Many Bay Staters know Allston-Brighton only as the blur of aging triple-deckers and chain-link fencing that whiz past as you cross the threshold into Boston on the Mass Pike.
But if you pull off the pike and head to heart of Lower Allston, you'll find Stadium Auto Body on Western Avenue. Chances are, you'll also find Joe DiStefano inside.
His father founded Stadium Auto Body in 1968, and DiStefano and all 11 of his siblings have worked in the shop.
DiStefano started helping his dad out when he was 13 years old.
“He said, ‘You don't know what end of the screw driver to hold,’” he remembered. “He said, ‘Go into the office and make me money.’”
Decades later, DiStefano, now the president and CEO of Stadium Auto Body, is finding a new way to make money: real estate. He’s hoping to replace the towed and beaten up cars on his lot with modern, glassy buildings.
It's all part of what Boston officials say is the biggest building boom in the city's history, especially in Allston-Brighton. Some developers are envisioning the neighborhood across the river from Harvard Yard as a new and improved Kendall Square. Many residents are excited about change, but nervous about the details. Both sides are focusing in on DiStefano’s Western Avenue property. What happens there, they say, could set a precedent for what’s to come.
A New And Improved Kendall Square
After years of dreaming about what he could do with his family’s land along Western Avenue, DiStefano set out to find a partner. Rejecting overtures from Harvard, he eventually brought in the Mugar Family, of Star Market fortune. Together, they plan to turn DiStefano’s auto body shop and his family’s other nearby real estate holdings into a biotechnology hub.
“We toured the site, liked it, and we just pursued it,” said Bob Reibstein of Mugar Enterprises, Inc. “I liked its proximity to Harvard and MIT. I liked its location. You can get anywhere from here.”
So, Mugar Enterprises bought up buildings around DiStefano’s land, including local institutions like the Breakfast Club restaurant and the Bus Stop Pub. They drew up plans to knock down the current buildings and construct three big new buildings that will include lab space, ground-floor retail, 40 apartments and 800-plus parking spots.
They gave the project a grand-sounding name: NEXUS at The Allston Innovation Corridor. All told, it’s over half a million square feet — that’s about half the Prudential Building, if you laid it out on a city block.
“We like to draw parallels to Kendall Square,” said Michael DiMinico of King Street Properties, which is developing the site. “This is a place where companies will be able to grow.”
“Having a critical mass is going to be really important,” DiMinico added. “Companies want to know that there are other life science companies around them. There’s a lot of collaboration that happens between companies, sharing of information. With a project of this scale, we can create that here.”
The NEXUS project partners — the DiStefano family, the Mugar family and King Street Properties — are not the only ones eyeing this area and envisioning a high-tech future.
If you stand outside Stadium Auto Body and look left, there’s an enormous shining glass structure under construction. The banner on top reads: Harvard Engineering 2020. It’s the university’s new billion-dollar engineering campus.
Look in both directions and you’ll see new apartment buildings, where a studio rents for well over $2,000 a month. Then there’s a hipster climbing gym that just opened a block away. There are fancy coffee shops. Trader Joe’s recently moved in. All of this is along Western Avenue within just a few blocks of the proposed NEXUS site.
But there may be a lot more to come.
“We see this project as a catalyst for what’s going to be happening on the street,” said DiMinico. “There has been a fair amount of residential development along this street, as well as institutional development from Harvard. What we see as something that is missing here is a key commercial project.”
They are hoping their project will knit together all the other new construction, hence the name: NEXUS.
Having A Say In What’s To Come
Tim and Jane McHale, who founded the Boston Minstrels singing group, live just a few blocks away from Stadium Auto Body. Standing on their front stoop, they can see the site that’s slated for the biotech hub — or the “emerging node,” as Michael DiMinico called it.
The McHales have been studying the NEXUS development carefully — Tim McHale even serves on a resident committee giving feedback to the Boston Planning and Development Agency, the BPDA, that oversees the whole approval process.
“This thing just rubbed us the wrong way. It was so big, so off the mark,” Tim McHale said. “We were surprised the BPDA let this see the light of day.”
The McHales explain that they are pro-development. They are excited to see that this section of Western Avenue will no longer be a patchwork of low-rise industrial buildings. However, they said, they want to make sure that new construction doesn’t eradicate the old neighborhood.
To start, analogies to Kendall Square make Tim and Jane McHale nervous.
“Our neighborhood does not want a Kendall Square,” said Tim McHale.
Jane McHale adds that in Kendall Square, the buildings are “10 stories, 15 stories. It’s very canyon-like. It’s kind of spooky walking around at night because there’s not that much going on — and we don’t want that.”
They want something that’s not just busy 9-to-5. They are looking for nice green space that connects to the existing neighborhood. The Charles River is currently only a block away, but hard to access. They would like that to change. And they worry about the affordability of the area.
Harry Mattison, another local resident, echoes the McHales’ sentiment. He’s glad to see new development, but his big concern is all the parking that’s planned.
“Western Ave. has been a semi-abandoned, underutilized strip of land for way too long,” said Mattison. “But why on earth do they want to build 800–something parking spots? That doesn’t make sense. It’s saying that we have no confidence in the MBTA, the city or the state to provide green, sustainable transportation options.”
DiStefano has heard this concern before. He’s quick to counter that given the current load of tow trucks, delivery trucks and customers coming and going from Stadium Auto Body each day, the new buildings wouldn’t be that much of a change.
“That’s the wrong way to frame the entire question,” said Mattison. He thinks past use shouldn’t be the benchmark. “This is the 21st century. We are trying to think about reducing congestion on the roads, reducing greenhouse gases — we are trying to think about our climate and our public health.”
Perhaps, most of all, the current Allston-Brighton residents want to feel like they're included in the planning process, part of the area’s future, and won't be casualties of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood.
The BPDA points out that the approval process is still in the early phases, so we could see changes before a final design is approved.
Even at this stage in the process, there is one thing the residents and the developers agree on: “It creates a precedent," said Jane McHale.
“Once we do this, other things will be developed as well,” said Bob Reibstein.
Whatever is approved now for NEXUS — the building height, the parking lot size, the designated green space — clears the way for future development.
And, for those long accustomed to whizzing past on the Mass Pike, they may soon be getting off the highway and entering a new Allston that’s unrecognizable to those living and working there today.
