Boston’s Sound Museum, a rehearsal space for bands and a longtime incubator of the city’s music scene, has hosted local bands and drop-ins from legends like B.B. King and David Bowie. Soon, the space at 155 North Beacon St. will be an incubator of a different type, as it is slated to become a lab building. It was shuttered at the end of February after a biotech firm that bought the space in 2021 announced plans to demolish and build ground-up lab space. It is one of many such operations struggling in the face of increased development. Nearby music club Great Scott closed in 2020, a signal of the end of a region dubbed Allston Rock City. When the Sound Museum first opened in the early 1980s in the city’s South End, run by Katherine Desmond and her husband, Bill “Des” Desmond, it wasn’t facing the pressure of expanding labs and a startup scene that would turn the Boston region into the nation’s center of life sciences. But over the next few decades, the operation would hopscotch between multiple facilities and neighborhoods, including Cambridge. These areas, like Kenmore Square and Somerville, have become centers of lab space development. 
In the unique saga of the Sound Museum, numerous threads of Boston real estate, culture and development come together. San Diego-based developer IQHQ’s $50M purchase of the 150K SF warehouse building that housed the studio rental company was the catalyst for the unfolding drama.The project and its fallout are representative of… Read the full story here. | 
