time, momentum requires time and permanence — a luxury that neither band members nor their fans can afford in the neighborhood. As students graduate, renters are priced out, and venues change and close, Marquis tells us that a local band is hard-pressed to maintain that traction.
“All that momentum we built, all that community we built — four years later, we’re looking at all new faces, and it’s hard to connect the dots and keep that consistency and that momentum,” says Marquis. “It kind of feels like you’re starting over every couple years.”
Everyone in Actor Observer has had to rearrange their lives to keep the band going. At one point, Jake M. Satow, one of the band members, calls it a “lifelong internship,” and everyone in the studio laughs. He’s only half-joking. In the last five years, he’s had to quit eight jobs to go on tour with the band. Grieco has worked as a bartender since he was 21 because the night hours are more accommodating for last-minute performances. Marquis has held as many as five different jobs at the same time, from walking dogs to working at an Apple Store.
Dwindling infrastructure and rising rent forces artists to spread themselves even thinner to afford staying in the community.
Genesis Lara, a local artist and renter, tells us that she is working four jobs. She is a freelancer. She designs event flyers for Stamina. On top of that, she works two restaurant jobs. As artists take on more and more responsibilities to stay in Allston, it becomes a tug-of-war between staying afloat financially and pursuing their art, she says.
In the end, many artists end up leaving. Lara tells us that she has seen her creative friends priced out of the neighborhood. Some of Actor Observer’s original members had to quit the band when they couldn’t afford to stay. Satow, the band’s current bassist, lives in Maine because it’s cheaper for him to own an apartment there than to rent in Allston. Despite this, he still drives hours on end several times a week to rehearse at Studio 52.
For Marquis, when a band member or fan leaves Allston, their departure feels like a personal blow to their community. “The heartbreaking part is how often we see that fracture, because it’s real life and money is real, and staying in a city that’s expensive is hard,” he says. “We’ve had friends leave because it’s too expensive, and that’s a piece of our community gone. We’ve had businesses leave. That’s a piece of our community gone. So the instability is basically an attack on the thing that makes us love it the most.”
This fracture underlies the band’s most-played song, “Fool’s Gold.” It was the first time Actor Observer released something sociopolitical, and they worked meticulously to strike a balance. “How do you write a song about gentrification without sounding fucking lame?” says Marquis.
In 2023, Marquis and the band performed “Fool’s Gold” at Boston Calling, a music festival that drew over 40,000 attendees to Allston. A few months later, they released a music video, superimposing their Boston Calling performance in front of roaring fans onto the empty buildings of Allston awaiting development.
The lyrics and instrumentation for the song blend together and toe the line between catharsis and optimism. Over major chords strummed in the background, Marquis’s shouts are resounding as he sings the first few verses:
“The storefronts change
But our problems stay the same
And if you stay here long enough
Soon you won’t recognize a face
We have been let down
By a place that never promised us a thing”
'The Red-Headed Stepchild of Boston'
A few blocks away from Studio 52, we meet Ricky Meinke at the Notch Brewing, a brewery and tap room down Western Avenue. Meinke, who first rented in Allston in 2015, is behind the creation of many initiatives in the neighborhood such as the Rat City Arts Festival, the Allston-Brighton Renters’ Garden Contest, and Allston Pride Week. He has short brown hair, a neatly-trimmed mustache, and round glasses; he’s wearing a fuzzy white fleece decorated with black daisies.
Meinke jumps into telling us that he had spent the morning searching for daycares. He and his partner are expecting his first child in June. But for Meinke, daycare could cost as much as a month’s rent, if not more.
“If I can’t afford to live here anymore, if I can’t afford the daycare here, if the schools are closing in the neighborhood — to keep surviving, I might have to go and move somewhere else,” says Meinke.
With the lack of affordable daycare options, the loss of public schools, and the deficit of city investment in the neighborhood’s infrastructure, Allston is becoming difficult for families to live in.
The neighborhood wasn’t always this way. Marlene A. Scanlon, a long-time resident who still lives in the same home where she grew up, remembers a time when every house on her street was occupied by a family with four or five children. As a child, she would play with her neighbors from sunup to sundown, stopping only for lunch or supper. As a teenager, she would go see the movie theaters or knock down pins at the bowling alley up on Harvard Avenue, which they nicknamed “The Ave.” The boys would prank the girls by driving them in their cars across the river to Mount Auburn Cemetery before leaving them in the dust. Teens would chase each other with eggs on Halloween — eventually, the stores would refuse to sell eggs to them during that holiday.
