🙋🏻‍♀️👟 Walk a mile in Mayor Wu’s shoes

It’s Wednesday, Boston.

🍝🍷 Want to attend a curated wine dinner … for free? Northern Italian restaurant Matria is serving a mouthwatering (21+) three-course menu on Aug. 21 paired with Stags’ Leap wine. Want in? They’re giving away a pair of tickets (a $240 value!) — become a member to be eligible.

👀 What’s on tap today:

• Late night MBTA service!?

• We’re getting hot n’ hazy

• It sucks to BU

Up first…

CULTURE

Play mayor for a day

Forget Mayor Wu and Josh Kraft. What if YOU were mayor for a day? As the *actual* race for mayor heats up, Boston magazine flipped the script and asked over 20 “highly opinionated” locals what they would do if they had the keys to the city for a day … and a magic wand. 

Here’s what they said:

🍷 Add some class to Boston’s beer garden scene. Enter: Wine gardens. That’s the suggestion from Raffles Boston GM Carlos Bueno. There’s no doubt Boston’s beer garden scene is thriving (here are some of our faves), but IPA-haters want to sip bevs on picnic tables too! He imagines “an elegant, year-round glass-enclosed pavilion, complete with a retractable roof to invite the breeze on temperate days.” We’d vote for that.

🧠 Put a plug in Boston’s brain drain. Here’s a conundrum: Boston has over 150,000 college students, but once they graduate, “we’re watching far too many of the brightest minds walk away from the state,” said Jacquetta Van Zandt, co-host of the “Politics and Prosecco” show. Why? Most of them can’t afford to stay here. Van Zandt’s solution? A new, stay-in-Boston fellowship to help recent grads launch their careers.

🔑 Turn tenants into owners. Breaking into Boston’s housing market can feel like a pipe dream. Boston Impact Initiative CEO Betty Francisco’s pitch to make it a reality: Community-owned and -led real estate development models. They’d pave the way for folks be a part of their building’s ownership structure regardless of wealth or background, helping them to not just own a home, but put roots down in Boston and share in the city’s future. 

🎫 Hot take: Charge for resident parking permits. Whether it’s speed bumps, crosswalks, or sidewalks, we can all agree that Boston’s traffic ~situation~ could be improved. But those improvements cost $$$. So Chris Dempsey, founding partner at Speck Dempsey, thinks we should follow in Cambridge and Somerville’s footsteps and charge for annual neighborhood parking permits to make them happen. “If you charge $40 per year, that raises four million bucks,” he said, which he’d pour into “traffic calming” initiatives.

🍎 Give Boston’s foodie scene a crunchy makeover. If Jenny Johnson, co-host of “Dining Playbook,” were mayor for a day, she’d take steps to “make Boston more calm, nourished, and centered in body, mind, and microbiome.” Translation: Make Boston’s foodie scene healthier. Think: Banning seed oil and artificial food dye, subsidizing olive oil and grass-fed ghee for restaurants, tripling the number of farmer’s markets, and no more ultraprocessed food in school lunches. 

💭 Wanna dream even bigger? You can read all 20+ ideas here.

TOGETHER WITH THE ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM 

Creativity is in full bloom

🦋🌷🎨This summer at the Gardner and Pao Arts Center, art and nature grow side by side. Step into immersive exhibitions like Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden, where sculptures bring teeming nature indoors, and in the Fenway Gallery check out Flowers for Isabella. Outside, Yu-Wen Wu: Reigning Beauty, 2025 blooms on the Façade as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025, while Small Conversation fills the Courtyard with a digital soundscape of crickets, cicadas, and frogs. Just a short trip downtown to Pao Arts Center brings you to Where We Meet: Imagining Gardens and Futures, where you can also pick up the zine Between the Bricks: A Field Guide to Imagined Gardens. Plan your next visit now. 

QUICK QUESTION!

