Peerless Life in Allston Rock City

[Allston Rock City: Corner Harvard/Brighton, circa 2005]

Allston is a thickly settled multi-generational, multi-cultural Boston neighborhood off the Mass Pike. It's a student ghetto, situated on the 57 and 66 bus routes, and the B train from Boston College to Boston University to Kenmore (Red Sox territory), and onward into Park Street, where you can change trains and get pretty much anywhere you want to go. Lower Allston, or "LA" so dubbed by its genial citizenry, is a comparatively quiet residential sprawl of vintage double and triple deckers. Upper Allston is the busy ramshackle Mah Jong board of brownstones and walk-ups and restaurants and coffee shops and tattoo boutiques and thrift stores and churches and a thousand other urban services and delicacies. Stand in the middle of Upper Allston any time of day and you're in the perfect spot to take the pulse of Rock City. It's a hopping hive of students and rockers and immigrants from everywhere, and when you stand on the corner at night, you think, "Excellent city."

The Peerless: Allston MA

In 2003 I somehow found myself moving from Somerville to Upper Allston, when I moved in with Joe. The apartment was a small one-bedroom on the second floor of The Peerless, a tired but noble old dame of a building situated just one T stop from the corner of Harvard and Comm. I love that building to this day, though the 1300 block is completely different now. What isn't?

The Peerless

She's a right proper old dame of a building that dates from the 1930s when Allston roads were "carriage lanes," a quaint sounding term. Officially that term is outdated, but when directing friends to Commonwealth Avenue, you must differentiate the main drag from these narrow one-way access roads that flank the avenue and the train tracks, and that's why we still say "carriage lane." The Peerless isn't noteworthy, just another apartment complex among many. If anything, people might know the 1300 block because of a rather drab walk-up a few doors down whose legacy is jack-hammered into the stone surplices just because it's where Aerosmith used to live in the 70s when they were a local Allston band.

Ours was the tiny unit over the entryway–a plus because there were no downstairs neighbors! But a minus because it only had one window overlooking the street and the train tracks. To be specific, one large picture window that didn't open, flanked by two small windows that you could pry partway open. Those windows did jack squat to stir the stuffy air. No cross breezes, no sunlight. Summers were rough when the place became a 98,000 degree sauna. Going outside for some relief meant sitting on the front stoop at car bumper level. Somehow we cohabited harmoniously right on top of each other for seven years. That's love, baby. I wouldn't recommend trying it for as long as we did, unless you marry your best friend.

The Peerless from across Comm Ave.

Despite the small space and large rent, I loved the place. I looked up the history and I found evidence suggesting that today's one-bedroom Peerless units are the result of breaking up larger two-and-three bedroom apartments many years ago, like the Bramford in Rosemary's Baby. They must have been gorgeous apartments. It seems that, originally, all the Peerless units had front or back porches, which must have been amazing. I could tell because if you were to open the front closet doors, the interior is all old brick that was the original outer wall of the porch. A porch! Imagine! I figure it must have been around the 1970s when they started divvying up the units, and did so along the living room and kitchen wall, so that these days, the corner units got a larger kitchen and bathroom, while the middle units got a larger living room with a big picture window, but a tiny kitchen.

I met "Mo" online, she used to live in the Peerless
and actually had a photo of her place when it still had a porch!

Ours was one of those "tiny kitchen" units. Seriously, I'd tell people how small it was, but nobody got it until they came over. That kitchen was the size of a restroom stall. It was so small that you couldn't open the fridge and the oven at the same time. Half the linoleum floor tiles, glued down during the Roosevelt administration, were missing, the remaining tiles stained and so brittle with age that they'd crunch and break apart if trod upon. Meal prep happened on an 8-inch span of crackled 1940s formica counter space, mind you that's where the dish rack lived so...really, zero counter space. The small stove had one medium-sized coil-style electric burner and three teeny little burners, so you might be able to fit four pots or pans but only if toy ones from a play kitchen. And the creaky old oven mocked me and my cookie sheet, which was too big to fit inside it. Though it hardly mattered if my cookie sheet fit, that oven couldn't outbake a lightbulb in a shoe box. Where's my EZ Bake Oven?

Space

When I moved in with Joe, I still had my baker's rack and my kitchen island from my much larger Somerville apartment, and I managed to cheat more kitchen area by configuring those two items outside the kitchen proper. Sure, that set-up occupied some of the living room, but I had to weigh that against how much I needed to augment that scant 8 inches of cracked formica counter space. It meant that you could sit on the couch and chop garlic on the kitchen island, but we made it work. Storage. Space savers. I became a space saving sorcerer in that apartment. I mounted metal grids on the walls and hung every utensil that was capable of hanging from a hook. I got shelves, shelf-expanders, under-counter gadgets, over-cabinet doodads, stacking wizards, you name it. My nested bowls were a work of art. Not a SET of nested bowls, no, man. I'm talking rag-tag bargain-bin hodge podge old school BOWLS, baby. No ordinary person can stack bowls like that.

Space is like money. You don't think about it at all if you have enough, but when you have none, Christmas is a drag. First off, where do you stash Christmas decorations for eleven months a year? Secondly, family wants to gift you appliances when you're Dinks (Dual Income, No Kids) who never had a bridal registry. So every Christmas, there I am, I'm under Joe's mother's tree saying sincere thank-yous. What's in the box? Inwardly I'm seeing my kitchen in my mind's eye, like the Terminator, as a mathematical grid. I flunked every math class they stuck me in, but when I'm hefting a wrapped Williams Sonoma box, I'm planning how I'm gonna fit whatever-it-is into my postage-stamp of a kitchen. My face is saying "oooh!" but mentally I was defining the variable of whatever's inside,  multiplying by the coffee maker conjugate so as not to have a complex number of sauce pans go undefined. (Bowls. She got us a nice set of glass nested bowls. I stored them under the couch).

Dust

When I'd tell people that I live "on the green line," I'd specify, "I mean ON the green line."  Joe stepped out the door, crossed the carriage lane and waited at the T stop. But I found a new enemy at the Peerless. Dust.

Comm Ave dust is not your ordinary, floaty mote-like variety of dust that retreats from a human hand inside an old sock. This was next-level dust. It was black. It was greasy. And it was everywhere. This was an insidious, heavy devil dust from the constant trains and exhaust from Comm Ave traffic. It was even coating all the stuff I had stashed under the bed. Every space saving Ninja's first go-to is that area under the bed, and mine was like a coal mine. So I bought a dust ruffle. When the Amazon box arrived, I wasn't ready to do the whole project (strip the bed, haul off the mattress etc) so I didn't open that dust ruffle. I, um, stashed it...under the bed. I never did open that box.

I Love Our Home

Sooooo much better...note the glass nested bowls.

Seven years later when we finally moved to Lower Allston, my space saving skills really came to light, because when I packed that Comm Ave kitchen, the stuff filled about ten boxes. "Where WAS it all?" marveled Joe. How could I have fit that much kitchen stuff into that dinky little kitchenette? Then when I unpacked at the new place, everything spread out into kitchen drawers and cabinets and what seemed like miles of counter space. I was SO HAPPY I'd kept my baker's rack and kitchen island, even though it was a tight squeeze back at the Peerless. My new kitchen is tricked out, baby!

Sure, the Peerless was cool and all, but Lower Allston is the best place I have ever lived. When I tell people how much I love where we live now, they nod and smile. I say no really, you guys don't understand. This house is heaven. Twenty-four windows sending breezes everywhere. There's even a window in the bathroom. Clean white tile floor in the kitchen. Going outside means sitting out on the front stoop...or on our very own glorious private porch, whaaaat? Yet we are still within walking distance of all those Upper Allston restaurants and coffee shops and tattoo boutiques and thrift stores and churches and a thousand other urban services and delicacies. That's why I am always amazed when I hear people dunking on Allston, and funnily enough, it's usually some tacky, over-processed bitch who lives...like...I dunno, in Billerica or something. Dude, you either "get" Allston or you don't. We love it here, and we love all our neighbors who love it here. Our people.

I would love to tell you that I totally returned that dust ruffle to Amazon but...um I was very busy. Does anyone need a dust ruffle? Still in the package! 👷