“My God, it was a blast!” she tells us, chuckling as she recounts these stories.
Another long-time resident, Paul F. Creighton, Jr., tells a similar story: when he was growing up, there were so many kids that they could fill 10 Little League baseball teams in Allston and Brighton. Around his block, there were three brick-clad schools: David L. Barrett, Thomas Gardner (now the Gardner Pilot Academy), and St. Anthony Parish, which doubled as a community center.
This type of infrastructure no longer exists, he says.
Scanlon noticed the environment shift as colleges, including Harvard, began to expand into Allston in the late 1980s. Soon, rent began to rise, and families could no longer afford to live in the neighborhood. This created a feedback loop: the more families moved out, the more the infrastructure meant to support them became obsolete, which caused even more families to leave. Saint Anthony’s closed their school in 2005 amidst dwindling enrollment. While schools like the Gardner Pilot Academy remained, local students were assigned to public schools outside of the neighborhood. Fewer and fewer Allston kids went to schools nearby.
Similar to Saint Anthony’s, Jackson-Mann K-8 School and Community Center operated as a school by day and a community center by night. Located in the heart of Allston, the center used to host after-school arts and music programs for kids as well as ESL literacy classes and job programs for adults.
The building, however, was crumbling, and programs began to downsize. The school closed in 2022, and the entire community center is currently slated for demolition. Since the closure, Jackson-Mann’s programs have operated in a limited capacity. For expecting parents like Meinke, the loss of the school and much of its community programs causes them to question whether it’s worth it to stay in Allston.
“I’m starting to ask folks, ‘why would a family stay here?’” says Meinke. “The neighborhood is changing in a way where we may not be as welcoming to a new family or even a new professional, a new person just moving in here, because it might cost so much and resources around the area might be dwindling,” he adds.
Jackson-Mann has been a sore subject for Allston residents. While other Boston neighborhoods have multiple Boston Centers for Youth and Families centers, Jackson-Mann is the only one in Allston.
Residents and community advocates have been vocal about the center for years. A recent city council hearing on Jackson-Mann drew hundreds of residents. According to Torres, who attended the meeting, one of the city councilors from Hyde Park said he had never seen a BCYF community center in such bad condition. Still, residents feel that the city is dragging its feet in addressing their calls for a renewed community center.
“One of my business owners keeps saying ‘Allston’s the red-headed stepchild of Boston,’” says Alex L. Cornacchini, the Executive Director of Allston Village Main Streets, an organization that supports local businesses. Despite being the second largest neighborhood in Boston, Allston-Brighton often places dead last for city funding.
According to Scanlon, there’s a belief amongst long-time residents that Allston is always at the “bottom of the list” because the city considers it “a transient part of town.” But Allstonians are pushing back against that label.
“They just think of it as a space for college students, and I think that’s just a very ignorant statement,” Meinke says. “There’s tons of families already here, from young families to families who have lived here for generations.”
Lizzie Torres, who previously worked for the City of Boston, believes decision-makers are missing the point when they view Allston as a transient community. She says Allston is “an easy thing to cut off and dismiss if there is an agreement amongst decision-makers that no one stays long enough to invest in it — rather than seeing it like, if you invested in it, people would stay longer.”
Amidst the dwindling number of families and the lack of city-funded infrastructure, Allstonians have taken it upon themselves to create resources that keep families in the neighborhood.
On Western Avenue, Charlesview Inc. is a cluster of 240 units — some rentals, some contiguous for home ownership. All of them are considered affordable, allowing many of the residents to stay. In fact, according to its executive director Jo-Ann Barbour, it only experienced five or six turnovers in their units last year. Some of the units have been inhabited by the same family for three generations.
Aside from affordable housing, Charlesview offers community services and spaces that are open to all Allston residents, not just those living in its units. On the first floor, there is a mural painted by a Boston College student. There is also a computer lab and printer available to anyone in the community. Next door, new immigrants can take ESL and citizenship courses. A few times a week, new parents can bring their toddlers to playgroups hosted by the Family Nurturing Center.
“It’s kind of like throwing spaghetti at the wall, right? If people like it and they want to come, then we’ll keep doing it,” says Barbour. “It was really about getting to know the community, getting to know what folks wanted, what they needed, and then being able to make this the center available for them to do that.”
Down the street from Charlesview, the Harvard Ed Portal is another community space for Allston residents. The front desk is lined with flyers advertising community art and music events in different languages. Elementary and middle school students can come in to build paper roller coasters in the science lab, grow microgreens, or craft their own short stories in the art room. Their parents can practice yoga next to the youth space or freshen up their resumes through the jobs program.
