Here is another Allston-Brighton location which, like the “Dicalced monastery,” makes but one appearance, also as a list item not significantly dwelled upon. But this one at least has a fun fact to go with it:

[T]he district Redemption Center down in West Brighton … actually even boldly shar[es] a storefront with Liquor World liquor store, so the can-miners can do like one-stop redeeming and shopping.

The editing work is necessary because the inventory in this case is a series of “night-noises”—from the Redemption Center, “clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners going after dumpsters’ cans and bottles”—irritating cokehead OCD psychopath Randy Lenz on a long walk back from the “Brookline Young People’s Mtg. over on Beacon near the Newton line” to Ennet House with housemate and frequent co-constitutionalist Bruce Green.

At first blush, this seems implausible. I am no expert in sonic geography, and to be fair I don’t even think sonic geography is a thing, but here’s how it works out: Beacon by Newton in Brookline is specific enough to place the meeting in Cleveland Circle, while Ennet House is a short walk up Chestnut Hill Avenue and then a somewhat longer walk down Comm. Ave. to Warren Street. The Redemption Center is all the way up in Allston—in real life it is actually the Allston Redemption Center—on Rugg Road. No bottle clink or dumpster rattle from Allston could possibly be heard so far south.

The best explanation is that they are not so far south, an assumption implied by known behaviors of the listener in question. Not only is Randy Lenz more or less completely out of his mind, he is also known for taking suspiciously long walks. As noted in the story, the “nightly AA or NA meetings get out at 2130h. or 2200h., and curfew isn’t until 2330,” yet Lenz has lately become known by Ennet’s live-in staff (Don Gately and Johnette Foltz) for taking “right up to 2329 to get home, almost two hours, even though it’s like a half-hour walk.” Although perhaps a stretch, it’s not impossible they could wander this far. Not to mention, poor Bruce Green would be more than compliant as Lenz simultaneously, contradictorily, talks his head off and tries to lose him.

Plus, Lenz’s northerly tendencies are well-documented—“he always has to sit in the northernmost seat in the car, for some reason, using a compass and napkin to plot out what the night’s major direction of travel’ll be and then figuring out what seat he’ll have to be in to stay maximally north”—as is his mastery of the “streets’ cockeyed grid” in the the ill-defined “Enfield-Brighton-Allston” area and also the technically non-existent areas of “South Cambridge and East Newton and North Brookline.” These are Lenz’s stalking grounds, and not just metaphorically. 

The empty lots and industrial alleyways around the Allston Redemption Center appear ideally suited for Lenz to prowl, so it fulfills that grim requirement as well.

However, you may be disappointed to learn that it does not share a storefront with a liquor store. And, unless the bars on the windows of the building pictured above indicate “this is a liquor store” as opposed to the more than equally plausible “this is a building in an unsafe neighborhood” then there is no sign one ever did.