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Boston, MA
This Dorchester resident brings trash to City Hall to raise awareness of the litter problem in Boston
Local News
“I’m not invited to these rooms where policies are being made. … but what I can do is point out infrastructure that’s physically visible to everybody,” Alex said.
If you see a man pushing a cart full of protruding poles or flattened construction cones down Massachusetts Avenue, it’s probably Alex Alex, making his frequent commute to City Hall in an attempt to clean up Boston.
“One of the most basic responsibilities of government is to keep areas clean, to manage resources right, and to manage the way that people move around. And I saw that, in Boston, there’s obviously a very clear failure in … those aspects,” Alex said.
Alex Alex, 25, may be familiar to some Boston residents after he ran a longshot campaign for mayor last fall. After his predicted loss, Alex has not stopped his campaign for a brighter Boston.
Alex opted to change his last name to match his first after he became an American citizen in 2023.
Alex, who works part time at a restaurant on Beacon Hill, spends his free time pushing a cart around the city, collecting fallen state and city government materials like bus signs, broken traffic cones, and forgotten construction equipment, along with other trash.
He then carts the damaged infrastructure and garbage to City Hall plaza and leaves it there for all to see.
The goal, he said, is to raise awareness about what he describes as inaction from the city and a misallocation of resources that have left ordinary Bostonians behind.
“I’m not invited to these rooms where policies are being made. I really can’t go to school board meetings, and pitch ideas there, but what I can do is point out infrastructure that’s physically visible to everybody,” Alex said.
Alex documents the process, filming his trash collections and posting videos on his social media platforms.
“The third time in ten days bringing damaged infrastructure to City Hall, totaling over 200 pounds,” Alex said in one of his more popular posts.
He’s picked up a total of 5,000 pounds of trash and other discarded materials in a year, Alex said.
The New York University graduate said he’s had a few encounters with police around City Hall. He’s never been arrested for dumping trash, but he did have to complete 16 hours of community service earlier this year after being arrested for spray painting statistics about fatal car crashes in Massachusetts outside of the State House.
Alex says that once, as he brought liquor bottles to City Hall after a cleanup last summer, 10 police officers circled him and about five police cruisers pulled into the plaza.
“It’s always a question of ‘Is there going to be law enforcement waiting for me? What is going to be the response?’ Because I can never really tell. Sometimes [authorities] tell me that it’s going to be a fine, and then they don’t do anything about it for a few months,” Alex said.
Alex said he’s fine with pressing the boundaries of the law.
“I’m OK with doing it, because I know how to walk a line. I know that eventually there will be consequences I have to face that I wasn’t ready for,” he said.
City Councilors say they’ve been willing to listen
The idea of lugging hundreds of pounds of broken traffic cones, traffic barricades, or bus signs around the city may seem extreme. According to Alex, he has already tried speaking to city officials about the litter problem, but they always seem to brush him off.
“It’s kind of been an escalation after being ignored by an administration that says that they listen to residents and then work with them to deliver real results. So I was like, ‘Okay, you don’t want to work with me. You don’t want to talk about these issues that I brought up. You don’t want to review the data. Then I’ll bring it to your front steps,’” Alex said.
Boston.com reached out to the City Councilors whom Alex said he’s tried to contact, along with Mayor Michelle Wu.
Councilor John FitzGerald, who represents Dorchester and parts of the South End, Councilor Benjamin Weber, who represents West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and At-Large Councilor Julia Mejia all pushed back on Alex’s claims that they haven’t engaged with his concerns.
“This is not true. I met Alex once in my life at a South End event, we talked for about 10 minutes and I actually gave him advice and was very complimentary of him, though I did push back on some of his comments and educated him on things he was unaware of that make his demands more difficult to accomplish than he realizes. So not sure where he’s coming from with that statement,” FitzGerald said in an email to Boston.com.
“I am sorry he feels that way, but I don’t think it is accurate. I have spoken to him at public meetings on a couple occasions and heard him out. If he has anything further to discuss, he is welcome to reach out to my office anytime,” Weber told Boston.com.
“We have connected and met with Alex Alex since that comment has been made (that her office is unresponsive), and look forward to partnering with him through our co-governance model, as we do with all Bostonians. We appreciate Alex’s advocacy and want to continue to amplify community’s voice,” a spokesperson for Mejia said in a statement to Boston.com.