While they appreciate the benefits that the Ed Portal brings, residents are pushing Harvard, which owns a third of the land in Allston, to invest more deeply in the community.
“The Harvard Ed Portal — I hope that stays for us long term. They provide some great services out there. They have really amazing people working there,” says long-time Allston resident Tahir A. Huissen. Still, he says that Harvard “could listen more to the residents and see where the needs were, they’ve got the money and the resources. I think they can do it — be more of a partner and not look at it only from a business person’s point of view.”
In a statement to the Crimson, Harvard spokesperson Amy Kamosa writes,“Harvard is proud to be part of the Allston-Brighton community and to work closely with community members and city leaders to develop and deliver programs and initiatives that evolve in response to community needs and contribute to the vibrancy and strength of the neighborhood.”
While many neighbors believe that Harvard must do more for Allston, such as funding Jackson-Mann or providing land donations to mitigate housing unaffordability, others worry that expecting Harvard to be the primary contributor to Allston’s infrastructure distracts from the deeper issue of city underfunding.
“We can’t expect Harvard to do things that the city should do,” says Elizabeth “Liz” A. Breadon, the Boston City Councilor for Allston-Brighton. “We need the city to at least be more invested in the public infrastructure here. And the community centers are one particular aspect of that.”
It’s A Small World, But It’s A Whole World
Across the street from Jackson-Mann, Twin Donuts is bustling with people the day before it closes for good.
Allstonians, old and new, come from all over to say goodbye to their favorite boxes of eggs, bacon, French toast and syrup, styrofoam cups of iced tea and coffee, classic donuts, and the Taing-Pang family who ran the diner for more than two decades. We sit at a worn gray table, amid a long line and filled seats, with copious amounts of sun streaming in through the windows. On one of the window panels next to the line is a poster where customers have written small messages and odes to the diner.
“For feeding ROCK CITY!” “Thank you for being the anchor in the community that cultivated my very best friend group.” “This place kept me alive during grad school … THANK YOU SO MUCH!” “We will miss you! You’ve seen me and my family through childhood.” “Thank you for healing our hangovers since 2014.” “Since the ’80’s when I had a gf.” “Voy a llorar cada noche sin ti (I’m going to cry every night without you).” “This is my first time here! Will miss this place.” “First meal in America, Jan ’23.”
As we begin munching on our donuts, the door opens and we see a familiar face: it’s Ricky Meinke, here for a last Twin Donuts meal of his own. After interviewing so many Allstonians, it’s not uncommon to bump into one of them at an event for the neighborhood or walking down the street.
To many of us, Allston feels like the entire world packed into a neighborhood. On a single street, we find a Burmese restaurant, a Pakistani grocery store, a Turkish cafe, and an Irish pub. Renters live next to homes that have been owned by the same family for generations. Artists practice in studios near a rehabilitation center that serves many seniors. At a local bar, we saw two young mothers holding their infants and sipping Guinesses beside a man in business formal typing away on his laptop. It’s a small world, but it’s a whole world.
The sweeping diversity of the neighborhood has created differing, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of what Allston should be.
Take bike lanes, for example. It’s something that comes up constantly in neighborhood meetings about Allston. During some of these meetings, older residents, who typically need cars to move around, say that bike lanes take up room that could be used for parking spaces. Younger residents disagree, arguing that they are necessary for safety. Between conflicting statements and competing needs, developers and city managers smile and nod — before moving on to other issues.
Many of Torres’s friends, who are artists and renters, have little choice but to bike to work because they cannot afford a car or auto insurance. When she worked for the City of Boston, she received 311 alerts on her phone whenever there was a cycling accident. Her heart rate spiked whenever she saw one in Allston.
She sees the debate around bike lanes as a disconnect in priorities between different groups in Allston, particularly between homeowners, who are often older, and renters, who are younger.
“The worst thing that’s gonna happen to you is that you’re in a warm car waiting,” she says. “The worst thing that happens to one of my friends is that they are dead. We are just not talking about the same thing right now.”
On the other hand, Scanlon, who just had her knee replaced, says that many of the elderly cannot use bikes and rely on cars to get around. Without enough parking spaces, she believes that residents from other streets will park at her front door and make it more difficult for her to reach her vehicle.
Torres thinks these generational differences extend beyond bike lanes. At an Allston Civic Association meeting, community members discussed building affordable units for residents who made between $50,000 and $70,000 — the typical range for an entry-level position in Boston. She remembers someone on the phone saying, “If you can’t survive on $50,000, you don’t deserve to be a grown-up on your own.”
