Wickedpedia

Who takes care of the alleys in Back Bay?

Members of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay have been working together since the 1970s to preserve and clean their historic neighborhood.

By Annie Jonas

June 12, 2024

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On a recent hot and sunny spring morning, Anne Swanson greets me from her brownstone in the Back Bay wearing a “Graffiti NABBers” T-shirt and matching pail of solvents and spray. The day’s work will be a dirty one, but the 76-year-old is sure to keep her hair perfectly coiffed and face painted with just a touch of makeup. 

Swanson is the chair of the graffiti removal program at the Neighborhood Association of Back Bay (NABB), a volunteer-run non-profit organization founded in 1955 whose mission is to preserve and enhance the neighborhood. She has been on its board of directors for 40 years.

Swanson has lived in the neighborhood for over 40 years, and founded the Graffiti NABBers committee in 2006 to clean up hundreds of vandalized historic buildings. Vandals would primarily target the alleys because they were rear-facing and somewhat hidden from the street, Swanson said. When the program began, the alleys were “in such terrible shape.”

“They were compared to the South Bronx,” Swanson added.

We are soon joined by Swanson’s next door neighbor, Ali Foley. Nicknamed “Back Bay Ali,” Foley is chair of NABB’s Block Captain program, in which residents adopt a block and care for its upkeep. 

The Block Captain program was created in 1976 but fizzled out after a few years. It started again in the mid 1980s and stopped in the early 90s before being revived by Foley in January 2024. 

Foley, like Swanson, has a keen eye for detail – er, trash. Foley noticed a discarded rug left on the curb a few houses down, and we hauled it to the alley behind her building before heading out to remove graffiti. The rug will be collected by the city’s code enforcement police, Foley said, which enforces state and city sanitary codes, and patrols neighborhoods on foot, bike, and car. 

I’m with Foley and Swanson to pick up trash and remove graffiti for the day. Along the way, they show me how to keep one of Boston’s historic neighborhoods in tip-top shape, and why it’s important for residents to be good stewards of where they live.

How is graffiti removed from the Back Bay?

Going about removing graffiti from the neighborhood’s 44 alleys was a difficult task when the Graffiti NABBers program started 18 years ago. Swanson first surveyed the approximately 200 buildings in the neighborhood and found that only about half a dozen did not need graffiti removal. 

Not only was the scale of the graffiti daunting, but the process to begin the removal was painstaking. Property owners are responsible for everything up to the roadway, which meant that Swanson needed to get permission from each building owner before she could even attempt to clean any graffiti on the buildings. 

So, Swanson enlisted the help of the city’s Graffiti Busters team. The Graffiti Busters have removed graffiti from more than 1,000 locations in Boston since it was started by the late Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino administration in 1997. 

“At first, it was just an immense amount of work to clean just one public alley, which was covered with graffiti on both sides,” she said. “It took a full day and two crews working from opposite ends of the alley and $1,000 worth of chemicals,” she added.

Eventually, Swanson developed a routine for her team of 18 volunteer Graffiti NABBers. Once a month, she would walk through all of the neighborhood’s alleys and report everything that needed cleaning. The Graffiti Busters would tackle the large-scale graffiti and Swanson and her team would tackle the smaller-scale vandalism. Both teams working together could clean the alleys in two or three days, she said.

Today, Swanson has over 40 volunteer Graffiti NABBers on her e-mail list. She still goes out to clean graffiti and remove stickers and posters with the volunteers initially, but once they get the hang of it, she lets them manage the removal on their own. 

We only make it around the corner from Swanson’s brownstone before she and Foley spot a sticker on the back of a street sign. Foley sprays a chemical solvent called Goof Off onto the sticker and scrapes it off with a razor blade scraper.

We continue our walk around the neighborhood, scraping more stickers off street signs, removing tape and outdated posters from poles, and picking up trash from the ground and sewer grates.

Three hours later, we have scraped stickers from several street signs, wiped graffiti from dumpsters and lampposts, and amassed two garbage bags full of trash and graffiti-soaked wipes. Passersby might not notice the small-scale graffiti removal efforts by Graffiti NABBers, but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t important, Swanson said.

“It’s like instant gratification. You can clean a sign and then the next time you pass it, you feel great,” Swanson said. 

What is the Block Captain program?

Foley hopes the 2024 iteration of the Block Captain program will piggyback off of Swanson’s work to help preserve and protect the neighborhood’s historic character.

She conducted a neighborhood-wide survey recently and said she received excellent engagement from the community. There are approximately 30 residents interested in becoming Block Captains, and Foley said she hopes the program can become a benchmark for other neighborhoods looking to do a similar thing.

“My big vision is that this will go throughout the city and beyond,” she said.

The Block Captain program was born out of community activism. When Susan Prindle, the former chair of the architecture committee of NABB, moved into the Back Bay in 1967, the alleys were unkempt and unsafe.

“The alleys were pretty despicable. We had razor wire around because of all the break ins,” she said in an interview with Boston.com.

After her late husband, Paul, heard a talk by activist Saul Alinsky on community activism, he, Susan, and NABB’s chair at the time, Jack Williams, decided to start the Block Captain program in 1976 to bring Back Bay residents together to improve the neighborhood. Prindle and her husband became Block Captains and helped assign NABB members to different blocks. 

Despite the start-stop nature of the program, Prindle said it had an everlasting effect on the neighborhood – and on her life.

“It’s been very satisfying work. All of our friends, our immediate family are people we have hung out in the alleys with. I think any neighborhood would prosper from doing something like this,” she said. 

How the neighborhood ‘gets dirty’ every year

The Alley Rally is a neighborhood-wide event held every year in Back Bay since 1972. It began as a way to get rid of the hoards of trash that accumulated in the alleys, but now functions more as a social event for neighbors. The event was started by NABB members who wanted to beautify their neighborhood. 

Elliot Laffer, a former chairman of NABB and Block Captain, moved to the neighborhood in 1974 and joined NABB four months later. At one Alley Rally, he recalled filling five or six dumpsters with alley trash ranging from “miscellaneous dirt to vending machines.”

It was an event that was filthy, but also immensely fun, Prindle said.

“The whole purpose was to get as dirty as you could all day and then have a big dinner at night,” she said. Residents played on the alleys’ dirty reputation by creating posters for the Rally with pictures of rats to commemorate the four-legged friends who frequented the alleys.

“It was a picture of a rat sitting on a trash barrel with a big piece of cheese in his mouth, and he had a banner saying ‘Easy Street,’” Prindle recalled.

Rats are still an issue for the neighborhood, albeit at a much more manageable level, according to Laffer. “While we still have rats, I think that the rat population is significantly less than it was in the 70s,” he said.

The Alley Rally continues to be held by NABB every year, although this year’s event was postponed due to construction at the Clarendon Street playground.

Why we need to take care of our neighborhoods

Swanson is modest about her impact on the preservation of the Back Bay, remarking that it is the residents of Back Bay that are responsible for preserving the historic character of the neighborhood.

“I believe that cities are as beautiful or as ugly as we make them. It’s this way because of what volunteers have done since [NABB’s founding in] 1955, to preserve and care for this neighborhood,” she said.

“We’re temporary stewards of this beautiful, historic place. That’s why we care so much about it. We didn’t create it, we’re just the current stewards of this place and we want it to be cared for,” she added.

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