Teamwork may pull Allston into new era

3 August 2001

Packard's Corner, the gateway to Allston, is ugly, dirty and confusing - symbolic, perhaps, of Allston itself.

Tucked somewhere between Boston University and Brighton and bisected by the Massachusetts Turnpike, Allston often seems to be Boston's forgotten neighborhood, a place one passes through on the way to Brighton.

But the community is changing: It looks better, new people are moving in and this coming Monday, in a ceremony fraught with symbolism, plans will be announced to remake Packard's Corner into a gateway that does the neighborhood justice.

Allston hangs like a thread to the rest of Boston, connected by one road, Commonwealth Avenue. It is reputedly the only community in the nation named after an artist (the romantic painter Washington Allston). Once part of Cambridge, it was briefly independent in the first half of the 19th century but was annexed to Boston on the same day as Brighton in 1874. Perhaps because of that, Allston has seemed subsumed by the leafier neighborhood to its west: Whenever it's given much thought, it's hyphenated, as in `Allston-Brighton."

It's a confusing place. "There are two Allstons," says Paul Berkeley, head of the neighborhood association.

One is overrun by transients, with large apartment buildings stuffed with students feeding a thriving bar trade along Harvard Avenue. The other, on the north side of the turnpike, is quieter. That housing stock consists mostly of two-and three-family homes and many of the families living there have been around for decades, if not generations.

Berkeley and other residents have fought a sometimes lonely battle to stop new bars from opening and to get amenities for the area, such as a recently opened branch library on North Harvard Street. More immigrants have moved in, as well as singles and smaller families attracted by relatively low rents and the proximity to downtown Boston. As a result, commerce along the streets is changing. A hugely successful Star (now Shaw's) supermarket is at Packard's Corner. The mix of businesses has begun to shift a bit toward those that serve residents as opposed to pub-crawlers.

Still, Packard's Corner, named after a defunct dealer of a defunct car, has proved a problem. Located at the point where westbound Commonwealth Avenue veers to the south, intersecting with Brighton Avenue, it is dotted with billboards and strewn with track from the MBTA's Green Line.

It was at that intersection that the T's B route of the Green Line would split from the old A route, the B cars running along Commonwealth Avenue to Boston College and the A cars along Brighton Avenue to Oak Square and Watertown. The A line stopped running in 1969, but the tracks remained like a scar for nearly 30 years.

Most of the tracks were removed in the 1990s in a multimillion dollar beautification program that did wonders for Brighton and Allston. But about 300 feet of unused track remained, right at Packard's Corner. The streets are bare with minimal greenery, giving the place a desolate look. Even worse, it's unsafe for drivers and pedestrians. When Star Market was built, the neighborhood association persuaded the chain to set aside $210,000 to improve the area. That money has just sat, unused.

But an unusual coalition has been working together with residents to fix Packard's Corner, and it increasingly looks like its efforts will meet with success.

Politicians such as Councilor Brian Honan and Mayor Thomas Menino have made Packard's Corner a priority, committing city resources and leaning heavily on the MBTA to remove the tracks.

For its part the MBTA, an agency with a reputation for a tin ear when it came to serving the public, has been undergoing a near- revolution in culture, trying to reach out to communities it had once seemed to ignore. The authority had long maintained that it needed the tracks as emergency storage, but when it took a close look, it found it could do without. It volunteered to rip out them out, a refreshing gesture of good will.

But a key element of the coalition came from a seemingly unlikely source: real estate maven Harold Brown. Brown, once Boston's largest landlord, went through a spectacular bust during the real estate collapse of the 1990s and has since clawed his way back. Brown's offices overlook Brighton Avenue and he footed the bill for conceptual designs by architect Arturo Vasquez. The design, which includes an historical marker and a striking vertical sculpture, transforms Packard's Corner. Brown also committed money which, combined with the funds from Star Market and resources from the city, should be enough to get the project done.

In stories like these, one always looks for the fatal "but" - the flaw that undermines the good people are trying to do. There doesn't seem to be one here. Residents, government and the private sector are all working together, something that happens rarely in Boston. Allston, too easily overlooked, may finally be getting its due.