In the last few years, Boston’s LGBTQ+ community has witnessed this firsthand with the closing of the gay bar Paradise in September 2018, which was the last open gay bar in Cambridge. “Pretty much nobody in a nice new, sort of fancier, neighborhood wants any bar by their house and certainly not a gay bar.” “Because of economic upswing, cities are becoming gentrified,” Bronski said. In turn, though, this pushes rents up and forces more historical establishments in those neighborhoods to close their doors. This highlights the trend of more and more companies and restaurants moving into other, seemingly less costly neighborhoods-like Fenway and South Boston-in order to find more affordable space. This multi-year trend of declining vacancy in the city is only projected to continue, according to the 2017 report.Īdditionally, over this six-year decline, retail spaces in Boston have absorbed almost 11 million square feet of space. In comparison, in the firm’s 2017 fourth-quarter report, Boston’s retail vacancy rate was only 6.2 percent. According to their 2011 third-quarter report, Boston’s vacancy rate for retail spaces across the city was 13.8 percent. The number of open gay bars in Boston has since sharply decreased.Īnd, the demand for retail spaces is exponentially rising, according to quarterly market reports from Cushman and Wakefield, a global real estate services firm. According to records from the History Project, a Boston LGBTQ+ history organization, at least 15 bars opened in the 1980s alone. “In the days, whether it be the police or the inspectors, they seemed to come in more often in those days to gay establishments,” Svetz said. “They were literally on the down-low, in many ways.”īill Svetz, the owner of Cathedral Station, said that police “weren’t as friendly.”
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“They were not fancy or glamorous,” Bronski said. The bars, in the face of the illegality of homosexual acts in cities across the country, often ended up in poorer parts of town where rents were cheaper and police were likely to harass owners and customers, Bronski said. “You see this sort of thriving bar culture beginning then, and then really becoming the spine, in many ways, for the gay community, because no one had Twitter yet, nobody had Grindr, nobody had apps,” Bronski said. From the 1920s onward, they were common, according to Harvard media and activism professor Michael Bronski, author of “A Queer History of the United States.” LGBTQ+ culture in Boston didn’t begin as focused on bars and clubs. Although they once populated the neighborhoods of Boston, only five exclusively gay bars now exist in the city. Today, though, few of these discreet bars remain. “The only other option was going to the Fenway and having sex in the bushes, bathrooms, all that sleazy stuff,” Cody said. “You would go into this doorway with no markings on it, so if someone saw you they wouldn’t know what it was.”īeyond that, Cody said, gay life in Boston was limited.
Boston gay bars 1970s windows#
“There were no windows and no names because of the closeted aspect, so no one would know what you were doing really,” Cody said.
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Even then, they were the center of an invisible network that connected the LGBTQ+ community in Boston. Such was the atmosphere around gay bars until the 1980s according to longtime Boston resident William Cody. This was not a place at which you wanted to draw attention to yourself. In and out of the door crept visitors, with surreptitious glances back and forth. It was a nondescript doorway, tucked away, with no view in and no name to mark it. By Avery Bleichfeld, Alison Booth & Colin Thompson