Taking it from the streets

Finding free stuff on the street is almost an art form for some.

"It's the most perfect transaction," said Abe Lateiner, a 25-year-old middle-school teacher and grad student, "because not only do you get something that you're looking for, someone else gives away something that they don't want, and there's no trash." Lateiner speaks from experience: He's found three dressers and three stereo systems, including a Bose, on the streets of his Inman Square neighborhood on the border of Cambridge and Somerville. He outfitted a whole room for his fiancee with his finds, and just in the past week he's found a wine rack, an ironing board, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster, a printer/copier/scanner, and a cube table painted to look like a copy of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book."

Lateiner doesn't go out looking for specific objects, but if something on the streets marked as trash shines just so and is something he needs, he'll take it. It seems that many young professionals in Greater Boston approach curb finds like magpies: If they see something appealing on the side of a road - an exercise bike, a table - they swoop in and add it to their nest.

As the seasons change and leases switch over, the average Boston resident could probably find enough stuff to furnish his entire apartment for free with the help of craigslist, Freecycle, and what's left out on the sidewalk. On Sept. 1, as the mass exodus of summer renters gave way to the influx of college students, I went to Allston to check out the feast on the streets. My tour guide was Kris Palumbo, a 22-year-old assistant manager at Boomerangs, a secondhand store in Jamaica Plain whose proceeds go to the state's AIDS Action Committee.

Boston's student population is estimated to be around 200,000, and while the students certainly don't all move this time of year, it almost seems like they do. And Allston, with its relative affordability and proximity to Boston University, Boston College, Harvard, MIT, Berklee, and Emerson, to name a few, is where most of the madness happens. As cars careened through the crowded streets, Palumbo said, "It's like being out on Christmas Eve when everyone's drunk."

Palumbo, a recent graduate of MassArt, has lived in six or seven apartments from Allston to Jamaica Plain. Some of her street finds include crates that she turned into shelves, a DVD of "Tremors 3," and tons of CDs, including lounge-style covers of Celine Dion songs. "I went to art school, so you kind of have to make something out of nothing a lot. I'd rather get something cheap or free and make it cool." Pricing Boomerangs' vintage offerings has also improved Palumbo's eye for cheap stuff: "I like being able to influence vintage fashions of JP. Nobody's going to be wearing white-washed jeans with an elastic waistband on my watch!"

As we walked down Linden Street, we found an array of discarded furniture including extravagantly upholstered '70s-style brown loveseats piled with plastic CD holders. Nearby, New England School of Photography student Dana Tarr, 21, stood by an open U-Haul truck. He was shirtless, having just finished moving a piano up a flight of stairs. He motioned to a red sleeper couch, shipped up from Rhode Island and covered with a tarp, that wasn't going to fit in the apartment. "We're probably going to put this on the street," he said.

We continued on to Ashford Street, where a student sat on an abandoned desk chair in the middle of the road. A black night table and a rolled-up poster of Kramer from "Seinfeld" had been placed next to a driveway. "That's trash," yelled Rob Laff, 22, a student at Berklee, indicating that we could take it. He was moving into a new apartment, but he wasn't about to partake in the street furniture free-for-all. "I got bedbugs a couple of years ago," he said. A nice white leather couch found on the streets by his old Fenway apartment was the culprit. It infested his old apartment, and then he unwittingly passed the pests on to a friend who inherited the couch.

Unfortunately, Laff's story is a common one. According to John Shea from the Boston Public Health Commission, "Over the past five years or so, bedbugs have come back in many parts of the United States."

In the Allston-Brighton area, the combination of multifamily buildings and a transient student population means a lot of furniture moving from apartment to apartment, and bedbugs often come along for the ride.

The Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation produces fliers and booklets recommending that people don't take free furniture on the streets, but it's an uphill battle. "This is the most difficult pest," said Juan Gonzalez, director of community organizing at the Allston-Brighton CDC. And nothing is safe. Female bedbugs can lay eggs in "books, CD covers, appliances, furniture . . . even frames! They can crawl through any particular place. Even the ceiling and electrical outlets."

It's almost impossible to tell if a piece of furniture is infested with bedbugs, but there are ways to treat it before you bring it inside (see sidebar). Once the tiny creatures have invaded an apartment, the whole building has to be exterminated to get rid of them.

Twenty-five CDC volunteers were combing the streets of Allston on Saturday, sticking fluorescent-orange "Bedbugs!" warnings on pieces of furniture on the curb. But people were still grabbing things left and right. In some places, orange stickers littered the ground where a piece of furniture once stood.

Ethan Snyder, a 21-year-old drummer at Berklee, was thrilled with his large collection of foam: "I have the most ridiculous collection of mattress pads. I'd go in a Dumpster for them. They're soundproof!"

Next door, the front yard of a purple house held a cornucopia of treasures. A crumbling, beautiful old claw-foot tub sat on the lawn underneath a tree, a free score off craigslist being used as decoration. But it was on its way out. "We had a whole bathroom in the front yard, including a sink, but we have to get rid of it to please the landlord," said recent Boston University graduate Esmeralda Stuk

Past Ashford Street on Harvard Avenue, at the corner of Verndale Street, lines of stuff wound around the buildings: old desks made of particle board, a TV, a sofa. Palumbo suggested that an old refrigerator door would make a great shelf.

For the average urban scavenger, the hustle for fantastic free stuff never ends. You can take your chances on the streets, or try online outlets such as craigslist, where the Boston "free" section had hundreds of posts and offerings in the past week. There's no bedbug-free guarantee here either, but at least you can ask the owners about it. Of course, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and yard sales always have great deals, and many local colleges sell leftover dorm-room furniture.

But free is the holy grail. And it's not just happening in Allston. There are high-end dressers on Beacon Hill, cute little wooden chairs near Tufts in Medford, framed Chinese embroidery pieces in Cambridge. Last week in Somerville, I stumbled across a goldmine: four puffy chairs sitting outside along Summer Street, waiting for the perfect transaction.

Finders, keepers

Leah Kramer, doyenne of Crafster.org and Davis Square's Magpie, and Kris Palumbo of Boomerangs in Jamaica Plain, offered these curb-find tips:

Bug off

If you find an abandoned item you can't live without and you're worried about bedbugs, take these precautions before bringing it inside:

Source: nyc.gov/html/doh/html/vector/vector-faq1.shtml