ONCE at Boynton Yards: 2022 Summer Fest Series
ONCEONCE Somerville returned to Boynton Yards with its Summer Series of music festivals in 2022. Hump Day News was there for all of it (OK, most of it)!
HDN caught up with JJ Gonson, music maven, photographer, and ONCE “proprietrix,” to chat about bringing music to Boynton Yards. The outdoor music festival series is the latest chapter for ONCE after its much beloved brick-and-mortar location closed during the pandemic shutdown.
Gonson: “When the building on Highland Ave closed I was looking for places where I could do shows and I was introduced to the people who oversee the Boynton Yards project. They are very keen to incorporate music into the Boynton Yards community and we have worked together over the past two years to do it.”
Boynton Yards is a mixed-use urban development project and public-private partnership between the City of Somerville and DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners (DLJ), Leggat McCall Properties (LMP), Deutsche Finance America (DFA), and Flagship Pioneering. Got all that?
Plan for Boynton Yards — the ONCE Summer Series is currently located on the empty lot of “Building 5.” When does construction begin?The “mix” of mixed-use will combine labs, residences, and a “cultural center” on 1.8M square feet of property (with the future option to balloon to 3.1M square feet) in Union Square, home of a newly-minted Green Line T stop. Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne has praised the project, saying it will bring “jobs, innovation, new tax revenues, leading-edge sustainable construction, new open space, contributions to our affordable housing and jobs trusts funds.”
Although the project is years away from completion, some residents are seeing immediate benefits. The Nissenbaum family of Nissenbaum Auto Parts sold their parcel of land on Windsor Street to developers for $150 million dollars to help clear the way for building.
Real estate jackpots aside, other Somerville residents have expressed concern, from the earliest phases of Green Line expansion to the present day, that development would lead to gentrification of the working class, blue collar area. In other words, the quality of life improvements that Mayor Ballantyne promised would be enjoyed by everyone except the local residents, who would be gradually priced out of the area. It’s a story about money, politics, and class struggle that’s unfolding in cities across America. ONCE artists performed all summer against the backdrop of a growing highrise.
Much like the highrises, each ONCE festival is built up from scratch. Turning a parking lot into a festival ground is a labor-intensive process. Gonson is full of appreciation for what her team is able to accomplish.
Gonson: We raise every festival from the ground up, and when they are over we bring it all back down to the parking lot. The stage takes an hour to build. The sound system takes three hours and is expertly executed by SBPro Audio and Dead Moon Audio.
A fleet of fantastic and seriously entertaining folks pop tents, take IDs, restock water and support the bands. Our interns are rock stars.
If you’ve been to the festival grounds at Boynton Yards, you’ve seen the mammoth shipping containers that give the location its industrial feel. You probably didn’t know the containers had names: Stan, Baby, and Bar.
Gonson: We operate out of three shipping containers: “Stan” which stands for “Old Stand By” is the 40 foot container we have been working out of since the beginning of the 2021 season (we did 26 festivals the first season and almost killed ourselves. 9 was far more reasonable). The bar container is in the middle and the smaller, 20 foot container on the other end is called “baby” because it is the little one. Baby is where we have operations and hospitality and Stan is storage. Bar is bar. Understanding the fine art of opening and closing industrial shipping containers was a life skill I never would have anticipated having to have.
Like a proud parent, the ONCE proprietrix wouldn’t pick a favorite show in the Summer Series because she loved them all.
Gonson: Every show this summer was brilliant. We never got rained out, the bands were phenomenal and the audiences came and stayed all day and had a wonderful time. We did 9 festivals and each one had a theme, like Pride, goth, doom metal, rock and roll…. Each one was excellent. I am so proud to have worked with an amazing group of producers, bands and workers this year!
When the temperature drops in winter, festival organizers start squaring away their plans for warmer days. What is the future of the ONCE Somerville Summer Series in 2023? A close inspection of the Boynton Yards plans shows a lab/office building, scheduled for completion in 2026, where the festival grounds are currently located. The Summer Series is not long for this world at its present location at 0 Windsor St., but another run in the summer of 2023 does not seem out of the question. JJ Gonson is mum for now.
Follow Hump Day News for future developments.
See JJ Gonson’s rock n roll photography at her current show at the Panopticon Gallery in Kenmore Square, “Noiseland: The Music Of Boston”, on view through late January.