Built on landfill in the mid-19th century as a residential district for Boston’s growing upper middle-class, hundreds of Victorian Bow Fronts were built and today it’s the largest enclave of urban Victorian residential architecture in the country. It is this socio-economic mix that has saved the South End from becoming one-dimensional and gives it personality. Despite its affluence, these institutions (thankfully) aren’t going anywhere. Yet, it’s home to the city’s largest soup kitchen, Pine Street Inn, large public housing complexes, Boston’s safety net hospital Boston Medical Center and its neighboring Healthcare for the Homeless. It has some of the most affluent properties and toniest addresses in the city. That gentrification would also result in Boston’s gay population moving out to Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Davis Square and elsewhere.Ĭathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston’s South EndĪbout The South End: The South End is a contradiction. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Boston’s population started to rebound and places like the South End started to flourish again. By then the neighborhood had a well-deserved seedy reputation and was afflicted by urban blight and crime. In the early 1970s many artists and gay men moved here for the cheap rent. It also became home for many in the city’s Black population (e.g., 395-397 Massachusetts Ave was home to Martin Luther King Jr. In the first half of the 20th Century, the South End would become the home for many immigrant groups notably Greek, Lebanese, Africans, and Caribbean/West Indies. A good example is Boston’s Union Park in the South End, which was built in the late 1850s. The South End was one of America’s earliest large-scale residential developments and much of that pre- and post-Civil War architecture remains. Each have their own history, architecture and personality.
If you visit Boston, you’ll understand this city is defined by its neighborhoods. This article appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Esquire.Boston is where I live, but the South End is home. Things are different out there in weird ways, but you may find some old traditions coming up through the ether, too-I’ve never seen (or had) more shots in my twenty-odd years as a drinker on this planet. That’s why bars are called bars, right? We hope you’ll be able to have that cathartic first drink on a barstool again soon. Still, there’s nothing like a real seat, at a real bar. Let’s embrace outdoor drinking as an essential part of bar culture, as so many other parts of the world have. A pioneering cocktail den in Harlem, one of the oldest sake bars in America, and a quintessential Mission District dive are all part of this year’s list, our fifteenth.Įven as our bars reanimate, there are those who will want to keep things al fresco for a while, vaccine or not. This year’s Best Bars are a reflection of the desire to experience wonder once more-in being introduced to mind-expanding wines and whiskeys, downing pints in old churches, or hunkering in jazzy spaces again-and to be grateful for places that managed to remain intrinsic to the fabric of drinking culture in America. A place where you can sip on a Sazerac, take a moment, catch up with the world, and decide to celebrate or brood? More of that kind of normal, please. In a time when life and work and family bled into one another in messy ways, the bar is that much-needed extra space-physically, emotionally-that we could all use right now. That vanished as many were forced to transform into takeout joints or, worse yet, to permanently close. But I suspect that I would have been hit with joy if it was any drink at any bar that had reopened its doors to do what bars do best: hospitality.īars are simultaneously a place to be by oneself and a place of community.
Perhaps it was what I was drinking at Viridian, an Asian American bar in Oakland, one of the places on this year’s Best Bars list many of the cocktails nodded to flavors of Asian candies my dad would surprise me with when he returned from grocery runs in New York’s Chinatown. Even with the masked staff and social distancing, the experience was unexpectedly life-affirming. To sit shoulder to shoulder with friends again, chatting with the bartender about esoteric spirits, hearing the laughter of strangers-it felt new and raw. Inside, on a stool, at the actual, physical bar. On April fifteenth, at 8:42 p.m., I had a drink.