Bar owners feel squeezed as city braces for Bowl
At Crossroads Irish Pub -- a gritty watering hole with two floors, seven televisions, and a menu stocked with 10 varieties of burgers and four types of steak tips -- there are only a few times a year that guarantee a full house. One is the Super Bowl, and on those occasions when the New England Patriots play, it's a rare opportunity to cash in.
But this year, Mayor Thomas M. Menino is putting pressure on bars like this one and has sent letters asking them to curb alcohol sales on game day, especially to college students.
The Crossroads, like many bars in the student nexus near Kenmore Square, must walk a tightrope between the desire to make money and staying on the mayor's good side this weekend. It's stocking up on extra food and beer and bringing on three extra servers and a doorman while refraining from advertising that could bring in extra crowds. It is not a particularly happy compromise.
"You have to consciously tell yourself, 'OK, I won't do that much business,' " said Patrick Brodigan, assistant manager of Crossroads, on Beacon Street near Massachusetts Avenue. "It's unfair; it's not a bar problem, in my opinion."
The crackdown followed the deaths last year of 21-year-old James Grabowski, who was hit by a sport utility vehicle amid rioting on Symphony Road after the Super Bowl, and Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove, also 21, who was killed by a pepper projectile fired by police during rioting outside Fenway Park after the American League Championship victory by the Red Sox.
Only 43 police officers were on duty the night Grabowski was killed, a level of staffing that an internal report later deemed "inexcusable." But universities, liquor stores, and bars are feeling the heat from City Hall.
"I have confidence in the police; it is the colleges and the liquor stores," Menino told a Globe columnist this week. Through his spokesman Seth Gitell, the mayor declined to comment for this report. Gitell referred questions to Patricia A. Malone, director of the city's Office of Consumer Affairs and Licensing, which monitors bars for the city.
"We want the licensees to act responsibly on a day that they could potentially make additional profit by letting a few things slip by," Malone said. "We just want to keep them on their toes."
At the Crossroads, the doorman has been instructed to be extra vigilant in checking identifications, and bar owner Michael Brodigan, Patrick's father, plans to put out a free feast at halftime, both to draw customers and to make sure they do not get drunk.
They say it's the same way they prepare for any big event. Being a bar owner in Boston, which has more students per capita than any other city in the nation, has long required a balance between profit and incurring the wrath of City Hall, according to Michael Brodigan, who opened the Crossroads 27 years ago.
"You're always getting these things," he said, recalling several fatal car crashes in the 1980s in which drunken students were responsible. "We're a sin business, and it makes us ripe for the picking. We're the ones they point the fingers at first."
Brodigan said the bar scene in the city is a lot more restrained than it used to be. Before lawmakers outlawed happy hours and discount drinks in 1984, bars often staged "chug-a-lug" contests, or "beat-the-clock" schemes, in which drink prices would go up every half-hour so customers often drank as much as they could as fast as they could. The two-for-one specials and even wet T-shirt contests and mud wrestling packed in the students, Brodigan said.
Liability insurance for bars skyrocketed, and Brodigan helped form an insurance pool for owners who could not afford the expense.
Things are a lot different now, he said. There are no raucous promotions encouraging customers to drink a yard of beer in one swallow, and bartenders no longer allow customers to line drinks up by the half-dozen.
Alan Eisner, who represents more than 200 bars and restaurants as head of the Massachusetts Hospitality Association, says bar owners are more responsible these days. "At one time, all the scrutiny was warranted," he said. "Now the bars are a lot better, more professionally run."
Brodigan's son said his father is teaching him to be happy with less, to do a slow and steady business instead of packing the bar to capacity every night.
"He's scared he'll get in trouble," Patrick Brodigan said.