“I don’t encounter that level of rude very often, but I do encounter that mentality a lot,” she says. “The idea of, ‘are you sure that you know how to manage your money? Are you sure that you know how to budget? Are you sure?’”
Meinke says the generational divide results in “a contrast in the level of care we have for different things in the neighborhood.” Some long-time residents hope to keep their neighborhood as family-friendly as possible, whether that’s keeping trees, building parking lots, or closing bars by 2 a.m. But another group — artists, musicians, small business owners — want practice spaces, performance venues, or later noise restrictions to keep their craft alive. Meinke says that these siloed visions of Allston creates a cycle where individuals only advocate for their own needs without considering their connection to the wider community.
Still, some residents feel that their status as renters undercuts the power of their voices at community meetings. Both Ali Iaria and Meinke, who have rented in the neighborhood for 20 and eight years respectively, say that some people still don’t consider them Allston residents. At times, they feel that their voices are dismissed at these meetings — cast away because they won’t stay for long and don’t have an investment in the community.
Breadon, the Allston-Brighton City Councilor, believes that the voices of Allston residents are stronger when they realize that they have much more in common over day-to-day issues than they think.
“That’s where we shoot ourselves in the foot. We divide into these factions, and it means that we politically have less power,” says Breadon. “If we all work together to get the things that we need for our neighborhood, we would be in better shape.”
One Big Family
In spite of these divisions, community organizers — young and old, renters and homeowners — are learning to embrace their differences and make advocacy more inclusive in Allston’s DIY fashion. This has created opportunities for and moments of unexpected and powerful unity.
As practice spaces and performance venues started to close during the pandemic, Meinke had an idea: organizing an arts festival to support local performers. He received $400 from Allston Village Main Streets and invited two local artists, along with five local businesses to provide food and drinks. Hosted outside the creative studio Zone 3, it became the first Rat City Arts Festival — free for the public.
In the next year, Meinke hired a local artist to design and promote the festival. Together, they unveiled a flyer: a band of rats dripped in hippy attire and red-headed pigeons. The event was gaining traction, too. The number of performing artists tripled to seven, and the number of vendors doubled to ten.
After learning that Allston had a history of supporting deaf people, Meinke also invited American Sign Language interpreters for the main acts. In future iterations, he hopes to recruit deaf performers to the stage and make advertisements specific for the deaf community. Ultimately, his goal is to make the festival as accessible to the neighborhood as possible.
According to Meinke, most of the concertgoers at Rat City Arts Festival are on the younger side, but he saw a need to build an event for his older neighbors. He partnered with the Veronica B. Smith Senior Center and came up with a throwback concert, Rock of Ages. Around a hundred people showed up for guitars, face painting, and covers of old songs.
Rat City Arts Festival and Rock of Ages are just as much about community advocacy as they are about community building. The day before Rock of Ages, Meinke organized a Rat City Walk, gathering attendees for a stroll through parts of the neighborhood where rats abound. He has also recruited local artists to paint and decorate rat traps.
His initiatives landed him the moniker “Rat Guy,” and he takes the title with some pride. This spring, he is launching the Rat Rangers program, inviting community members to work with local artists to develop ways to educate the neighborhood about rat issues.
“In times when people could easily fall into their silos, it’s ‘how can we build up our entire community to get behind artists or get behind renters, to get behind so many different populations that need support in Allston-Brighton?’” says Meinke.
***
In 2017, Greg Marquis was feeling discouraged. As it became harder and harder to afford living in Allston, Marquis was uncertain about the future of Actor Observer and his place in the neighborhood.
He began learning about Allston politics, thinking about ways to advocate for artist resources and affordable housing. Along with Torres, he and the members of Actor Observer founded Boston Artist Impact to organize working-class artists to advocate for themselves by directing them to the right resources. For a while, according to Torres, it was like “trying to catch butterflies.”
When they first began coming to community and development meetings, Marquis noticed a divide between the artists and the long-time residents. To him, there was a sense that artists were not permanent contributors to the community because they were renters. But as the band kept showing up, Marquis said, they were able to make sure artists’ voices were heard.
“No matter how long we live here, we still live here. We’re still citizens. We’re taxpaying residents. We all deserve a say,” says Marquis. “I’m a renter because I can’t afford a home. I'm trying to put down roots here.”
They found an unlikely ally in Anthony “Tony” P. D’Isidoro.
