by Bill Shaner, News Staff
Two and a half weeks into the first semester of the Northeastern University P.L.E.D.G.E. – a message from the administration urging students to be good neighbors in the Mission Hill and Fenway areas – students and long-time residents find themselves in an ideological battle over acceptable behavior on Mission Hill.
This struggle is nothing new. Students have been living on Mission Hill for years, and many other Boston-based colleges, like Boston University and Boston College, are going through the same problem as they expand, Vice President for City and Community affairs John Tobin said in an interview with The News.
Long-time residents said college students are on a different clock, and residents often don’t appreciate their neighbors being so rowdy.
“The kids next door to us had a party last week and, you know, my son’s bedroom is next to their kitchen,” said Nancy Carren, a 36-year-old Mission Hill resident and mother of both a 2-year-old and 3-month-old son. “It was 11 o’clock at night – and that’s not too late – but it’s late for us, and when they’re yelling after every shot it keeps me and my sons up.”
She said that she’s noticed in recent years the Hill has become far more student based, and family life is diminishing.
“I wouldn’t say students are bad neighbors,” she said. “But they’re often not the most respectful, and not the most concerned with their neighbors.”
However, John Valentine, a middler business student who moved to Mission Hill the first week of September, said he feels partying isn’t always detrimental to the neighborhood.
“I think it depends on the party,” he said. “If people are partying inside their house and they’re being respectful and doing their best to be quiet, then it’s OK.”
Talia Ibarguen, a senior environmental studies major in her second year on the Hill, said that while there is nothing inherently wrong with a party, there are limits.
“It’s a student area in the sense that most of the people that live here are students,” she said. “But there are families here and I can understand that people being loud is a problem. I myself have the cast of ‘Animal House’ living above me. They party at like 5:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, and that’s obnoxious.”
Many students said they have noticed an increase in police activity this year.
Steve Gould, a junior electrical engineering major and second year Hill resident, said on any given weekend night, there are three to four police cruisers or motorcycles on the corner of Calumet Street and St. Alphonsus Street, where Gould’s apartment is located.
“My buddy got a $200 fine for drinking on a stoop, and another got a ticket for carrying a beer that wasn’t even open,” he said. “Yeah, I don’t like the cops here.”
Michel Saltani, a 50-year-old Hill resident and 17-year owner of The Mission Bar & Grill on the corner of Huntington and Tremont Avenues, said he welcomes the growing student presence on the Hill.
“All I can tell you is if one day all the schools decide to tell their students they cannot live on Mission Hill, no business could afford to be here, the cost is too high,” he said. “In this tight economy, students keep us afloat.”
He said roughly 50 percent of his business is generated from students and students’ families, and in the summer months he sees a lull in his profits.
Saltani chided Boston Police for what he thought was excessive ticketing on move in days, allotting an hour for a truck to move in an apartment, and generally not sending the most welcoming message to students.
He said he lives on Tremont Street above the Mission Hill post office and occasionally deals with a rowdy or drunk crowd of students, but that it isn’t a major problem.
“There’s always a few bad apples, but students aren’t a disease,” he said. “Sure, the occasional student gets drunk and pees on the sidewalk, but I’d rather deal with young professionals acting stupid on occasion than people going nowhere in life.”
Gould said students are a better alternative for Mission Hill as well.
“I think that there’s this whole idea the college kids are ruining the neighborhood, when before college kids lived here it was, like, a slum,” he said. “People were getting robbed and killed. And now kids just party and maybe things get broken every once in a while.”
