If there was ever an Allston CO, it was gone many years ago. Allston is a part of Brighton. Allston's separate identity dates back to the railroad, which needed a name for a second station in Brighton. George Washington Allston was a popular local painter, so they named it after him, and it stuck; the neighborhood (once a Town before crooked politicians essentially sold it to Boston sometime around
1870) is sometimes called Allston-Brighton, though the two halves are reasonably distinct. The Brighton CO is right in Brighton Center, within a short enough reach of Allston to cover it efficiently.Note, though, that a significant part of Allston-Brighton is served by the Brookline CO and is in that rate center. When I moved from one side of Comm. Ave. to the other some years ago, my phone number (and rate center) changed from ASPinwall-7 to STAdium-3. (Brookline's 3Ls included REGent and LONgwood.) Boundaries are weird there. The phone company follows the middle of Comm. Ave. (a natural boundary for wire, with a trolley line running there). The post office puts all Comm. Ave. addresses, both sides, in Allston or Brighton, but side streets in Brookline. (This impacts insurance rates. I once knew someone whose basement apartment, on a side street, netted a much lower car insurance rate than the upstairs units, because of the different ZIP code.) The real city limits meander a couple of blocks back.
Harvard has bought up a LOT of land in North Allston, right across from their Cambridge campus, and is planning to develop that too. I think a couple of blocks in Allston near Harvard are already in the Cambridge rate center, and Harvard is likely to equip most of its new buildings with Cambridge numbers too. WGBH ("God Bless Harvard", though they'll probably claim it stands for "Great Blue Hill") has a Cambridge phone number, for instance, though it too is in Allston (or as it's known to Zoomers, "Boston 02134"), just across the river.
The 617-931 choke exchange is listed in the LERG to the Cambridge 02T tandem, a DMS-200. It's one of two tandems in VZ's 210 Bent St. CO (the other is a 5E; a 4E next door, at 250, has been decommissioned). If MIT still gets its dial tone from VZ, it comes out of Bent St. That 3-block-long street is full of telecom carriers, Level 3 (and others having buildings there. AT&T still uses 250, which is a divestiture condo (shared between AT&T and VZ). I think the carrier hotel (was Network Plus, now defunct) at #185 has closed. XO is at 89 Fulkerson, a block or two off Bent. It seems like there's more glass than dirt in the ground around there....
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting