The oldest bar in Boston

A Charlestown corner and two houses on Union Street

Warren Tavern is the building worth crossing the river for: weatherboarded, low-beamed, on a Charlestown corner, named for Dr Joseph Warren who was killed at Bunker Hill, and used by Paul Revere’s Masonic lodge within three years of going up. Washington called in 1789. It was nearly lost around 1970 and the Boston Redevelopment Authority restored it in 1971. The Union Oyster House holds the oldest fabric on this page and the best-documented interior: a semicircular oak counter over soapstone, with cast iron stall fittings, standing in the position it was given in the 1820s, which the landmark nomination calls — with the booths beside it — the only known survivors of their kind in the United States. The Bell in Hand is the loudest and the least documented, named for the hand bell its founder carried as Boston’s town crier, and now a room for bands and late nights. Both Union Street houses sit in the Blackstone Block, close enough that our own coordinate check queries them every time it runs, and since nobody has settled whether that is one building or a copied pin, nothing on this page turns on how far apart they stand.

Three breaks in three stories

Boston is where this site’s distinction between an old house and an unbroken trade does most of its work, because every one of these three has a gap and each gap is a different shape. Warren Tavern stopped being a tavern around 1813 and spent a century and a half as a bakery, a club and a warehouse before the restoration that brought it back in 1972: the frame is genuine and the trade is not continuous. The Bell in Hand has moved at least three times to reach Union Street and closed during Prohibition, so its 1795 belongs to a business rather than to an address — and the 1795 itself rests on tradition, as Wikipedia notes, with the town crier’s founding unsupported by a record. The Union Oyster House is the opposite case: it has fed people at the same counter without a break since 1826, and what opened in 1826 was not a drinking house. Drink is in its record from an 1854 advertisement pricing the Atwoods’ liquors by the gallon, Daniel Webster is reputed to have taken a tumbler of brandy and water with each half dozen oysters in the 1840s and 1850s, and the bar room now trading opened in August 1983. Three good houses, three ways to fail a test of continuity. The test itself is described in how historians date an old pub, and the national argument these claims feed into is in what is the oldest bar in America.

Reading a city’s own paperwork

The pleasure of researching Boston is that the public record is more forthcoming than the marketing. The Bell in Hand’s website refuses readers it does not recognise, so its own founding claim had to be cited from a copy taken in 2019; meanwhile the National Park Service will hand anybody the full nomination text for a National Historic Landmark, and the city will hand anybody its licensing dataset. That combination is why one house on this page carries a grade A and the other two do not, and why the grades here rest on a Masonic lodge’s meetings, a dated advertisement and a federal nomination rather than on anything printed on a sign outside.

Where Boston sits in the wider list

Three houses is thin for a port this old, and the gap is ours: the North End and Beacon Hill are unworked here, and so is the question of which Boston rooms never got their licences back after Prohibition. The state picture, including a Post Road inn licensed in 1716, is at the oldest bars in Massachusetts; the country’s is at the oldest bars in the USA. For how a claim is weighed against a record on this site, read the methodology.