Self-guided walk · Boston
The Boston historic pub walk is a self-guided route of 1.72 km between 3 old pubs, about 23 min walking, with a GPX file to follow. Warren Tavern makes the oldest claim on it, 1780, and it holds the oldest record too, from 1783.
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The distance is the walked street route, not the straight line. These are history walks, not a drinking challenge: take it slowly, drink water between stops, and leave a pub out if the day is getting long.
Boston’s oldest bars, Charlestown to the Blackstone Block. Under two kilometres, three bars, and one river crossing. It starts at the only house in Boston on this site that has a document from within three years of its own claim, and finishes on Union Street in the Blackstone Block, where the oldest building of the three sells oysters. None of the three has poured continuously: one lapsed for a century and a half, one shut for Prohibition, and one did not serve drink at all for its first hundred years.
2 Pleasant Street, Charlestown, MA 02129
A weatherboarded tavern on a Charlestown corner, among the first buildings raised after the British burned the town in 1775, and named for Dr Joseph Warren, killed at Bunker Hill. Paul Revere's Masonic lodge met here and Washington visited in 1789. Saved from demolition around 1970, it again pours pints beneath low beams near the Freedom Trail.
1.7 km to stop 2 · about 22 min
45 Union Street, Boston, MA 02108
A busy tavern in Boston's Blackstone Block, named for the hand bell carried by its founder, town crier Jimmy Wilson, who by tradition opened it in 1795. Daniel Webster is said to have been a patron. It has moved premises several times and now occupies an old building on Union Street, a popular spot for live bands and nightlife.
60 m to stop 3 · about 1 min
41 Union Street, Boston, Massachusetts
An oyster house on the Blackstone Block, in a brick building of about 1716 that was a dwelling and then a draper's shop. Hawes Atwood opened his counter on the ground floor on 7 October 1826, and the semicircular oyster bar has stood in the same spot ever since, with its soapstone top under copper. Drink is served at that counter and in the Union Bar of 1983 next door.
This is a short walk with a long argument in it, because all three of these houses have had their trade interrupted and each of them says so differently.
The Warren Tavern is the one with the paperwork. Eliphelet Newell built it soon after the British burned Charlestown in 1775 — it is among the first buildings raised on the ashes — and King Solomon’s Lodge, whose charter Paul Revere signed, met in it in 1783 and 1784. That meeting is three years after the claimed 1780 and is why this is the only grade A on the walk. What the tavern does not have is continuity: the drinking stopped around 1813 and the building spent the next century and a half as a bakery, a club and a warehouse, until the Boston Redevelopment Authority restored it in 1971 and it reopened as a tavern in 1972. The house is continuous. The trade is not. It has no entry of its own in the federal register; its corner falls inside the Town Hill District, listed on 10 May 1973, and a district entry describes no individual building.
Cross the Charlestown Bridge and follow the Freedom Trail back into town for the Bell in Hand, which prints 1795 and the words first pour at the head of its own site. The founder, by tradition, was the town crier Jimmy Wilson, and the bell in the name is the one he carried. The business has moved premises at least three times to reach 45 Union Street, and it closed during Prohibition, so the phrase that usually travels with it — oldest continuously operating — is the one part of the story that cannot be right.
Four doors on, the Union Oyster House has the oldest building and the youngest bar. The National Historic Landmark nomination of 2003 traced a conveyance of 13 September 1717 describing a newly built brick messuage on Union Street, which makes this the earliest building in the Blackstone Block. It was a dwelling, then a specialty store from 1742, and Hawes Atwood opened his oyster counter on the ground floor on 7 October 1826. The semicircular oak bar over soapstone has stood in that spot ever since. The Union Bar beside it opened in August 1983.
The rest of the city is at the oldest bars in Boston, the country’s at the oldest bars in the USA, and the argument about which of them is first is weighed in what is the oldest bar in America.
