🔮 Dust off your 2024 bingo card

It’s Thursday, Boston.

❓ Have you been paying attention to local news this year? Prove it! We’ll Venmo $5 to the first person to reply to this email with a screenshot of a perfect score on Boston.com’s “How well do you know the biggest stories of 2024?” quiz. Ready … set … GO!

👀 What’s on tap today:

• Say goodbye to two Green Line stops

• Boston’s best restaurants of 2024

• Boston Public Library, Wrapped

Up first…

12 DAYS OF B-SIDE

Local experts 🤝 Fortune tellers

On the 11th day of B-Side the newsletter gave to me: Fortune-telling locals, holiday traffic warnings, tips for surviving family drama, holiday good news, five delish hot chocolates, Phillip Eng’s Spotify Wrapped, volunteer opportunities(!) … tips for Boston winters, one pop-up review, local gift recs, and a Boston holiday tree. 🎶

Last year, we asked five experts across different industries for their local predictions for 2024. Here’s what came true:

🚇 The MBTA had money on its mind. Liveable Streets Alliance’s former executive director Stacy Thompson predicted that as the MBTA takes on bigger projects, questions about its truly dire funding situation would become more urgent. She pretty much nailed it: Gov. Maura Healey created a new Transportation Funding Task Force to make funding recommendations for the MBTA (among other things) by year’s end. So stay tuned: Those recs are going to play a BIG role in determining the agency’s future, said now-co-executive director Makayla Comas.

🏘️ The housing market continued to make us nauseous. Boston Pads CEO Demetrios Salpoglou suspected high demand and tight supply would keep driving up rent prices into 2024. Surprise! It happened. “We came in at +3.08% rent growth over the last 12 months, as there wasn’t enough supply created to offset demand,” Salpoglou said. Those rising costs drove folks to seek out spots with more roommates in order to save money, he said — which, spoiler, actually drove up the price of those units even more *sobs*.

 🎓 Higher ed fell deeper into its flop era. Sentiments about higher ed were souring in 2023, and Mary L. Churchill, associate dean at BU’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, predicted it’d only get worse this year. “Unfortunately, much of this came true,” she said. While Churchill couldn’t have predicted just how much went down this year (encampments, resignations, soaring costs, post-affirmative action enrollment, etc.), none of it sweetened the public’s perception, and she thinks the incoming Trump administration won’t either.

🌎 Mass. took a big step toward climate-friendly infrastructure. Hessann Farooqi, the executive director of the Boston Climate Action Network, predicted/wished Mass. would take steps toward making climate-friendly infrastructure upgrades in 2024. And while we didn’t implement much (shoutout to the commuter rail for making a plan, though!), the future for those upgrades looks bright thanks to Gov. Healey’s major reform to how Mass. sites and permits clean energy projects, which should make upgrades significantly easier.

🍽️ Restaurants are still struggling to have it all. Biplaw Rai, a managing partner at Comfort Kitchen, predicted restaurants would need to figure out how to fix the industry’s “broken” wage system to keep employees happy post-COVID. We couldn’t get ahold of Rai, but he certainly had his finger on the pulse with ballot question 5. Evan Harrison, a partner-owner at State Park — a Cambridge restaurant that nixed tipped minimum wage — feels the question not passing has taken the wind out of the conversation’s sails, which he said had been gaining steam for years. Translation: Don’t hold your breath.

B-SIDE AWARDS

Welcome to the first-ever B-Side Awards! 

A.k.a. our new mini year-end awards show that aims to recognize the best, worst, silliest, floppiest, and wildest things we covered in the newsletter. 

This is the FINAL category of this year’s awards (we’ll reveal all the winners tomorrow). But for now, vote, vote, vote! Without further ado, the last category is:

B-Side’s local icon of the year.

TOGETHER WITH THE MGH FUND

Your donation x 3 = A LOT of good

💸❤️‍🩹 It’s basic math: You give $50, and an anonymous donor turns it into $150. Donate to the MGH Fund and help power life-saving research, patient care, and community health programs at Massachusetts General Hospital. For today and tomorrow only, your donation will go 3x as far — and the clock is ticking. Act now before it’s too late, and triple your impact. 

CITY

Quick & dirty headlines

🚃 Two Green Line T stops are on the way out. By 2026, Brookline baddies will be saying goodbye to the Kent Street stop and looking at one combined Fairbanks Street and Brandon Hall stop. The changes are an effort to make the C branch more accessible, efficient, and, ever so slightly, speed up commute times (similar to the B branch merger a few years ago). Construction is slated to start between late 2025 and early 2026, and yes, there might be a few … shutdowns.

🤝 The State House hammered out a BIG bill targeting the opioid epidemic. Less than two weeks before its session ends, the Legislature agreed on a long-awaited bill addressing the issue. Inside: A mandate for insurance companies to cover overdose-reversal drugs and recovery services. Plus, language that would no longer require hospital officials to report suspected abuse or neglect solely because a baby is born exposed to drugs, a practice that many say stokes fear in women in recovery (here’s an explainer). Notably absent: A proposal to allow for safe injection sites. A vote is expected on Thursday.

🍟 Bad news for fry lovers. And good news for beer lovers. After 13 years in biz, the downtown location of beloved french-fry spot Saus will fry its final fry on Sunday, Dec. 22. On the bright side, its Bow Market location will remain open. On the beer front: Cambridge Brewing Co. is also closing this month, but its legacy will live on through Castle Island Brewing, which bought its brand rights (including beer recipes) and will start selling two of its popular brews: Cambridge Amber ale and Flower Child IPA.

🏆 Babe, wake up, the 2024 Boston-area restaurant awards just dropped. That’s the Globe’s year-end restaurant “best of” list, and there was some stiff competition. As for who came out on top: “Opening of the Year” went to La Padrona; “Best meal” went to Black Cat @ Vee Vee; “Best concept” went to Quincy’s Lê Madeline (these spots also got shoutouts in Eater Boston’s awards). Meanwhile, “Triumph of the year” went to Dani’s Queer Bar; and “Best comfort food” was Abuela’s Table. Check out all the winners here.

ONE LAST THING

The Boston Public Library, Wrapped

You’ve heard of Spotify Wrapped, and you’ve even heard of Boston Wrapped and Massachusetts Wrapped. Now, may we introduce you to … BPL Wrapped.

That’s right, even the Boston Public Library jumped on the Spotify Wrapped bandwagon, dropping some major reading facts and figures from 2024. Highlights include: 2,332,152 in-person visits system-wide, 148,149 new library cards, and 1,836,618 physical books in circulation, the three most popular of which were “Happy Place” by Emily Henry; “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus, and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. Go off!

You can check out the rest of this year’s Wrapped here.

— Written by Gia Orsino and Emily Schario

📚 Thanks for reading! Hot girls loooove the library.

💜 Special shoutout to today’s sponsor, The MGH Fund, for supporting local journalism and keeping our city healthy. 

🏆 The results are in: For the last time, we’re not going to tell you which viral moment that only chronically online Bostonians would know won the B-Side Award, but we will tomorrow! One reader said: “Wow I thought I was chronically online but I've only heard of ONE of these things. Looks like I need to get more screen time in.”

💃 Keep up with us @BostonBSide on IG, TikTok, and Twitter. Send comments and suggestions to [email protected] or [email protected].