Love it or leave it

Tell Daniel Desrosiers that his Allston neighborhood has been called a dump and a "student ghetto" in a new book, and he bursts out laughing and nods as if it's an inside joke.

"It has a filthy, dirty, grimy charm to it," says the 23-year-old artist and musician. "It's like that uncle in your family. You love him because he's family, but. . ."

Allstonians who beam with pride for living in an urban-industrial haven of funky shops, furniture stores, clubs, and ethnic restaurants have another thing to brag about: It's now one of the 50 crummiest places to live in the United States. So says a new book called "The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America." It describes Allston as a community of "faux Irish pubs, garbage, vomiting in the shrubbery, drunken brawling, late night/early morning car alarms," and other cultural highlights.

It turns out the author, Dave Gilmartin, used to live in the 02134 neighborhood .

"Allston is a Neverland for the thrift shop set," he writes. ". . . you have this whole aging (thirtyish) segment of the population pathetically suffering from the Peter Pan-like delusion that they'll never grow old or irrelevant, still hanging out at the college bars and sitting in each other's living rooms dissecting pop culture like it's 1992."

Ouch!

Some A-towners say it's not hard to see where Gilmartin and other naysayers are coming from. They know the neighborhood is not the Boston area's most manicured or quietest (like its fraternal twin Brighton), but c'mon, it's not that bad.

"The landlords don't live here, and there seems to be a level of not caring what their place looks like," says Sue Jeiven , owner of Regeneration Records and Tattoo in Allston. "But if you're going to spend a couple days here, you will have a very fun time."

Gilmartin spent more than a year polling thousands of people nationwide online to identify the country's geographic "armpits." One other Bay State community -- Fitchburg -- made the list for its "guidos," "slum lords," and "mediocre students forced to fall back on Fitchburg State College." But Allston made Gilmartin's list by personal choice, even though he says people voted for it as a candidate.

"I knew it so well," says Gilmartin, 31, who lived in apartments and houses on Glenville Avenue and Pratt Street in the 1990s, when he studied at Boston University. "I did have some fun there, even though I hated parts of it, too. When I go back, it's cool to see it again, but I wouldn't want to live there."

Why? He answers that in the book: "Victorian homes long since oversubdivided for use as student housing, Allston, Massachusetts, is a melting pot of upper-middle-class white kids eager to experience a brief taste of rebellious semiurban squalor."

So what else is new, residents and workers say, adding that the neighborhood has its ups and downs.

"I know the difficulties here with the college students, the trash, the ruckus," says Marianne Burke , an Allston receptionist. "But those are more annoyances. You'd think there would be worse places than Allston with crime. It's not the filthiest place in the world."

But it may be one of the louder ones, she says.

Burke lived in Allston for eight years before she moved five minutes up the street to Brighton last year. The masses of club crawlers pouring out onto Brighton and Harvard avenues in the wee hours finally made her want to pack up and go -- but not too far.

"Allston wears on you, hearing bar people coming out at 2 a.m.," she says, adding that it's also small enough that you don't have to venture far to be somewhere else. Jeiven says one of the neighborhood's biggest attributes might also be contributing to its bad rap -- its diversity of cultures packed in such a small area.

Allston has a mish-mash of people because it's at a crossroads to big colleges and it's near Fenway Park. It has the student population; bohemian types; and a growing ethnic base of Korean, Brazilian, and Salvadoran immigrants who may not immediately interact with one another, but share the same financial reasons to rent. It even has its own colorful mascot, Mr. Butch, whose portrait, along with those of other denizens, is splashed on the side of one of the buildings.

"At first glance, Allston looks really alive. There are people walking around at all times of night," adds Jeiven. "It only takes a little while and upon closer inspection [you find] that the homeowners do not live there and 90 percent of the population couldn't care less about it and use it as a trash can."

Todd Baribault , 19, says that's not him, although he's seen the trash. He moved into an Allston apartment with three roommates a year ago to be near Boston University, where he's a student. He's already experienced the hard knocks of Allston life.

"I had my bike stolen once. There's little petty crime, but I don't feel endangered by it at all," he says, grabbing a large coffee at Herrell's Allston Cafe on Brighton Avenue. "You see some sketchy things. I saw two prostitutes coming out of a car in an alley near the mattress place," he says, pointing down the street.

But then he considers the perks of Allston life. "A lot of my friends live here," he says. "You can walk everywhere. Cool shops and music scene. It's fun."

"It's like rock city," adds Andrew Pease, an Allston barista at Herrell's. The 31-year-old enjoys eating steak tips at Common Ground, listening to music at O'Brien's Pub, and throwing darts at the Silhouette Lounge. "It's very youthful and fun."

Jennifer Rose sees Gilmartin's book as another black eye that adds to the area's bad rap of a haven of rowdy students. "If you did live here in the first few weeks of the school year, people are sort of getting drunk with their first exuberance. It may not be the best face of Allston," says Rose, who runs the Allston Village Main Streets program, which promotes business opportunities in the neighborhood. "Allston accepts the students and all the hairdos and tattoos and fashions and people from lots of different cultures. This sarcastic [author] is not the only guy to listen to."

Johnny Diaz can be reached at jodiaz@globe.com