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With elections for the Boston City Council less than a week away, a long-running sore spot for Allston-Brighton residents has returned to the public eye through several candidates’ campaign platforms: the still unaddressed future of the neighborhood’s condemned community center.
The Jackson-Mann Community Center has been scheduled for demolition since 2019, when the city deemed it too hazardous to be renovated. In the six years since, residents have lobbied the city council to fund a replacement — but progress has stalled.
The two public schools housed in the Jackson-Mann complex soon shut down, with the Jackson-Mann kindergarten through eighth grade school closing in 2022, and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing relocating to Charlestown in 2024.
In 2022, the city conducted a study to plan a new facility. It held four public meetings over nine months and distributed a survey to residents where it ultimately found that residents and staff preferred a community center that isn’t constrained by sharing a space with a public school, as the previous one did.
In the three years since then, the city has not spent money from the $4.1 million allocated to the project, aside from $500,000 over this coming year. It held a hearing last fall for residents to voice their frustrations with the delays, without apparent success — there is still no public timeline for the building’s demolition, much less for the construction of its replacement.
The center has shuttered all its early childcare services in the meantime. Their only remaining offerings are afterschool programming and adult education classes.
The six years without renovation plans have incited frustration from residents and elected officials alike. A special public hearing last fall, held at the center itself and specifically to address its replacement, drew more than 200 residents to demand answers from city officials and testify to the importance of the center’s programming.
At a candidate meet-and-greet hosted by the Allston Civil Association last Wednesday, multiple at-large candidates from outside the neighborhood promised to address the Jackson-Mann issue in their brief speeches to residents or in comments to the Crimson afterward.
Frank Baker, a former district city councilor running for an at-large spot, proposed a public-private partnership to increase funding opportunities in his speech.
In addition to a possible partnership, Marvin Mathelier, another at-large challenger, said creating smaller community centers in the neighborhood was another option to consider — and said that the new center should be open later in the evening.
Pilar Ortiz, who is challenging Breadon for her spot on the council representing Allston-Brighton, called the Jackson-Mann “a big issue” in an interview after the meet-and-greet, adding that “it is really important to kind of brainstorm what the possibilities are, bring everybody in, hear what they have to say.”
“Until we really present more options to the community, we’re not going to have very nuanced conversations,” she said in response to a question about her approach to advancing the replacement.
Boston City Councilor Elizabeth A. “Liz” Breadon, who currently represents Allston-Brighton, said the issue was “brought up all the time.”
“We have been in conversation with the mayor’s office almost constantly,” the councilor continued, adding that the neighborhood’s low turnout complicated the problem.
“We don’t have a huge voter turnout. So there’s no political consequence for ignoring us,” Breadon said.
In the November 2021 city council election, Allston-Brighton had the ward with the lowest voter turnout in the city at 23 percent, 10 points lower than the Boston average. In the 2023 election, it was near the middle of the pack.
“But I think that’s changing. So many more young people want to stay here. They came for school, came for work. They want to stay,” Breadon said.
The spokesperson for the city of Boston did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
One reason for the delays in building a new center, according to Breadon, is that the city must wait for Boston Public Schools to decide whether it will eventually open another school on the same site.
“The whole site is controlled by Boston Public Schools,” Breadon said, also in an interview after the event. “We have to establish whether they want to build a new school there.”
That has forced the city to wait before allocating any funding for an eventual new community center, according to Kelly M. McGrath, who serves on the center’s board.
BPS has not publicly shared when Allston residents might expect its decision, even as pressure has remained high on the city to speed along the center’s reconstruction.
—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.
—Staff writer Emily T. Schwartz can be reached at emily.schwartz@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @EmilySchwartz37.
