From Guinness to green teas
Along Dorchester Avenue, a pub culture is crawling to a halt
Local practitioners used to call it the crawl, a slow trek from pub to pub. T. J. Burke was first told about it when his father brought him to what is now the Blarney Stone when he was a boy of 9.
Back then, the Fields Corner hangout was called Costello & Kelly's. It was a spot frequented by crawlers, and Burke's father would buy him french fries and tell him to keep quiet when his mother asked how much drinking had been done.
Now nearly 70, Burke still visits the Blarney Stone, but the experience is a radically different one. The retired motorman for the T's Red Line sits under track lighting and orders Budweiser, surrounded by a young, fashionably dressed cocktail crowd.
"They're trying to make it more for yuppies," Burke said of his longtime watering hole. "A lot of guys I hang around with, they don't like the prices."
Just blocks away, patrons like Burke still stop by Nash's Pub only to find the green and yellow clapboard building locked. An Irish tricolor still hangs out front, but the building is slated to be reincarnated by summer as a sushi bar. Pete Nash, the owner who held court behind the oak bar for 20 years, shrugged off the change. The Irish construction workers and Gaelic football players who were the mainstay of his business have dwindled.
"Business was slowing down," he said. "It was time to move along."
Dorchester Avenue - Dot Ave. to many - may have helped seal Boston's reputation as America's "Most Irish City," but its pub life is drying up. As the influx of Irish immigrants has slipped in recent years, and a growing number of Irish Americans choose life in the suburbs or overseas, The Tara, Mickey's, the Irish Rover, Foley's Tavern, and other pubs have disappeared from the 4-mile strip, in just five years. Many of the remaining pubs - city officials do not keep statistics, but there are fewer than 10 now where there used to be dozens - have changed their look and feel in ways considered inconceivable just a decade ago.
The barroom and restaurant once known as Ned Kelly's and later P. J. Quinn's is now "dbar," a place popular in the gay community. Nash's will trade Guinness for green tea to become Van's. And the Blarney Stone, once the first stop for Irish immigrants fresh from Logan International Airport or the docks, has morphed into an upscale fern bar, serving beet and arugula salads and pear martinis.
It is a trend that mirrors one in Ireland, where pub closures and a two-year decline in Guinness consumption has raised concern about the demise of the traditional pub culture. The country's booming economy and newfound wealth has meant that for the first time in history, more Americans are immigrating to Ireland than the reverse; many of the most recent Irish laborers who came to the United States in the '80s and '90s and worked on such projects as the Big Dig have returned to Ireland's greener pastures.
Meanwhile, many of the Irish-Americans who once filled the three-story apartment buildings along Dorchester Avenue have moved to the suburbs.
"Their tastes have changed . . . grown more refined," said Sean Grant, executive director of the Irish Cultural Center of New England, which sits on a 48-acre spot in Canton and has its own pub. American Irish want more than a "beer and a shot," he said. "I think to a certain extent the pubs that [remain on Dorchester Avenue] are the gateway to people that are non-Irish to learn how to discern what a pub is."
Should they so choose. Dorchester Avenue is increasingly a hub for the city's Vietnamese population. Theirs is the first language in many restaurants, pharmacies, and gift shops along the road. The number of non-Hispanic whites living along Dorchester Avenue dropped 5 percent between 2000 and 2005, while the number of Asian or Pacific Islander residents increased almost 4 percent, according to the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Daniel F. Pokaski, chairman of the Boston licensing board, said the number of alcohol and beverage licenses has dropped along the strip as new bistros and restaurants open "all over downtown." His office does not track the migration of the licenses, but he said the pattern is similar to what occurred when Faneuil Hall opened in the '70s. Around that time, many of the neighborhoods in Charlestown went from gritty Irish enclaves to gentrified havens, and pub owners facing declines in business sold off their liquor licenses.
Pokaski, who grew up in a Polish section of Dorchester Avenue, said he sees the same phenomenon in Dorchester as new restaurants open on downtown's waterfront.
"It's really shifted away from the neighborhoods," Pokaski said of the bar business. "There's a lot of new chi-chi places" opening downtown. A license to open a restaurant or tavern on the avenue could fetch $50,000 to $100,000, Pokaski said.
Karen Diep, who plans to open the sushi spot in the former Nash's Pub, will not say what she paid for her liquor license. She said she envisions her business as an upscale sports bar serving sushi.
"We know what people need in this neighborhood," she said. "It's something I can give back to the community, back to our culture. There are really no upscale [Asian restaurants] here."
Of course, Nash's former customers still have plenty of veteran institutions in the neighborhood to choose from. The Harp & Bard and Peggy O'Neil's pub still draw crowds on weeknights. The red-headed bartender at Peggy O'Neil's will serve cold beers, domestics mostly, while belting out the words to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin' " on the jukebox. A sign posted outside the Harp & Bard touts an old-world favorite: "Best Steak Tips in Boston."
"We're still what we always were," owner Michael J. Galvin said last week. "Our gravies are homemade. We have pork roast on Wednesdays and pot roast on Fridays." Fish on Fridays as well during Lent.
The changes have also meant the demise of some of the rougher establishments. Ned Kelly's Restaurant & Pub, which later became P. J. Quinn's, had a bright red exterior and a lively clientele. When Brian Piccini took over to create dbar there in 2005, he said he refinished much of the wood interior that had been damaged by bottles thrown in bar fights.
Piccini, a former bartender at Aquitaine in the South End, gutted the place to get rid of the "beer stench," he said. He threw out the old booths, the beer barrels used for tables, and the moldings carved with shamrocks.
"We left one at the door for heritage's sake," said Piccini, 27. "I wanted it to look authentic." Today, the bar's most popular drink is its espresso martini. And the lighting around the mahogany bar looks traditional but it is wired to glow in disco colors.
At the Blarney Stone, Michael G. Conlon Jr. runs the place with several co-owners, taking over from his father. But, do not look for him in a long white apron or the green shamrock tie his father wore.
The bar's owners boast that the place was the first in North America to sell Guinness and that they have the paperwork to prove it. Today, the only commemoration of it is a painting of a bottle of the famed Irish stout adorning an exposed brick wall.
Ben Johnson, a co-owner who used to work at the Blarney Stone of yore and was raised outside Dublin, said the goal is to make the place warm and welcoming for a younger crowd. "We've thought about changing the name," Johnson said in a thick brogue. "But I don't know if we're ready for that." 