Say goodbye, or good riddance, to old pub
Seedy Waltham Tavern was also beloved by some
The demolition crew ripped up rotten floorboards and yanked jagged metal brackets from moldy walls, gutting what used to be the Waltham Tavern, a tattered South End pub that was shut down last year amid accusations that it was a haven for drug dealing.
Gone is the plaque that hung outside the bar for decades, famously reading "Ladies Invited." Instead, the building now displays a different sign: "Custom Designed Luxury Homes. Early 2008."
Few dispute the tavern's unsavory side. But it was also a haunt for those who pined for an earlier era in that corner of the city, before organic markets and fusion restauraunts began to show up. For them, news that the pub's vacant shell was being torn apart to convert the six-story corner brownstone into luxury condominiums was like a stake in the heart.
"The South End is losing its soul," said Alex Rehm, a computer programmer who frequented the tavern. Rehm lived in the South End for four years but moved last month to Jamaica Plain because it is cheaper. "Everyone who's left there is the yuppies."
Some neighbors who walked through the cloud of construction dust that saturated the quiet streets around the site yesterday hailed the development as another step to make the South End a nicer place to live.
"It will be very nice," said Bob Lyons, 68, a retired cook who has lived nearby for 20 years.
"It's a better use of the space," Justin Budrow, a consultant who has been living in a condominium nearby for a year and a half, said before hurrying past the construction site.
Once a gritty slum of townhouses and brownstones, the South End has been transformed over the last quarter of a century into one of Boston's most coveted neighborhoods, with condominiums that routinely sell for more than $1 million.
"It's certainly changed; it's gone from rundown commercial buildings to condos and art studios," said Tony Crawford, a bartender of 15 years at J.J. Foley's, a corner bar on East Berkeley Street.
Foley's, which was established in 1909, is hailed by some residents as the last vestige of the old South End now that the Waltham Tavern is gone.
"We hope not to become the last of the last," Crawford said.
The Waltham Tavern was decidedly not yuppie, with its low ceilings and crooked pool table. The bartender, Rose, had a habit of hazing new customers. ("It was sort of like the 'Fight Club' initiation," Rehm recalled. "It was intimidating at first.") The drinks were cheap, and the drunken patrons who poured out of the bar at early hours were loud.
The Licensing Board shut down the tavern in January 2006, citing reports by Boston police and federal agents that OxyContin pills were regularly sold there. The two people listed as the tavern's owners were deceased; one of them, Josephine Baiona, was the wife of reputed mobster Philip "Sonny" Baiona, a convicted bookmaker who, a week after the tavern was shut down, pleaded guilty to selling cocaine and OxyCodone in 2002.
The tavern was certainly seedy, said Jack Tumminello, who has lived in the South End for six years with his wife, Kathleen. But the couple, who have never patronized the bar, worried that building more upscale condos will deprive the South End of the neighborhood feeling that once permeated its streets.
"We live here because of the diversity," said Kathleen Tumminello. "I don't like to see it go so upscale, like Boylston Street. There's no neighborhood feeling to that."
Luxury condos "means more yuppies in the neighborhood," according to a blog, "The South End Is Over," which aims "to discuss the 'new' and hardly improved South End."
"People, I ask you this: How much more maple, granite and stainless steel can the South End stand before it starts to creak, buckle, and finally implode upon itself?" the blogger wrote.
"Enough with the condos," agreed Kate Koengeter, an accounting manager and a South End resident of four years, who strolled along Shawmut Avenue yesterday at lunchtime. Koengeter said that the Waltham Tavern was "not some place I frequented." Still, she said, "it would have been nice to have another tavern."
Geno Ranaldi, the real estate developer who purchased the building last month, acknowledged that "we're certainly going to give some of the character up."
The new condos, he said, "will be high-end, as high-end as you can get in the South End." Ranaldi hopes to sell them for up to $1.4 million each.
Anna Badkhen can be reached at abadkhen@globe.com. 