Wu and City Councilors Liz Breadon, Sharon Durkan, and Enrique Pepén did not respond to requests for comment.
When Alex goes through neighborhoods picking up trash, some residents express their appreciation, he said. However, he stresses that he can’t be the only person cleaning up the city. He wants people to understand that “at some point you’re going to have to do this too,” Alex said.
On Earth Day, April 22, Alex plans to host a protest at the State House. He’s asking participants to pick up trash from spaces that matter to them and bring their findings to the State House “to show the legislature what our state looks like and how dirty it is,” he said.
Alex is also working to launch his own consulting firm called 100ForDemocracy.
“Part of this consulting agency would be to hire people like me and young people who don’t really have these opportunities to break into the professional world, but who have skills, who have the background knowledge, and who have expertise that is being underutilized,” he said.
In the meantime, Alex will carry on with his cleanups and continue to work at his restaurant job where, he said, his boss will continue to jokingly ask him if he’s gotten arrested lately.
Boston, MA
SEE THE GOOD: Roxbury center reminds young adults ‘You got this’ – Boston News, Weather, Sports | WHDH 7News
BOSTON (WHDH) – The You Got This center, run by Children’s Services of Roxbury, helps young adults coping with homelessness, mental health needs, and addiction.
The drop-in center also provides a space to create community.
One of the programs they center offers, freestyle Fridays, held on the first Friday of every month, gives members a chance to test out their rap skills.
Members said programs like these have taught them to be more confident.
“It’s a comforting area,” Deryq Samson-Brown said. “I’ve never felt like an outcast; I don’t think anybody has really felt like an outcast. It’s like a real accepting place.”
Samson-Brown said the center has inpsired him to pursue a career giving back to youth.
(Copyright (c) 2026 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Boston, MA
Chickadee, the popular Mediterranean restaurant in Seaport, is shutting down – The Boston Globe
An Instagram post that announced their closure on Tuesday evening did not point to any reason for the closure, and requests for comment were not immediately returned.
“Eight years ago, we opened our doors at the Innovation and Design Building with a simple hope: to bring you honest, delicious food and a warm place to share it,” read the post. “What we found instead was a community – regulars who became friends, first dates that turned into anniversaries, celebrations, quiet lunches, and everything in between. You made this restaurant so much more than a place to eat.”
Globe Food Critic Devra First awarded Chickadee 3.5 stars in October 2018, where she wrote how some meals “are magic, everything cooked perfectly, making you swoon.”
At the time, it was also considered one of the earliest restaurants to have opened in the still-industrial far reaches of the Seaport, which was home to ship-repair facilities and cutting-edge design firms, seafood wholesalers, and biotech companies. In terms of location, some said it was ahead of its time.
DaSilva, a three-time James Beard Best Chef: Northeast semifinalist, has led some of the top restaurants across the Greater Boston area. Aside from Barbara Lynch’s flagship No. 9 Park, he opened Spoke Wine Bar in Somerville in 2013. During his time at Spoke, he received a number of accolades and was named one of Zagat’s “30 Under 30” for Boston and earned the title “Rising Star Chef” from StarChefs.
Kilpatrick, who also left Lynch’s group in 2014, worked for the team behind O Ya to help open restaurants in New York. According to his LinkedIn, he started a new job as a regional operations manager for Lark, a boutique hotel management company, in April.
Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com. Follow her @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.
This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
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🥵Very hot, with highs around 97 degrees. Sunset is at 8:19 p.m.
GBH’s Dan Murphy captured Abby Evangelista and her corgi, Rocko, at Sail250 this weekend. “Rocko gets dressed up for lots of occasions … sometimes just to go to the store, and he does so great with meeting people,” Evangelista said. Keep reading for more photos from the tall ships.
A year ago today firefighters were extinguishing flames at the Gabriel House, an assisted living facility in Fall River. Ten people died in the fire, a tragedy for their loved ones and a scary moment for about 18,000 people who live in assisted living facilities across the state.
