The Riverside neighborhood was our home for the next thirty years, years as boisterous and crowded with memories as Western Avenue was with people on those long ago summer’s nights.

We moved into 149 Putnam Avenue in 1966. The rent was $75. It went up $10 the next year, and $15 the year after. I was vaguely aware of the new Harvard buildings going up a few blocks away, but I don’t remember connecting them with our rising rents.

In those days 149 Putnam was assessed for just $9500. Thus, one year’s rents from the four apartments and storefront brought in more than the whole assessed value of the building. Our landlord had done exactly zero work on the building since he bought it in the 1940s.

Late in 1968, activists led by Progressive Labor came to our door with a petition to put rent control on the city ballot. I joined their campaign and got my first real taste of local politics.

When we brought in our petition, the city simply refused to put it on the ballot. When we went to the election commission to protest, they arrested 42 of us.

I stopped paying our latest rent increase and helped start the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee, which used a telephone tree to assemble crowds and block evictions.

Hundreds of neighbors and activists came and actually physically stopped our family’s eviction three times between May and December of 1969. On the fourth try the evictors succeeded. But we had succeeded, too, because the petitioning, the arrests, and the eviction fights convinced our city council to adopt rent control.

It was around this time that an anti-urban renewal activist, Steve Goldin, showed me a picture he had taken of our landlord a couple of years earlier. He was being hauled away by four cops from a crowd that was blockading bulldozers!

Our old building changed hands three times after the eviction. One owner wanted to tear the building down and build a fourteen story condo tower on the site. Because of the rent control law, and the neighbors petition drive, that plan was scrapped.

Finally a landlord came who was willing to to fix it up, modernize the heating system and bathrooms. Rather than go through a rent control hearing process, the tenants and landlord agreed on the rents for the next seven years. The Rent Board signed off on the deal.

Before rent control, many of the three deckers along Putnam Avenue had been owned by absentee landlords. After 1970, they became owner-occupied. Rent control exempted two and three unit buildings if the owner lived in them. In Cambridge as a whole, the percentage of homeowers doubled during the rent control years.

On one corner of Putnam and Western Avenue there’s a long building with eleven apartments. Behind it, towards the Charles River, stands the former power plant of the Cambridge Electric Light Company (CELCO).

CELCO had long coveted its neighbor’s property. The company wanted to tear the apartments down so they could put in a big transformer to serve the expansion of MIT. The old landlord, Mr Marquis, had not wanted that to happen. He restricted the deed so that the building couldn’t be sold to CELCO. After Mr Marquis passed away in 1985, the building was sold to Ed Cacciola, but he, in turn, resold it to CELCO.

In order to evict the tenants, CELCO had to get certificates from the Rent Board. Among the hundreds of neighbors who came to the hearings were landlords like Marvin Gilmore and Tony Sala. Because of the rent control law, the neighbors were able to stop CELCO. The company sold the apartment building to its residents, who still own it as a cooperative.

And as it turned out, the power plant shut down and was sold to Harvard. If CELCO had prevailed, we would now be trying to figure out what to do with another abandoned industrial building.