Sitting at the helm of the ACA, D’Isidoro is a towering figure with a short white beard and a friendly face. He appears everywhere in Allston, on the ground at community meetings or on the popular Allston-Brighton Google group. Every week, we receive his “Community Notes” newsletter — a hodgepodge of different meetings and events happening around Allston.
D’Isidoro has lived in Allston all his life. Most of his friends, who grew up alongside him, come up to shake his hand or give him a hug after each community meeting.
After consistently attending and speaking up at the ACA, Grieco, Marquis and their group of artist-activists befriended D’Isidoro. When they first joined, there was a requirement that only those who attended three meetings in a row could become voting members. Grieco recalls sharing that the requirement made it difficult for service workers, artists, and neighbors juggling multiple jobs to have a voice in the community.
D’Isidoro and the ACA responded in turn. By the next year, the ACA changed the requirements for voting membership to a residency application and a $10 fee.
The connections that these artists made with long-time residents mean that they have a voice in community meetings, even when they are physically unable to be there. A few years ago, Marquis remembers hearing about a development meeting that proposed building luxury apartments. In response, one of the older residents commented, “I don’t think our artist friends are going to like that very much.”
Change can be slow, but the breakthroughs are monumental. After Great Scott closed, Grieco worked closely with its owners to try to find them a new location, and community members donated thousands of dollars to revive the venue. According to Marquis, it took five or six years, but this past spring, Great Scott announced plans for its return in 2026.
Marquis says his advocacy work helped him find his place in the neighborhood. “It helped us realize our greater connection to the community — not just artists, but renters, people who are lower income, working class, blue collar, local businesses,” says Marquis. “Understanding that your role in a community isn’t just about the thing you do, it’s about all the people around you and how you support each other.”
Meinke believes that there is still more work to be done in bridging the perspectives of different generations. “Leadership needs to be cross-sectional. It needs to be intergenerational, and it needs to be leadership that can understand even if these topics are vastly different, how to connect all of them together,” he says.
Despite the disagreements that people have over bike lanes and affordable housing, these Allston advocates have a deep respect for each other. Torres affectionately calls D’Isidoro “Uncle Tony.” Meinke tells us that the mother of longtime Allston-Brighton resident and state representative Kevin G. Honan prayed the rosary for him and his wife as they went through IVF.
In the same way, when we ask D’Isidoro whether he thinks that advocates like Meinke and Torres will carry on the work that he and the ACA are doing, he remarks drily: “I’ve threatened them. So that’s enough incentive.”
While he has more experience working with neighbors his age, D’Isidoro finds it particularly exciting to work with the new generation of Allstonians who fight for the neighborhood — despite their differences in age and experience living in Allston.
“What’s very nice is they’re all very respectful. They call me a lot and ask for my opinions and advice and guidance,” says D’Isidoro. “That’s going back again to this rich history of civic engagement in our community that only carries on because generation to generation has stepped up to the plate and taken their role in that endeavor.”
Despite conflicting needs and conflicting visions, there’s a sense of collaboration and collegiality. We tell Torres that it all seems like “one big family fight,” and she laughs.
“It really is, but it’s family, so you gotta figure it out,” she says.
***
In the front yard of a house down our street, there is a porcelain bathtub turned on its side. Inside, a sculpture of the Virgin Mary stands serenely.
This is a Bathtub Madonna. To many, it’s a sign of someone who is going to stay for a while. Older residents tell us that three or four decades ago, Bathtub Madonnas filled the front yards of Allston. Walking down our street today, we don’t see as many around. We count only two on our block.
The Bathtub Madonnas may be dwindling, but Allstonians’ love for their neighborhood lives on. Residents may not be able to stay for as long as they’d like, but they still make an effort to leave a mark on the neighborhood that has left a mark on them.
We still go to the library near our house where a librarian offered us a chance to earn our volunteering hours. We became mentees and mentors at the Harvard Ed Portal where kids and families spend their afternoons. Walking through the neighborhood, we pass by the rat traps that Ricky Meinke helped paint, the newsstands filled with local art, and streets cleaned by Zach Shelley and Genesis Lara. Maybe, if we listened hard enough, we could have heard “Fool’s Gold” by Actor Observer playing during Boston Calling, the sound pouring out of the stadium and ringing through the streets of Allston.
Correction: April 6, 2025
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the music venue Great Scott was replaced by a Taco Bell several months after its closure during the pandemic. In fact, a Taco Bell franchise opened at the site four years after Great Scott closed.
—Magazine writer Joanna Lin can be reached at joanna.lin@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @linsaniiity.
—Magazine writer John Lin can be reached at john.lin@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @LinJohnZ.