Bartender Stephen Higgin took a cigarette break yesterday. (Globe Staff Photo / Janet Knott)
| Bartender Stephen Higgin took a cigarette break yesterday. (Globe Staff Photo / Janet Knott) |
Sixty years after it opened as a blessedly cramped, poorly lit watering hole for politicians, bookies, tourists, immigrants, and anyone in need of a cold pint of lager, The Littlest Bar, located near Downtown Crossing, is closing.
The Abbey Group, a major Boston real estate developer, plans to raze the 38-seat pub on Province Street and build in its place a tower with 150 condominiums, the company's president said yesterday. By December, the venerable bar may have served its final whiskey and water.
''I'm sorry to see it go, but I don't own the property, so there's nothing I can do," said the bar's proprietor for the past 15 years, Patrick Grace. His pub sits at the base of a hulking garage.
With red-paned, sidewalk-level windows, a deeply nicked wooden bar, and a framed, warmly inscribed photo of former Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, The Littlest Bar had withstood sweeping changes in downtown Boston's commercial market.
Woolworth's, Dini's Seafood, the Province Deli, venues where a rumpled office worker could grab a quick sandwich or some manila folders, have all ceded ground to more upscale businesses: places like the Nine Zero Hotel and the chic club Felt.
In its earliest days, after World War II, the bar was a good place to wager on the horses or just about anything else, said the owner's nephew, Dermot Grace. It was on the Littlest's stools that Jan Schlichtmann worked on the legal strategy in his now-famous civil action against W.R. Grace, said the nephew, who was in the bar yesterday. When he was in office, US Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II once meandered over to the bar after a fund-raiser at nearby Cafe Marliave to shake hands with beer-drinking voters, said Marliave's owner, Frank Iacoviello.
Inside The Littlest Bar yesterday, Alexander Cedric Roy, 88, gently fingered a Seagram's and water as he chatted with other regulars about the bar's demise.
''Before you were born, I was here," he told a reporter. ''It is a great place, a great meeting place. I know everybody that comes in here. Very friendly, very nice, very productive place. No problems, ever, to my knowledge."
Sara O'Neill, a bartender for 14 years, credited the owner, known universally as Paddy, for the bar's longevity.
''Paddy always went the extra mile for people," she said with a Derry-tinged brogue. ''I've never seen it anywhere else. Tourists will come in, people who didn't know the city, and he would take them on a tour, make sure they had accommodations. American, Irish, it didn't matter."
The bar's walls feature a yellowing newspaper headline about the blizzard of 1978. Badges tacked over the bar pay homage to police officers and firefighters who have stopped in from across the country. A tiny jukebox hangs in the corner, next to the littlest bathroom. The place is the antithesis of trendy.
''This buddy Tony Mazz and I would sneak into The Littlest Bar. We'd go in, and I said, 'Tony, this is little in here, you know that?' " said Bobby Carr, 57, a former Bank of Boston worker, who shook his head at the news the old haunt was closing.
''I think what they're doing in Boston is they're taking all these nice little places, and they're putting in condos," Carr said. ''If somebody walks in and hasn't been in Boston in 20 years, they'll walk by and see a town they won't recognize."
Patrick Grace said he is hunting for a new locale.
''I am looking for somewhere small to move my little bar to, because I own the license and the name," he said. His wife, Maura Grace, who helped stock chips, pretzels, and paper towels, said, ''I don't think he wants to retire."
Wherever and whenever it may rise again, locals and regulars say it will not be the same: a place where six people made it feel crowded and two bartenders squeezed past each other to top off pints of Guinness and tumblers of rye.
''You have a lot of Irish pubs that do open and make a lot of money, but this is the true Irish pub," Iacoviello said. ''This is the real McCoy."
David Epstein, president of Abbey Group, which owns the property, said the company is in the ''formative stages" of figuring out how to ''preserve some semblance of The Littlest Bar." Epstein said building codes would require a new venue to be more spacious.
''It may be gone, but it won't be forgotten," he said.