Parama Chattopadhyay has bolstered the arts scene in the Boston area for two decades. As owner of the Out of the Blue gallery at the Armory building in Somerville, she’s advocated for artists while sharing her own art, poetry and music.
It’s challenged her in recent years – for all the wrong reasons.
“I am the only woman of color running a business here,” Chattopadhyay said. “And I am the only woman of color running a nonprofit here. And I am the only leased resident here by Massachusetts law. And despite all of this, I am treated the worst.”
Chattopadhyay, better known by her stage name, Parma Chai, isn’t paid for the art she hangs on the gallery’s walls. On top of running Out of the Blue, she teaches – recently working three jobs – to pay to rent live-work space on the third floor and a gallery performance space in the basement.
Chai and Steven Asaro, her partner and maintenance manager of the gallery, sublet their Medford apartment and began renting out the living space on the third floor of the Armory in 2019. With effort, money and time, she put on the gallery’s first full-scale art installation in 20 years. Chai and Asaro made the move permanent in 2020, under the building’s previous ownership.
Now, five years later, amid ongoing efforts by the city of Somerville to solidify a long-term governance plan for the Armory, Chai is burned out, traumatized and uncertain of the future of her gallery.
Sense of exclusion
Arts at the Armory, the Armory’s main programmer, and the Somerville Arts Council began meeting in 2021 to discuss the future of the Armory – without Chai, Asaro or the other tenants, Chai said. The goal? To figure out a way to get rid of her and the other tenants, she said. Some warned her the city wanted to replace her gallery with its own through the council. (Arts at the Armory directors were contacted for comment for this story and shared a brief statement. After publication they clarified: “Going back to 2021, our goal in any conversations with our landlord was to understand the process and to find stability in maintaining our spaces. Our concerns and advocacy remain about our own tenancy and our organization’s future.”)
The plan, Chai said, was based on the city’s false allegations that she was serving minors alcohol at her events. Unwilling to back down, Chai made petitions and voiced her concerns through public meetings and press coverage. She denounced what she called a “heist” and condemned leases issued to tenants when the city acquired the building at 191 Highland Ave., Spring Hill, through a $5 million eminent domain land seizure in May 2021. The move seemed to threaten them with eviction.
“I don’t want to be homeless,” she said. “I don’t want to be nonprofit-less. I don’t know where my home is and I don’t know where my nonprofit is.”
The Armory, home to Out of the Blue, the Center for Arts at the Armory and a few other businesses and event spaces, has lacked a long-term governance plan since the city’s 2021 acquisition. A draft Armory Master Plan released in November was unpopular; a revised draft went out Jan. 17 that emphasizes that a retenanting process should accommodate “any and all of the current arts tenants who would like to be considered to stay on.”
But Chai and Asaro fear that the process will not be fair and that they will be pushed out without enough money from the city to find new homes for themselves and the gallery.
“It goes beyond just getting her out of the building,” Asaro said. “This threatens her career.”
Treatment of tenants
Jason Berube, a longtime Out of the Blue artist and friend of Chai’s, is not a tenant but feels her frustration. He said that tenants – especially Chai – have been treated cruelly and unusually.
“The Somerville Arts Council is filled with nefarious characters,” he said. “They’ve been trying to ‘trauma’ the people out of there by feigning [incompetence]. They’re purposely torturing somebody so that they will move out of their own accord, because the place is untenable.”
In a statement to Cambridge Day in May 2024, Stephanie Scherpf, co-director and chief executive of the Center for Arts at the Armory, acknowledged the hardships of tenants but did not address any role of the center in planning the future of the building, saying, “the City of Somerville has been an absent and negligent landlord of the Armory since the building has been under city ownership, and I know that Armory tenants have been negatively impacted by this. In my role as the co-director/CEO for the Center for Arts at the Armory, I cannot speak about the experiences of other Armory tenants.”
Five tenants have moved out of the Armory since the acquisition – the five that remain must complete a process for retenancy consideration.
Warming center
After a full day of teaching Jan. 18, 2024, Chai decided to take an Uber back to the Armory to avoid stormy weather. In three days, she would undergo surgery to remove what she called a stress-induced cyst from her breast.
But once Chai arrived at the Armory and stepped out of the car, an unhoused person living at the Armory’s now-closed warming center called her a racial slur, threatened to kill her and seemed to be hurling things from the sidewalk at her room on the third floor. A guardrail kept anything from hitting the windows.
She recalled thinking “What the hell is going on here? This is horrible.”
Chai is unsatisfied with how the city handled the situation – her request for police officers to be hired as full-time security after the incident was not honored, and she said other tenants were distressed by unsanitary conditions and other issues at the time the warming center was in the building.
“A warming center client did cause a disturbance at the Armory, including making threats to those physically present, Parama included,” Grace Munns, deputy director of communications for the city, wrote in an email. “This incident was responded to appropriately by warming center staff who contacted the Somerville Police Department to ensure the safety of all parties involved. The individual was removed from the warming center by SPD.”
The incident is one of a number of concerns Armory tenants had about the warming center, which was installed without warning Jan. 8. Unhoused people using the warming center had to sleep across from the Armory’s often loud and busy events. And firm policies and procedures weren’t put in place, according to remarks Chai and others made at a community meeting about the warming center in May.
After Armory warming center users and volunteers, Armory tenants and staffers and other warming center advocates or collaborators reported numerous issues with the operation, the city made the Cummings School on Prescott Street the location of this winter’s warming center.
Broken utilities and health concerns
When the city of Somerville acquired the Armory in 2021, its elevator began malfunctioning, at one point trapping Chai and Asaro inside. When it was taken out of service, Chai, who has 10 pieces of metal in her left leg, had to climb four flights of stairs daily while carrying equipment. She made repeated requests to have the elevator serviced, but it wasn’t until August 2022 that it was fixed. (It still doesn’t work a quarter of the time, Chai said.)
Worse, the Armory experienced a rat infestation. With no janitor in the Armory, Chai said she and Asaro were left to complete cleaning services themselves – for free.
Tom Galligani, operating manager of the Armory and executive director of the city’s Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development, addressed the problems in summer 2022 by hiring Jack Donahue, who worked at AudioTech Services in a rented office next to the gallery’s performance space. Donahue was responsible for light janitorial duties in exchange for reduced rent.
But Donahue wasn’t doing the work, Chai said. While she and Asaro were mopping floors, scrubbing toilets and installing lights, she felt like his role was to spy and report back information the city would use against them. She wondered if Donahue was living in the AudioTech offices, which are windowless and have no bathroom or kitchen.
“It wasn’t really bothersome at first,” Chai said. “But then [Galligani] just kept on calling” with issues seemingly inspired by things Donahue saw.
Cambridge Day requested an interview with Donahue – he declined, saying that he did not feel comfortable talking about Chai. In her email, Munns confirmed that the city hired Donahue as a janitor from July 2022 to August 2023 in exchange for reduced rent but called the allegations against him and the city defamatory.
“No City of Somerville employee has ever, or will ever, harass or ‘spy’ on any” Armory tenant, Munns said. “Nor would the city ever request that those types of actions be done by a third party… the allegations made by Parama and her partner grossly misrepresent the facts of the city’s interactions with her at the Armory.” She added that city staff told Chai’s representatives to stop trying to clean or repair common spaces at the Armory and that maintenance issues should be filed through 311 requests.
Maintenance and repairs
There was a positive experience with city staff in this period, when Marc Hamel, a Somerville Department of Public Works superintendent, worked with Chai, Donahue and other tenants to remove the rats from the building. Hamel also approached Donahue multiple times to let him know that there was money to cover an actual janitor, according to Chai.
Emails obtained from Chai show that she and Asaro made multiple 311 requests in summer 2023 and that multiple DPW tickets were created – not just for common spaces but for her own live-work space, for which the city is the landlord. Chai claimed she had to pressure the city to conduct an inspection. In a December 2023 visit, the Somerville Board of Health found 32 infractions in Chai’s live-work space including a broken window, dishwasher and laundry machine.
Chai said that when the city took over, it refused to fix the safety issues. It wasn’t until the inspection, Chai said, that Matthew Bennett, current Somerville DPW head, fixed the water damage and got her a new dishwasher. But the city blamed her and Asaro for laundry machine breaking and refused to allow him to install a new one, instead taking a 30-year-old machine from the unoccupied unit next door and giving it to them, Chai said. It didn’t work.
Today, there are still repairs needed in the unit.
“Repair and maintenance work at the Armory building was done by employees of Somerville’s Department of Public Works (in this case, Matthew Bennett and Marc Hamel) as part of the city’s maintenance of the building and within the normal scope of work of city employees,” Munns said in her email. “This work was not done by them outside of their city employment, but as part of, and on behalf of, the city and all involved departments.”
In a December interview, SAC executive director Greg Jenkins said the city was enacting a model of governance that looked to keep tenants from being responsible for maintenance and repairs in the building.
Police reports made
In November 2021 and April and October 2022, the Somerville Police Department was called on Out of the Blue events for allegations of underage drinking. Police records show Galligani called the police on the first two events: a spoken-word reading and a comedy show. The third was called on a child’s birthday party by Ted Fields, senior economic development planner with the OSPCD and Galligani’s colleague.
The city insists underage drinking, indoor vaping and building damage took place, according to Munns’ email. Police reports of each incident don’t include details about any of those claims.
“This was a nightmare,” Chai said. “My life had been completely offset.”
The city said it sent Chai’s attorney, Mark Delaney, a notice in December 2021 to cease and desist from “leasing, renting or allowing other individuals, groups, organizations or entities to use the commercial space in [her] unit.” Chai said neither she nor Delaney ever received such a notice. Delaney however, wrote a “cease and desist” to Galligani in 2021, telling the city to stop its “continuing pattern of harassment and arbitrary treatment of Parama as a tenant and resident at the Armory,” documents obtained from Chai show.
Empowered by community
Business at Out of the Blue is booming and there is goodwill for her in the creative community, Chai said.
“That’s the part that I’m really taking precedence and happiness for,” she said. “That people have believed in me. I am one woman fighting the economic development association of Somerville, Massachusetts, and I’ve done it pretty well for three years without a cent in my savings. I’m doing great.”
Councilor Willie Burnley Jr. is on the city’s Creative Displacement Task Force, a committee working to ensure artists such as Chai aren’t displaced and have places to do their work. He’s supported her for years and believes the city needs to step up.
“The city is a landlord to Parama and as such, I think it needs to abide by not only the law, but a certain code of conduct and level of decency that it’s failed to meet time and time again,” Burnley said. “She’s not only an artist who has contributed to the city’s growth and culture, but is an artist-in-residence that the city has the double responsibility to.”
Complaint filed with state
Fellow councilor Naima Sait tried to broker a meeting this week in with Chai and city staff could talk through the gallery owner’s complaints as well as its future in the Armory, according to documents shared with Cambridge Day. Rachel Nadkarni, the city’s director of economic development, opted out in a Thursday email of meeting on topics apart from Armory plans and tenant applications and offered no other staffer to engage with. Noting that Chai had filed a complaint against the city with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, she told Chai and Sait that she might “prefer to wait until after that process is further along.”
“We certainly can wait on these other topics,” Nadkarni wrote.
Burnley is concerned about both the future of the Armory and artistry in Somerville.
“I worry about the precedent that sets if the city maintains its role as a landlord,” he said. “The kind of programming that the city would try to do moving forward through the Armory would be somewhat tarnished by that legacy.”
Feeling run “ragged”
Berube, the artist, told Chai long ago that she needed to leave the Armory and couldn’t “run herself ragged,” advice that eventually inspired her to quit one of her three jobs.
“Her life is more important to me than her service to the community,” Berube said. “I mean, if the leaders of the community come and try to kill you, you move on to different communities. We don’t deserve her.”
Chai’s art has hung on the Armory’s walls for years. Chai herself has hung on too. But she wonders if she wants to anymore. Sometimes she feels: She can’t. She won’t.
“You hate me so badly, you five people,” she said. “You got thousands of people who are like, ‘We love Parama,’ and you hate that too. So if you want to hate me that much and you want to not even give me a policeman to protect me when my life is threatened and you don’t want to give me a laundry machine, okay. I know you don’t want me. Give me a place.”
This post was updated Feb. 13, 2025, with an additional comment by the directors of Arts at the Armory and an edit to clarify the meaning of a city spokesperson in referring to the building and not a nonprofit within the building.)
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Yet another cautionary tale of eminent domain and government overreach. Parama has courage. Somerville should have never stolen this property from the Sater family and no one should stand for it.