Wet Boxes, Sleepless Nights and a Fifth-Floor Surprise
Margarita Gomez had already seen enough by mid-morning. Furniture piled on sidewalks, trucks double-parked with their hazards blinking, and now rain soaking through cardboard she hadn’t finished taping shut. “Crashes, people fighting with each other, furniture everywhere. It’s awful,” she said. Then came the part she hadn’t planned for: her books, unprotected in the downpour, starting to warp. “It’s raining and all of the books are getting wet. It’s terrible,” she told CBS Boston. This is what September 1 looks like in Boston most years, and this year, the sky decided to make it worse.
Boston’s unofficial moving day, when tens of thousands of leases turn over within the same 48-hour window, is a quirk of the city’s rental market that has become a local institution: with so many leases tied to the academic calendar and standardized to September 1, entire neighborhoods empty out and refill on the same day, as CBS Boston has documented year after year. It is a phenomenon locals have nicknamed “Allston Christmas,” because so much usable furniture ends up abandoned curbside that treasure hunters actually go looking for it. This year, that scavenging happened under steady rain, which meant a lot of that curbside furniture was getting ruined before anyone could claim it.
For Mike O’Brien, the day came with a specific betrayal: bad information from his own daughter. He’d shown up to help her move under the impression the walk-up was manageable. It was not. “She told me originally, it was on the third floor. She lied to me and told me as we got here it’s on the fifth floor,” O’Brien said, hauling a mattress up a stairwell he hadn’t budgeted for. It’s the kind of detail that sounds almost too on-the-nose for Boston’s moving day chaos, except CBS Boston caught it on the record, from a father actually living it in real time…