💸 Is economic uncertainty impacting your housing choices? (Think: Living with parents/roommates for longer, delaying/giving up on homeownership, etc.)

CITY

Quick & dirty headlines

🚇 Our late-night MBTA dreams are coming true! This is NOT a drill: T, bus, and ferry service are all getting late-night extensions on Fridays and Saturdays starting Aug. 24. Service will extend by “about one hour” on the T (which currently ends around 1 a.m.), and these eight bus routes will get the same treatment. Another five buses, plus the Hingham/Hull, East Boston, and Charlestown ferries will also add various late-night trips. Oh, AND as a welcome gift, service after 9 p.m. will be fare-free for five weekends. Thanks, train daddy!

💸 Trump’s policies could be COSTLY for Boston higher ed. Literally. According to a new study, international student enrollment could drop by a whopping 40%, which would cost Mass. (which hosts over 80,000 of them) an estimated $619 million in revenue. Meanwhile, the state’s grad school ecosystem will also be feeling the squeeze from both international student losses AND new caps on federal student loans in Trump’s “big, beautiful, bill.” All of this could spell big trouble for schools whose bottom lines depend on these students, many of which are already hurting financially.

🌫️ This week’s weather forecast: Hot n’ hazy. This week’s heat wave is heat waving, with heat indexes projected to hit the 90s today before finally dropping off tomorrow. Also sticking around today? Not-so-great air quality, the Globe’s lead meteorologist told us. Suffolk County has seen air quality alerts this week, and apparently, ozone is the culprit. High pressure is keeping ozone pollutants low enough for us to breathe in, plus there’s still some haziness from the Canada wildfires in the air. Long story short: Take it easy outside, and hydrate!

⛴️ Now arriving: A new ferry stop in the Seaport! Please give a warm welcome to Pier 10, the newest Seaport ferry stop in the Raymond L. Marine Park on Drydock Avenue. Pier 10 isn’t *technically* new (the ferry’s been running there since June), but the city officially celebrated its opening and the new commuter ferry Aug. 12. The new ferry runs from Lovejoy Wharf (near North Station) to Fan Pier to Pier 10 during peak commuting hours Monday through Friday for $5 a trip. Check out the schedule here.

GIVEAWAY

Together with Al’s Block Party at Fenway

Enter to win two tickets for the Grand Slam Package - access to Big Al's Block Party + the game and Jersey collab. To enter, just refer a friend and have them accept your invite by the end of the day on 8/14/25. If you have already referred a friend to B-Side (and they’ve accepted), you're eligible! Full details below*

18+. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Limit one entry per person. See Official Rules & an additional entry option here.

ONE LAST THING

It sucks to BU

When most B-Siders think of BU, they probably think of Boston University. But down in Texas, there’s another BU: Baylor University. And now, they’re going toe-to-toe in court.

The problem? Boston University is using an interlocking “BU” logo that looks nearly identical to Baylor’s. 

Long story short: The two schools have been feuding about this for literal decades after Baylor tried to register it back in the ‘80s, but have since been in a peaceful truce thanks to an official agreement to coexist. That is, until 2018, when Boston University started ramping up its own use of the interlocking “BU” and refused Baylor’s requests to stop. 

Baylor’s ask? That Boston University stop using the interlocking BU permanently … and deliver up and destroy all materials featuring the logo. Yeesh.

— Written by Gia Orsino and Emily Schario

📝 Correction: The new ferry dock in the Seaport is not served by the MBTA, it’s a stop on the Seaport Ferry, which is run by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

🎓 Thanks for reading! Between this and Applegate, Mass. is on a ROLL with local lawsuits.

💜 Special shoutout to today’s sponsor, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, for supporting local journalism and bringing culturally rich experiences to our city. 

🦞 The results are in: 34% of B-Siders say their perfect kind of night is a Summer Shack seafood platter after a long day in the sun. One reader said: “It is unwise to get between me and a crustacean!” Noted!

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