Here’s what it’s like to be a mover on September 1 in Boston

The trucks start lining up as the sun does. By 6 a.m. on Sept. 1, crews across Boston will be loading dollies, checking supplies, and mapping out a day that will take them up narrow triple-decker stairwells, through gridlocked streets, and, this year, around a city that’s also trying to vote.

Nearly 79% of leases in Boston turn over on Sept. 1, according to the real estate agency Red Tree Boston, making it the single most competitive and chaotic day in the region’s rental market.

It’s a phenomenon so entrenched it has its own nickname, “Allston Christmas,” for the piles of discarded furniture that appear on sidewalks as tens of thousands of tenants — many of them students — move out and in within the same 24-hour window. 

This year, the chaos could be compounded. Massachusetts’ state primary election falls on the very same day, Tuesday, Sept. 1. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., meaning the same streets that will be clogged with U-Hauls and double-parked cars will also be carrying voters to and from the polls.

For the movers themselves, none of that changes the job. It just adds one more layer to a day they already describe, unanimously, as chaotic.

Chris Johnson, 32, is a mover with Olympia Moving, a company founded in Boston in 1993 that has since launched branches across the Northeast and the South. He’s originally from Tampa, Florida, and moved to Worcester last February to be closer to his son. This will be his second Sept. 1 in Boston, but he’s no stranger to moving days; he’s been in the business since August 2016, after answering a Craigslist ad and landing a job with a contractor.

Even coming from a college town like Tampa, he wasn’t prepared for what he found. 

“There’s a lot more colleges here. It’s a lot more hectic,” he said. Describing his first Sept. 1 in the city, he said, “hectic is the best way to describe it.”

He compared it to Tampa’s own back-to-school rush around the University of Tampa and University of South Florida: “there are quite a bit of moves going on, but it’s nothing compared to how it was last September. It was much more busy.”

Ask him how long a Sept. 1 job takes, and he’ll tell you there are multiple factors at play: “what floor they’re on, if there’s an elevator, if there’s stairs, or if it’s ground level, how much stuff they have.” The list goes on.

Heading into this year’s Sept. 1, Johnson’s approach is simple: “Just be on my toes. I feel pretty prepared for it.”

A mover-turned-traffic coordinator

Jarid Sylvia, 34, works out of Olympia’s Watertown branch and has been moving furniture for more than a decade. The New Bedford native started small, doing furniture delivery for local contractors before moving into residential work with a van line and eventually landing at Olympia, where he’s worked for the past four years.

Sylvia doesn’t sugarcoat what Sept. 1 is like: “It can be a bit chaotic,” he said. He’s careful to note the stress isn’t a sign anything is going wrong, it’s just the nature of the day. “It’s just a lot of stress for most people, for most parties involved.”

A typical Sept. 1 for Sylvia starts around 6 a.m. He’ll get materials ready, figure out the day’s job sites, prep trucks, and make sure everyone’s in uniform before heading out to start packaging and preparing furniture to move. Depending on the size of the jobs, he’ll run anywhere from one to four moves in a day.

One of his more memorable moments as a mover came when he “stopped being a mover for a moment and turned into a traffic coordinator,” he said. The gridlock got bad enough that he had to step away from the job momentarily.

“One street was so shut down with so many moving vans that I had to actually stop a move to get traffic flowing again,” he recalled.

And then there are challenges that a historic city like Boston presents; narrow staircases,  cramped hallways, and lots of stairs.

“That’s a typical Boston thing,” he said. “It’s obviously a very, very old city, so you have to deal with all variations of access.”

‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’

Stephen Cotter, 40, of Newton, has been with Olympia since 2020, when he took the job after his brother, who already worked there, told him about an opening.

His description of the day matches his colleagues’: “It’s chaotic,” he said. Streets are full of people, cars, and other moving vans. “You have to navigate around all of that just to complete the task at hand,” Cotter added.

Parking a moving truck can be its own game of Tetris; sometimes, he’ll find a spot to park and complete the move within a reasonable time. Other times, he admits, he might have to double park, or leave the driver to circle the block while he and a few movers bring everything outside and wait for the driver to swing by again to pick it up.

Despite moving being a headache for most, Cotter is nonchalant about the day: “It’s good for overtime. And you do get a great workout in.” His days start early, anywhere between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., and can often run 12 hours, he said. 

He describes the physical toll matter-of-factly, too. “You build enough stamina throughout the year, you make sure you eat the right food, stay hydrated, take breaks when needed,” he said. “We’re all focused on the task at hand. Get the stuff out. Get it moved in, and then you just keep going,” he added.

College move-ins add their own challenge to the day. Northeastern University, he said, is “the biggest” of the student move-ins his crews handle, with teams stationed outside dorms to help carry belongings up. His personal “biggest move” occurred at a Northeastern University dorm on St. Stephen Street “that was all stairs,” he recalled. Cotter recorded about 215 flights of stairs climbed that day — “one of my records,” he said.

Getting furniture up buildings without an elevator, he said, comes down to teamwork, something Olympia crews call “a chain.” Someone pulls an item out of a vehicle or a bin, and passes it to the next guy, who will run up a flight or two, and continue passing it along until it reaches its destination, Cotter explained. 

“You have to work together,” he said. “You have to stay in that chain so that one person doesn’t have to walk up four flights every single time.”

Not every Sept. 1 memory is about climbing stairs, though. Cotter recalled a driver who saw his moving crew and pulled up in the middle of a street asking for help; Cotter and his crew jumped into action, even though they were about to start a move themselves. 

“We brought a team over and ran his stuff up real quick, and then he gave us a tip. Otherwise, we would have been delayed with our job, waiting for him [to finish his move]. We were just all  like, ‘You’re a student. This is you and your father doing this [move]. We’ll get you in and out of the way as quickly as possible.’ It’s tough to just sit around and watch,” he said.

One plus of Moving Day is the curbside treasure hunting that gives “Allston Christmas” its name. (It’s not just for renters, after all). 

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Cotter said, repeating the proverbial saying. Many of his crew members have taken home a few pieces of furniture discarded on the street: a nice chair, a dresser, a bookshelf, a random mirror, he said.

“People are throwing it away, and it’s gonna end up in the garbage. So might as well get some use out of it.”

His own apartment, he said, bears the evidence. “My whole apartment is filled with stuff that people threw away,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe not all from September 1, but from other moves in general.” 

None of the movers mentioned the state primary unprompted. But the overlap is hard to miss on the calendar: the same Tuesday that will send Olympia’s crews weaving trucks through the streets of Greater Boston is also Election Day for Massachusetts’ primary. Polls close at 8 p.m., hours after most Sept. 1 leases have already changed hands.

For Boston’s moving crews, though, the day’s real deadline isn’t the ballot box. It’s getting the truck packed, the stairs climbed, and the next person safely moved in before dark.

Annie Jonas is a Community writer at Boston.com. She was previously a local editor at Patch and a freelancer at the Financial Times.