Now state officials have created new regulations for fire safety in assisted living facilities, going into effect later this month. Fire departments will inspect these facilities once a year, and facilities will need to submit emergency plans and train their workers on what to do in case of a fire.
GBH’s Craig LeMoult found that neither the new regulations nor state or federal fire codes address checking sprinkler systems. Some of the sprinklers at the Gabriel House weren’t working the night of the fire, including the ones in the room where it started.
“Had the sprinklers functioned properly, we’re not having this conversation right now. It is maybe a single fatality fire, but certainly not more than that,” Fall River fire chief Jeffrey Bacon told LeMoult. “The good news is that some of the sprinklers did function. And had they not, we would be here talking about 20, 30, 40 victims.” You can read the full story here.
Four Things to Know
1. Colleagues and friends are remembering Louisa Gag, a Boston transportation planner killed last week when a truck driver hit her as she rode her bike near the Roxbury Crossing MBTA stop. Gag grew up in Roslindale and worked for the city on expanding the BlueBikes bike-share program. Before that, she worked for the LivableStreets Alliance, co-authoring a plan to help cities stop traffic deaths. You can see her talk about her work in this 2019 video.
“In moments like these, there is a tendency to reduce the person to the way they died and to their activism,” said Stacy Thompson, a former executive director of LivableStreets. “While we may know Louisa as a deep champion of the city and a close advocate, she’s also a Boston Latin [School] kid. She’s also, like, the most infectious, hilarious person you’ve ever met. She’s also a daughter. It’s so important to us right now for her life to not be reduced to how she stopped living.”
2. More than 4,000 nurses are back at work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They went on a one-day strike last week, and hospital administrators kept them from returning to their jobs for another five days. The Massachusetts Nurses Association and Brigham management have been negotiating a contract for seven months, going back and forth over wages, health insurance premiums and staffing levels.
“It’s exciting, but also frightening,” said Christine Forgeron, a cardiac nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “I don’t know what to expect when we go back to our patients. What happens next, because we still don’t have a contract,is the most unsettling part.”
3. Michael Walsh, a Republican candidate for state attorney general, will be on the primary ballot in September despite what Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Karp called “substantial evidence in the record of voter fraud.” The case began when Adam Roof, executive director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, submitted a complaint accusing a signature gatherer Walsh’s campaign hired of either falsifying or not meeting state requirements for 1,021 of the 10,677 signatures they submitted. Candidates for statewide office need 10,000 signatures to get onto the ballot.
Karp said that there was indeed evidence that the signatures came not from voters themselves but from a list of registered voters the state’s Republican party gave the signature gatherer. But the case fell on a technicality: state law required Roof, the Democratic party official, to submit his complaint by certified mail, and he did not do so. The state’s highest court still has to decide what will happen to Anne Manning Martin, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor who used the same signature gatherer.
4. Residents of towns around the Quabbin Reservoir flooded into the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority meeting last week to ask for a better deal. The Quabbin supplies clean drinking water for dozens of cities and towns in the eastern part of the state. Right now, the state requires towns like Shrewsbury, Belchertown, Orange and Pelham to keep their development in check to keep the Quabbin clean. Though those towns get some money in return, local officials said it’s not enough to cover their costs.
“We are protecting this watershed by foregoing any type of economic development, which is a cornerstone of providing the basics of education [and] public safety,” said state Rep. Aaron Saunders, of Belchertown. “It’s time for a change, and not an incremental one.”
Tall ships sail into Boston
Dan Murphy / GBH News
Tomorrow is the last full day of Sail Boston, the city’s tall ships celebration. The ships will leave our harbor Thursday morning. GBH photographer Dan Murphy was there over the weekend to capture the Parade of Sail.
Dan Murphy / GBH News
The Esmeralda, a ship from Chile, sailed by Castle Island.
Dan Murphy / GBH News
Carolyn Gustine carried her son, Patrick, on her shoulders.
You can see the full photo essay here.
Dig deeper:
–Spectators line Cape Cod Canal to see tall ships make their way to Sail250 in Boston
–The World Cup transformed Greater Boston. Will it last?
–Department of Agricultural Resources celebrates Ice Cream Trail program
GBH Daily
Your essential daily newsletter delivering trusted news, local insights, ways to connect, and can’t miss programs from Boston and beyond.
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