There's nothing like a good junkyard to make your day. Mountains of dead cars, their entrails piled high above sagging corrugated walls. Grilles and hoods of Chevys and Cadillacs 20 feet off the ground. Windshields, wheels, and things I've never laid eyes on before. The grime and the grease. It's just grand.
So God bless junkyards. They're a refreshing breath of foul air in the New Boston. They're rich and raw - a nice tonic to the numbing bright and shiny glass and steel we see more of every day. They forever belong in the urban mix, along with urban wasteland surrounding them. Every city needs some.
Drive from Boston to East Cambridge to see what I'm talking about. Bang a right off Cambridge Street onto Windsor, and within moments, you're in a magnificent world of junkyards. The business they practice is now known in the trade as "automotive recycling." New Age meets old metal.
There is a raft of them on the Cambridge-Somerville line, including a block of Columbia Street that is scrap metal central. Nissenbaum's Auto Parts has been there for a century, and its vast empire spreads across both sides of Windsor in a vista of desolation. You've got a lot of other names there, too, like Joseph Talewsky, Atlas, and Acme.
Nestled amid all of this, just over the Somerville line, is 561 Windsor St. - a four-story bizarro warren of bare space rented by tiny outfits, often solo acts, drawn by absurdly cheap rates.
Some call it an incubator of creativity. I call it Dada capitalism. What makes 561 different, and more interesting from, say, the artist studios around Fort Point is its business component. The place is also full of entrepreneurs with fevered visions of financial success.
"We're totally in the Bermuda Triangle here," Jacob Knowles says with pride. He's a young architect who designs residential houses and consults on green building issues. Like so many others at 561, Knowles, 28, is playing without a net. He has started his business, Studio Respiro, from scratch, and he and his wife have a child on the way.
561 consists of two moribund warehouses mysteriously joined together. It's got a fun house quality to it. You're immediately lost in its endless dimly-lit halls. You see figures in the distance who materialize and then disappear like weirdos in a Coen brothers movie.
There's an A side and a B side to this monolith, each built at a different level. To go from one side to another is a complete crapshoot. Your best bet is something called The Middle Stairway.
You know you're not in Post Office Square when you walk into the lobby to find a bunch of decidedly unchic bicycles in disarray and Peter Rinnig's QRST's T-Shirt Printers. It's mid-morning and the building is somnolent. The 561 crowd works late and sleeps late. They come and go on their own, free to succeed or fail. And they do fail. A photo lab called Zona went belly up in the space Rinnig is in now.
It takes awhile to grasp what is there. Let's see, you've got a fencing club, an outfit that makes electric bikes, worship space for Sikhs, who arrive in turbans and saris. A micro p.r. firm called Potter Ruiz that does ads aimed at the local Latino community.
There's an Akkaido martial arts outfit, three recording studios, a dance studio, graphic artists, photographers, painters galore, and Community Enterprises, the nonprofit that helps people with disabilities find work.
There's Gentle Giant Restoration and Conservation, a wing of Gentle Giant Movers that fixes furniture busted during moves. Gentle Giant also has a training center at 561 where neophyte movers learn how to pack. They practice on pianos, cribs, refrigerators, and televisions. All the best, guys.
There's a pungent, vinegary odor wafting in the hall - "one of the many odd smells in this building," notes Sara Pellerin of Gentle Giant Restoration. It turns out to come from Taza Chocolate.
Taza, the tiny phenom that makes organic chocolate, came here, like everyone else, for cheap space. Taza in turn rents a small corner of its space by the hour to Lourdes Smith, who makes fresh mozzarella every morning and sells it to farmer's markets and restaurants like Oleana.
There's a significant dog quotient at 561 - always a good sign. Pellerin on 2, for example, brings Mabou to work. Knowles, up on 4, brings Zack, the only other living thing in his one-room space.
There's also an undeniable isolation that permeates 561. People work behind closed doors. Some may chat in the halls, but that's about it. Knowles, an acknowledged introvert, also appreciates community, and would love to see regular mixers, for the lack of a better word, so people could cross-pollinate.
In a studio environment, he says, where people work on their own projects side by side, the energy level is intense.
"You get more work done," he says. "There are parallels to some degree here."
You can appreciate 561 without romanticizing it. It's not unique. Brooklyn is full of these places. Here, it's notable. It's worth remembering the funk of the building wouldn't exist without the protective profusion of junkyards. Long live junkyards.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com
